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National League of Cities 3/9/92 [OA 6099] [2]
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26
17
7
4
(Ferguson/Gershowitz)
March 5, 1992
Draft Two
NLC2
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
MARCH 9, 1992
WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:40 A.M.
Thank you, Glenda (Hood) for that kind introduction. My
greetings also to Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, Don Borut, and Wallace
Stickney.
I'm pleased to be here today. I know I spoke to many of you
over television hook-up last December, and it's nice to climb
down from the silver screen to speak with you face to face.
Since December, I've had a chance to talk with several of
you in depth about the problems you face. In January, I had an
important meeting in the White House with ten of your members.
Like your organization as a whole, they represented a cross-
section of urban America's leadership -- Republicans and
Democrats, liberals and conservatives, officials from large and
small and mid-sized cities.
Of course, we're all concerned about the big issues -- jobs,
family, world peace. Even so, I was struck by the unanimity of
the message these leaders wanted to deliver. It was an insight
that we have been acting on for three years, but it can't be
repeated often enough in Washington, or in state capital on in acity hull
Their message was simply this: The enormous problems facing
cities today -- from infant mortality to high drop-out rates to
runaway crime -- are in part symptoms of one larger problem, the
deterioration of the American family.
2
That is the extraordinarily serious issue I would like to
discuss with you today. I have made the restoration of the
American family a priority of this administration. It lies at
the heart of much of what we have done for three years.
The problem offers no safe harbors, no sanctuaries. It
touches every American, regardless of personal circumstance.
Leaving aside for a moment the enormous governmental costs,
family breakdown endangers our position in a world increasingly
driven by economic competition. It endangers -- for all of us -
- our ability to create jobs, to generate economic growth in the
years ahead, to leave a prosperous country for the generations
that will follow us.
So we must start with a clear-eyed look at what is really
happening to the family in American communities today -- not just
in poor urban neighborhoods but all across America. Then we must
look inside ourselves, to establish the principles that will
shape our approach. And then we must act.
The urgency is clear. We all know the statistics, the
dreary drumbeat that tells of family breakdown. Today, one out
of every four American children is born out of wedlock; in some
areas the illegitimacy rate tops 80 percent. The problem is so
overwhelming that a few communities have even begun passing out
condoms in school. In my heart I cannot approve of such a
measure; but I understand the sheer desperation that drives
public officials to take it.
3
Twenty-five percent of our children grow up in households
headed by a single parent. More than two million are called
latch-key kids -- who come from school each afternoon to an empty
home. And a large number of our children grow up without the
love of parents at all.
We know from experience the consequences of family decline.
Neglected children are more susceptible to the lure of crime and
drugs, are more likely to have poor health and to drop out of
school early, to lead a life without hope.
You on the frontlines know the human costs that statistics
can only dimly sketch. You know, as I do, that for every blip on
a chart or dot on a graph there is a human story to tell, and too
often the story is a tragedy.
About ten days ago, I was in San Antonio, meeting with Latin
American heads of state to intensify our war on drugs. And while
there I noticed a front-page story in the San Antonio Light. A
cabdriver had been murdered last September -- another act of
random, senseless violence -- and his murderer had just been
found guilty.
But what was truly horrifying -- what would horrify any
American -- was this: the murderer was a 12-year-old boy.
As the deputies took the boy from the courtroom, according
to the newspaper story, they had trouble fitting him with
shackles and handcuffs, so slender were his wrists. This
youngster was four-feet tall, not yet a teenager, and now a
convicted murderer.
4
The drumbeat continues: two teenagers shot dead in a New
York public school -- an LSD ring busted up in an affluent
Northern Virginia suburb -- and the harrowing stories of runaway
kids and the horrors that befall them.
I know that almost all of you could tell stories equally
distressing -- stories from neighborhoods in your cities where
the unthinkable has become the commonplace. Something's wrong
when elderly city-dwellers, with triple-bolted doors, dare not
leave their homes for fear of attack; when babies are born
addicted to crack cocaine; when school children shoot one another
over a pair of sneakers.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I am sure that all
of you in this room took office with high confidence in our
ability to solve these problems, only to discover -- sooner
rather than later, I suspect -- that they were far more stubborn
than any of us had supposed. Let's not forget that the trials
our citizens face today were generations in the making. We can't
expect change overnight.
