from Federal Welfare Reform Speech

I have to tell you that the challenge of the welfare system poses these issues, all of them in stark terms—how to make the economy work, how to make the government work for the ordinary citizens, how to empower individuals and strengthen communities.

We have to repair the damaged bond between our people and their government, manifested in the way the welfare system works . . . we have to end welfare as we know it.

An awful lot of people are trapped in welfare because they are raising children on their own when the other parent of the child has refused to pay child support that is due. . . . This plan includes the toughest child support enforcement measures in the history of the country.

How are we going to do that? First, by requiring both parents to be identified at a hospital when a baby’s born. Second, by saying, if you don’t provide for your children, you should have your wages garnished, your license suspended, you should be tracked across state lines. . . . We should encourage teen parents to live at home, stay in school, take responsibility for their own futures and their children’s futures.

We must keep people from the need to go on welfare in the first place by emphasizing a national campaign against teen pregnancy, to send a powerful message that it is wrong to continue this trend, that children should not be born until parents are married and fully capable of taking care of them.

No country has ever devised any sort of program that would substitute for the consistent, loving devotion and dedication and role-modeling of caring parents. We must do this work. This is not a government mission, this is an American mission. But we must do it if we want to succeed over the long run.

So I say to you, we propose to offer people on welfare a simple contract. We will help you get the skills you need, but after two years, anyone who can go to work must go to work—in the private sector, if possible; in a subsidized job, if necessary. But work is preferable to welfare. And it must be enforced.

We cannot permit millions and millions and millions of American children to be trapped in a cycle of dependency . . . with parents who are trapped in a system that doesn’t develop their human capacity to live up to the fullest of their God-given abilities and to succeed as both workers and parents.

Highlights of Bill Clinton’s Plan to Overhaul the Welfare System

• Spend $9.3 billion over five years on job training, child care, teen pregnancy prevention and public service jobs for welfare recipients.
• Leave the current welfare system largely intact for welfare mothers born before 1972.
• Target education and training for welfare mothers born in 1972 or later.
• A twenty-four-month, lifetime limit on cash benefits for welfare recipients over the age of eighteen. After the twenty-four months, they would be required to work in taxpayer-financed public-service jobs if they did not get jobs on their own.
• Allow recipients to remain in public-service jobs if they cannot find private employment.
• End welfare benefits for recipients who refuse to stay in school, look for work, go to job training or accept a job offer.
• Guarantee child care to welfare recipients during education or training programs and for one year after they leave welfare for the work force.
• Initiate a national campaign against teen pregnancy; provide grants to about 1,000 middle and high schools for teen pregnancy programs.
• Discourage unwed motherhood among teens by refusing to issue separate welfare checks to minors living apart from parents or a responsible adult.
• Require hospitals to establish paternity at birth as a way to improve child-support collections.
• Establish a national child-support clearinghouse with registries of parents who owe child support.
• Withhold wages and suspend professional and occupational licenses and driver’s licensees from fathers who fail to pay child support.
• Much of the money for the plan comes from cuts in social spending and restriction on health and welfare benefits for legal immigrants whose relatives can afford to support them.