But make no mistake: We will change things. And we will do
it by digging to the root, to the deepest problem underlying so
many others. Each day, as public servants, we must redouble our
efforts to restore the family to its place of primacy in American
life. It's been said that the family is the best Department of
Health and Human Services ever devised. That is a singularly
American insight. The genius of our system has always been its
5
reliance on the family, not government, as the fundamental unit
of social progress.
Families open up the world's horizons to individuals. They
give older family members a stake in the future and connect
children to their past.
In restoring the family, then, we restore to coming
generations the values, the sense of right and wrong, the will
and confidence to succeed that only a family can provide a child.
And in doing this, we will reinvigorate our cities as well.
We needn't look far for principles to guide us. They are
the old home truths. Rely on what works -- discard what doesn't.
Never be afraid to innovate. The government that is closest to
the people responds best to the needs of the people. And let's
not forget this as a guiding principle: if people are to be
responsible, they must be given responsibility.
The government's first duty is like that of the physician:
Do no harm. And the fact is, with the best of intentions, many
government policies in the past have worked against the
institution of the family -- undermined young people's desire to
marry and stay married, to provide for their children, to plan
for their future.
As a practical matter, "doing no harm" means in part that we
ensure parents retain the authority to make the big decisions for
their families. Government only harms the family when it
restricts the its autonomy or usurps the authority of responsible
parents.
6
Let me give you an example: Those of us in government can
never plausibly claim to fight for families if we insist that
government, not parents, must choose who cares for their
children. Two years ago, my administration waged a fight in
Congress over this very issue, and we won. We kept choice of
child care out of the hands of government and put it where it
belongs -- in the hands of parents.
Now we're engaged in a similar fight, over whether parents
should have the right to choose their childrens' schools. We
know the benefits of competition; it is the linchpin of American
prosperity. And competition among schools will be the linchpin
of educational excellence, too.
But school choice is important for other reasons: It
restores authority and responsibility to parents. And just as it
makes our schools accountable, so does it make parents
accountable for the decisions they make. Restoring authority and
accountability -- not only in child care and school choice but in
other areas as well -- will be a key to healing the American
family.
Another example: The initiative we call HOPE. It took more
than a year to get HOPE through Congress, and another year to get
even partial funding for it. But HOPE will be crucial to our
success, by offering low-income families a greater opportunity to
own their own homes. HOPE is based on a simple principle: to
survive, people need the intangible values of dignity and self-
7
respect. Government can't provide those. But homeownership can.
An education can. A job can. And being part of a family can.
of course the federal government has a positive role in
preserving the family. We welcome that role; it has guided the
decisions we've made over the past three years. Since 1989, for
example, we have more than doubled funding for Head Start, a
program that brings children and parents into the classroom,
strengthening family ties and reinforcing parental
responsibility. For the first time in the program's history, our
new budget supports one year of Head Start for every eligible
child whose parents choose to have him participate.
There are many other examples: since 1989, we've increased
the funding for WIC -- the Supplemental Food Program for Women,
Infants and Children -- by 47 percent, to $2.8 billion next year.
We've increased other nutrition programs by similar percentages.
And this year federal support for childhood immunization grants
will increase by $52 million, an increase of 18 percent over last
year's level.
All told, funding for children's programs -- from nutrition
and education to foster care and child immunizations -- has
increased 66 percent since we took office.
But please understand: we will never measure our success in
dollars spent. We will measure it by results -- by the health
and happiness of our children and, most important of all, by the
sense of self-reliance we can instill in a family. My
administration has concentrated on funding the programs that work
8
for the family -- that efficiently fulfill government's role in
supporting families and keeping them together.
At the same time, we must face another fact: government can
sometimes be a burden as well as a boon. Over the past forty
years, the child tax exemption has lagged far behind the soaring
costs of child-rearing. I have asked Congress to increase the
exemption by $500 per child. For a family with four children,
that's an increase of $2,000. It's a crucial first step toward
redressing the imbalance, and it's what we can afford.
We have also successfully increased the earned income tax
credit for low-income families. A strain on the family budget is
a strain on the family -- and families don't need the added
pressure.
And now I come to perhaps the most crucial matter of all: we
must reform our nation's welfare system. Americans are the most
generous people on earth, but they want to see -- and they're
entitled to see -- some relationship between welfare and work.
Welfare must never be what FDR warned it might become: a subtle
destroyer of the spirit. It is not meant to be a way of life, or
a family legacy passed from one generation to the next. Welfare
can eat away at the ties that bind a family together.
State and local governments are undertaking the brave work
of reform. My administration has vowed to help them. We are
acting now to waive federal requirements that impede reform, for
every state that asks for it.
9
I have dwelled today on the role of government -- both
positive and negative -- because we are men and women of
government. But let us never forget the work of private
Americans dedicating themselves to the voluntary service of
others, who create an environment where families can flourish.
Right now, as we're gathered here, somewhere in America a
volunteer is reading to a child; a businessman offers job
training to a young man he's just met; a woman teaches young
expectant mothers how to care for the children they will soon
bring into the world; neighbors band together to rid their
neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs.
Each of them is a Point of Light, offering service with no
thought of reward, though the reward will be reaped by every
American. I urge all of you, when you return to your cities, to
do all in your power to encourage these caring men and women, to
make yours a community of light.
In my State of the Union address, I announced that we would
soon institute a commission on America's urban families. Their
work will be one result of my meeting in January with some of
your leaders. I have asked Gov. John Ashcroft of Missouri and
Annette Strauss, the former Mayor of Dallas, to lead the
commission and fulfill its mandate: to identify those government
programs, at all levels, that weaken or strengthen urban
families; to analyze ways to improve private efforts to
strengthen families; and to recommend new policies to help
families in our cities.
10
I am convinced that we can correct our mistakes, learn from
our failures, and build on our successes. I do not exaggerate
when I say that the future of America depends on our efforts.
The family is the irreducible unit of comfort and love, and from
families radiate neighborhoods, from neighborhoods come towns and
cities, and their health determines the health of our country,
for better or worse. Like you I am committed to making our
health whole, and to ensuring that our cities, as Theodore Parker
said, remain the fireplaces of America, radiating warmth and
light against the darkness.
#
#
#
#
)
Certandy the family itself is critical
moreover at a time when the central
forms of our govt is on econonee youth
increasingly clear we have to
become more conpetitive
as a country
Can't afford to see the human
resources wasted
and can is afford do pay for that waste
Reason somary mayors of it support diastic
reform - got to let states immovate New Jerry, Calef
as we require traing we have not done it
because wire cheap bartards but because we really
believe this is the best way to serve people
2)
equally clean that families can't succeed
of they can't be economically viable
best of intentions
seamless circle to make formlies
and therefore successful cities
Document No. 313275ss
WHITE HOUSE STAFFING MEMORANDUM
DATE:
3/6/92
ACTION/CONCURRENCE/COMMENT DUE BY: SAT. 3/7/92 10:00 am
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
SUBJECT:
MARCH 9, 1992 - 11:40 am
ACTION FYI
ACTION FYI
VICE PRESIDENT
HORNER
SKINNER
MCBRIDE
SCOWCROFT
MOORE
>
DARMAN
>
PETERSMEYER
>
BRADY
PORTER
\
BROMLEY
ROGICH
>
CALIO
ROLLINS
>
DEMAREST
SMITH
FITZWATER
>
YEUTTER
GRAY
FINDLAY
>
HOLIDAY
ANDERSON
KAUFMAN
MCGROARTY
REMARKS:
Please forward your comments directly to Dan McGroarty, Rm. 122, x2930,
no later than 10:00 a.m., SATURDAY, MARCH 7, with a copy to this office.
Thank you.
RESPONSE:
PHILLIP D. BRADY
Assistant to the President
and Staff Secretary
Ext. 2702
(Ferguson/Gershowitz)
March 5, 1992
02 MAR 6 P3: 35
Draft One
NLC2
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
MARCH 9, 1992
WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:40 A.M.
[Acknowledgments]
I'm pleased to be here today. I know I spoke to many of you
over television hook-up last December, and it's nice to climb
down from the silver screen to speak with you face to face.
Since December, I've had a chance to talk with several of
you in depth about the problems you face. In January, I had an
important meeting in the White House with some of your members.
Like your organization as a whole, they represented a marvelous
cross-section of urban America's leadership -- Republicans and
Democrats, liberals and conservatives, officials from large and
small and mid-sized cities.
Of course, we're all concerned about the big issues -- jobs,
family, world peace. Even so, I was struck by the unanimity of
the message your board wanted to deliver. It was an insight that
we have been acting on for three years, but it can't be repeated
often enough in Washington. or in any steap or city Lall
your
Their message was simply this: The enormous problems facing
cities today -- from infant mortality to high drop-out rates to
runaway crime -- are in part symptoms of one larger problem, the
deterioration of the American family.
That is the extraordinarily serious issue I would like to
discuss with you today. I have made the restoration of the
central
to
the
efforts
2
American family a priority of this my administration. It lies at
In fact,
the heart of much of what we have done for three years.
We must start with a clear-eyed look at what is really
happening to the family in American communities today -- not just
in poor urban neighborhoods but all across America. Then we must
look inside ourselves, to establish the principles that will
shape our approach. And then we must act.
The urgency is clear. We all know the statistics, the
dreary drumbeat that tells of family breakdown. Today, one out
of every four American children is born out of wedlock.
Some
communities have even begun passing out condoms in school -- not
from a lax attitude toward premarital sex, but from sheer
desperation.
Twenty-five percent of our children grow up in households
% one lui prove
headed by a single parent. More than two million are called
latch-key kids -- who come from school each afternoon to an empty
home. And a large number of our children grow up without the
love of parents at all.
We know from experience the consequences of family decline.
Neglected children are more susceptible to the lure of crime and
drugs, are more likely to have poor health and to drop out of
school early, to lead a life without hope.
You on the frontlines know the human costs that statistics
can only dimly sketch. You know, as I do, that for every blip on
a chart or dot on a graph there is a human story to tell, and too
often the story is a tragedy.
3
About ten days ago, I was in San Antonio, meeting with other
American heads of state to intensify our war on drugs. And while
there I noticed a front-page story in the San Antonio Light. A
cabdriver had been murdered last September -- another act of
random, senseless violence -- and his murderer had just been
found guilty.
But what was truly horrifying -- what would horrify any
American -- was this: the murderer was a 12-year-old boy.
As the deputies took the boy from the courtroom, according
to the newspaper story, they had trouble fitting him with
shackles and handcuffs, so slender were his wrists. This
youngster was four-feet tall, not yet a teenager, and now a
convicted murderer.
The drumbeat continues: two teenagers shot dead in a New
York public school -- an LSD ring busted up in an affluent
Northern Virginia suburb -- and the harrowing stories of runaway
kids and the horrors that befall them.
I know that almost all of you could tell stories equally
distressing -- stories from neighborhoods in your cities where
the unthinkable has become the commonplace. Something's wrong
when elderly city-dwellers, with triple-bolted doors, dare not
leave their homes for fear of attack; when babies are born
addicted to crack cocaine; when school children shoot one another
over a pair of sneakers.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I am sure that all
of you in this room took office with high confidence in our
4
ability to solve these problems, only to discover -- sooner
rather than later, I suspect -- that they were far more stubborn
than any of us had supposed. Let's not forget that the trials
eachard every day
our citizens face today were genérations in the making. We can't
expect change overnight.
we will change thing
But make no mistake: We will change things. And we will do
it by digging to the root, to the deepest problem underlying so
many others. Each day, as public servants, we must redouble our
efforts to restore the family to its place of primacy in American
life. It's been said that the family is the best Department of
Health of Human Services ever devised. That is a singularly
American insight. The genius of our system has always been its
reliance on the family, not government, as the fundamental unit
of social progress.
Families open up the world to individuals. They give older
family members a stake in the future and connect children to
their past.
In restoring the family we restore to coming generations the
values, the sense of right and wrong, the will and confidence to
succeed that only a family can provide a child. And in doing
this, we will reinvigorate our cities as well.
We needn't look far for principles to guide us. They are
the old home truths. Rely on what works, discard what doesn't.
Remember that
Never be afraid to innovate. The government that is closest to
the people responds best to the needs of the people. And let's
5
not forget this as a guiding principle: if people are to be
applais
responsible, they must be given responsibility.
As a practical matter, that means we must ensure that
parents retain the authority to make the big decisions for their
families. The government's first responsibility is like that of
Jun
the physician: Do no harm. And let us never doubt that
government only harms the family when it restricts the family's
autonomy or usurps the authority of responsible parents.
done
Let me give you an example: Those of us in government can
never plausibly claim to fight for families if we insist that
government, not parents, must choose who cares for their
children. Two years ago, my administration waged a fight in
Congress over this very issue, and we won. We kept choice of
child care out of the hands of government and put it where it
belongs -- in the hands of parents.
Now we're engaged in a similar fight, over whether parents
should have the right to choose their childrens' schools. We
know the benefits of competition; it is the linchpin of American
prosperity. And competition among schools will be the linchpin
of educational excellence, too.
But school choice is important for other reasons: It
restores authority and responsibility to parents. And just as it
makes our schools accountable, so does it make parents
accountable for the decisions they make. Restoring authority and
accountability -- not only in child care and school choice but in
6
other areas as well -- will be a key to healing the American
family.
2 years
Another examplé: For more than a year now we have been
trying to get through Congress our HOPE initiative, which would
offer low-income families a greater opportunity to own their own
homes. HOPE is based on a simple principle: to survive, people
need the intangible values of dignity and self-respect.
Government can't provide those. But homeownership can. An
education can. A job can. And being part of a family can.
State can positive
of course we will never shirk the federal government's
affirmative role in preserving the family. Our belief in that
role has guided the decisions we've made over the past three
years. Since 1989, for example, we have more than doubled
funding for Head Start, a program that brings children and
parents into the classroom, strengthening family ties and
reinforcing parental responsibility. For the first time in the
program's history, our new budget provides that every eligible
four-year-old will be able to start school ready to learn.
There are many other examples: over the past three years,
we've increased the funding for WIC -- the Supplemental Food
Program for Women, Infants and Children -- by 47 percent, to $2.8
billion next year. We've increased other nutrition programs by
similar percentages. And this year federal support for childhood
immunizations will increase by $52 million, an increase of 18
percent over last year's level.
7
All told, funding for children's programs -- from nutrition
spective.
and education to foster care and child immunizations -- has
be
increased 66 percent since we took office.
But please understand: we do not measure our success in
put in
in
X
dollars spent. We measure it by results -- by the degree to
the
3
which it keeps children healthy and happy and, most important of
of
all, increases a family's self-reliance. My administration has
still
concentrated on funding the programs that work for the family
that efficiently fulfill government's role in supporting
will wroduce it
families and keeping them together.
rhx
At the same time, we must face another fact: government can
to
sometimes be a burden as well as a boon. Over the past forty
years, the child tax exemption has lagged far behind the soaring
costs of child-rearing. I have asked Congress to increase the
exemption by $500 per child. For a family of four, children that's an
increase of $2,000. It's a crucial first step toward redressing
now
the imbalance, and it's what we can afford. We have also
successfully increased the earned income tax credit for low-
income families. A strain on the family budget is a strain on
the family -- and families don't need the added pressure.
Probably
And there's another thing we must do: we must reform our
the
in
nation's welfare system. Americans are the most generous people
in
mallia
on earth, but they want to see -- and they're entitled to see --
some relationship between welfare and work. Welfare must never
be what FDR warned it might become: a subtle destroyer of the
spirit. It is not meant to be a way of life, or a family legacy
welfare you system signat/caties
8
passed from one generation to the next. Welfare can eat away at
the ties that bind a family together.
States are beginning to undertake the brave work of reform.
My administration has vowed to help them. We are acting now to
waive federal requirements that impede reform, for every state
that asks for it.
I have dwelled today on the role of government -- both
positive and negative -- because we are men and women of
government. But let us never forget the work of private
Americans dedicating themselves to the voluntary service of
others, who create an environment where families can flourish.
Right now, as we're gathered here, somewhere in America a
volunteer is reading to a child; a businessman offers job
training to a young man he's just met; a woman teaches young
expectant mothers how to care for the children they will soon
bring into the world; neighbors band together to rid their
neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs.
Each of them is a point of light, offering service with no
thought of reward, though the reward will be reaped by every
American. I urge all of you, when you return to your cities, to
do all in your power to encourage these caring men and women, to
make yours a community of light.
Today I will sign an executive order establishing a
commission on America's urban families. This panel is one result
of my meeting in January with your executive council. I have
asked Gov. John Ashcroft of Missouri to lead the commission and
9
fulfill its mandate: to identify those government programs, at
all levels, that weaken or strengthen urban families; to analyze
ways to improve private efforts to strengthen families; and to
recommend new policies to help families in our cities.
I am convinced that we can correct our mistakes, learn from
our failures, and build on our successes. The future of America
depends on our effort. The family is the irreducible unit of
comfort and love, and from families radiate neighborhoods, from
neighborhoods come towns and cities, and their health determines
the health of our country, for better or worse. Like you I am
committed to making our health whole, and to ensure that our
cities, as Theodore Parker said, remain the fireplaces
America, radiating heat and light in the darkness.
#
#
#
#
lefet against of the dartness
P.4
let's face it
So I ask you to join me.
together we must call for a cease five in the
was of
word
This is no time to cost blame This is no
that too
time to quest con motivis
often
consumes
us.
let us focus every any of
energy on Tummy back
this assoult
Oct us act as one nation to
defend and strengther The
American family
snapshots of illey
since 1960 1960->19
(Ferguson/Gershowitz)
March 5, 1992
Draft One
NLC2
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
MARCH 9r 1992
WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:40 A.M.
[Acknowledgments]
I'm pleased to be here today. I know I spoke to many of you
over television hook-up last December, and it's nice to climb
down from the silver screen to speak with you face to face.
Since December, I've had a chance to talk with several of
you in depth about the problems you face. In January, I had an
important meeting in the White House with some of your members.
Like your organization as a whole, they represented a marvelous valuablez
cross-section of urban America's leadership -- Republicans and
Democrats, liberals and conservatives, officials from large and
small and mid-sized cities.
Of course, we're all concerned about the big issues -- jobs,
family, world peace. Even so, I was struck by the unanimity of
the message your board wanted to deliver. It was an insight that
we have been acting on for three years, but it can't be repeated
often enough in Washington, or in any state caps, or in any city hall.
Their message was simply this: The enormous problems facing
cities today -- from infant mortality to high drop-out rates to
runaway crime -- are in part symptoms of one larger problem, the
deterioration of the American family.
That is the extraordinarily serious issue I would like to
discuss with you today. I have made the restoration of the
unit is cutture
The wame focus more 1) of we our comp. can mimber human to afford to to wante have
We want families
1) strong families participate
to be stury
2)
we the can this t afford diag on our excumy.
2
leaving aside
in the country at lary
the you casts
American family a priority of this administration. It lies at
the heart of much of what we have done for three years.
We must start with a clear-eyed look at what is really
happening to the family in American communities today -- not just
in poor urban neighborhoods but all across America. Then we must
look inside ourselves, to establish the principles that will
shape our approach. And then we must act.
economic grouph.
The urgency is clear. We all know the statistics, the
1960-219
dreary drumbeat that tells of family breakdown. Today, one out
of every four American children is born out of wedlock. Some
communities have even begun passing out condoms in school -- not
from a lax attitude toward premarital sex, but from sheer
desperation.
Twenty-five percent of our children grow up in households
headed by a single parent. More than two million are called
latch-key kids -- who come from school each afternoon to an empty
home. And a large number of our children grow up without the
love of parents at all.
We know from experience the consequences of family decline.
Neglected children are more susceptible to the lure of crime and
drugs, are more likely to have poor health and to drop out of
school early, to lead a life without hope.
You on the frontlines know the human costs that statistics
can only dimly sketch. You know, as I do, that for every blip on
a chart or dot on a graph there is a human story to tell, and too
often the story is a tragedy.
3
Latin
About ten days ago, I was in San Antonio, meeting with other
American heads of state to intensify our war on drugs. And while
there I noticed a front-page story in the San Antonio Light. A
cabdriver had been murdered last September -- another act of
random, senseless violence -- and his murderer had just been
found guilty.
But what was truly horrifying -- what would horrify any
American -- was this: the murderer was a 12-year-old boy.
As the deputies took the boy from the courtroom, according
to the newspaper story, they had trouble fitting him with
shackles and handcuffs, so slender were his wrists. This
youngster was four-feet tall, not yet a teenager, and now a
convicted murderer.
The drumbeat continues: two teenagers shot dead in a New
York public school -- an LSD ring busted up in an affluent
Northern Virginia suburb -- and the harrowing stories of runaway
kids and the horrors that befall them.
I know that almost all of you could tell stories equally
distressing -- stories from neighborhoods in your cities where
the unthinkable has become the commonplace. Something's wrong
when elderly city-dwellers, with triple-bolted doors, dare not
leave their homes for fear of attack; when babies are born
addicted to crack cocaine; when school children shoot one another
over a pair of sneakers.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I am sure that all
of you in this room took office with high confidence in our
4
ability to solve these problems, only to discover -- sooner
rather than later, I suspect -- that they were far more stubborn
than any of us had supposed. Let's not forget that the trials
our citizens face today were generations in the making. We can't
expect change overnight.
But make no mistake: We will change things. And we will do
it by digging to the root, to the deepest problem underlying so
many others. Each day, as public servants, we must redouble our
efforts to restore the family to its place of primacy in American
life. It's been said that the family is the best Department of
Health of Human Services ever devised. That is a singularly
American insight. The genius of our system has always been its
reliance on the family, not government, as the fundamental unit
of social progress. Governments don't overcome poverty, people do,
Families open up the world to individuals. They give older
family members a stake in the future and connect children to
their past.
In restoring the family we restore to coming generations the
values, the sense of right and wrong, the will and confidence to
succeed that only a family can provide a child. And in doing
this, we will reinvigorate our cities as well.
We needn't look far for principles to guide us. They are
the old home truths. Rely on what works, discard what doesn't.
Never be afraid to innovate. The government that is closest to
the people responds best to the needs of the people. And let's
but
our
we he cut is selvices them oven which even access the and help shills can in
the of the and TV read to
their luds
Label the failures
of the past
with the best of interests
5
at
you 't pol worked have again
not forget this as a guiding principle: if people are to be
the family
twenty
responsible, they must be given responsibility.
placed us
forther away
As a practical matter, that means we must ensure that
from the your
we sun.
parents retain the authority to make the big decisions for their
families. The government's first responsibility is like that of
the physician: Do no harm. And let us never doubt that
government only harms the family when it restricts the family's
autonomy or usurps the authority of responsible parents.
Reinwenting
Let me give you an example: Those of us in government can
never plausibly claim to fight for families if we insist that
care
government, not parents, must choose who cares for their
children. Two years ago, my administration waged a fight in
Congress over this very issue, and we won. We kept choice of
child care out of the hands of government and put it where it
belongs -- in the hands of parents.
Now we're engaged in a similar fight, over whether parents
should have the right to choose their childrens' schools. We
know the benefits of competition; it is the linchpin of American
prosperity. And competition among schools will be the linchpin
of educational excellence, too.
But school choice is important for other reasons: It
restores authority and responsibility to parents. And just as it
makes our schools accountable, so does it make parents
accountable for the decisions they make. Restoring authority and
accountability -- not only in child care and school choice but in
6
other areas as well -- will be a key to healing the American
family.
Another example: For more than a year now we have been
trying to get through Congress our HOPE initiative, which would
offer low-income families a greater opportunity to own their own
homes. HOPE is based on a simple principle: to survive, people
need the intangible values of dignity and self-respect.
Government can't provide those. But homeownership can. An
education can. A job can. And being part of a family can.
the
Of course we will never shirk the federal government's
affirmative hasa role in preserving the family. Our belief in that
role has guided the decisions we've made over the past three
years. Since 1989, for example, we have more than doubled
funding for Head Start, a program that brings children and
parents into the classroom, strengthening family ties and
reinforcing parental responsibility. For the first time in the
program's history, our new budget provides that every eligible
four-year-old will be able to start school ready to learn.
There are many other examples: over the past three years,
we've increased the funding for WIC -- the Supplemental Food
Program for Women, Infants and Children -- by 47 percent, to $2.8
billion next year. We've increased other nutrition programs by
similar percentages. And this year federal support for childhood
immunizations will increase by $52 million, an increase of 18
percent over last year's level.
The test will he
the degree which
to and Artend thing All it this
7
told, funding for children's programs -- from nutrition
education to foster care and child immunizations -- has
a
we
increased 66 percent since we took office.
will
But please understand: we do not measure our success in
will
dollars spent. We measure it by results -- by the degree to
a
which it keeps children healthy and happy and, most important of
all, increases a family's self-reliance. My administration has
concentrated on funding the programs that work for the family --
that efficiently fulfill government's role in supporting
families and keeping them together.
At the same time, we must face another fact: government can
sometimes be a burden as well as a boon. Over the past forty
years, the child tax exemption has lagged far behind the soaring
costs of child-rearing. I have asked Congress to increase the
exemption by $500 per child. For a family of four, that's an
increase of $2,000. It's a crucial first step toward redressing
the imbalance, and it's what we can afford. We have also
successfully increased the earned income tax credit for low-
income families. A strain on the family budget is a strain on
the family -- and families don't need the added pressure.
Probably the most fun damental publem
And there's another thing we must do: we must reform our
nation's welfare system. Americans are the most generous people
on earth, but they want to see -- and they're entitled to see --
some relationship between welfare and work. Welfare must never
be what FDR warned it might become: a subtle destroyer of the
spirit. It is not meant to be a way of life, or a family legacy
8
passed from one generation to the next. Welfare can eat away at
the ties that bind a family together.
States are beginning to undertake the brave work of reform.
My administration has vowed to help them. We are acting now to
waive federal requirements that impede reform, for every state
that asks for it.
I have dwelled today on the role of government -- both
positive and negative -- because we are men and women of
government. But let us never forget the work of private
Americans dedicating themselves to the voluntary service of
others, who create an environment where families can flourish.
Right now, as we're gathered here, somewhere in America a
volunteer is reading to a child; a businessman offers job
training to a young man he's just met; a woman teaches young
expectant mothers how to care for the children they will soon
bring into the world; neighbors band together to rid their
neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs.
Each of them is a point of light, offering service with no
thought of reward, though the reward will be reaped by every
American. I urge all of you, when you return to your cities, to
do all in your power to encourage these caring men and women, to
make yours a community of light.
Today I will sign an executive order establishing a
commission on America's urban families. This panel is one result
of my meeting in January with your executive council. I have
asked Gov. John Ashcroft of Missouri to lead the commission and
9
fulfill its mandate: to identify those government programs, at
all levels, that weaken or strengthen urban families; to analyze
ways to improve private efforts to strengthen families; and to
recommend new policies to help families in our cities.
I am convinced that we can correct our mistakes, learn from
our failures, and build on our successes. The future of America
depends on our effort. The family is the irreducible unit of
comfort and love, and from families radiate neighborhoods, from
neighborhoods come towns and cities, and their health determines
the health of our country, for better or worse. Like you I am
committed to making our health whole, and to ensure ing that our
cities, as Theodore Parker said, remain the fireplaces of
against
America, radiating warmth and light II ^ the darkness.
#
#
#
#
Document No. 313275ss
92 MAR 6 P7: 25
WHITE HOUSE STAFFING MEMORANDUM
DATE:
3/6/92
ACTION/CONCURRENCE/COMMENT DUE BY: SAT. 3/7/92 10:00 am
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
SUBJECT:
MARCH 9, 1992 - 11:40 am
ACTION FYI
ACTION FYI
VICE PRESIDENT
HORNER
SKINNER
MCBRIDE
SCOWCROFT
MOORE
>
DARMAN
PETERSMEYER
BRADY
PORTER
\
BROMLEY
ROGICH
CALIO
ROLLINS
>
DEMAREST
SMITH
YEUTTER
FITZWATER
GRAY
FINDLAY
>
HOLIDAY
ANDERSON
KAUFMAN
MCGROART
REMARKS:
Please forward your comments directly to Dan McGroarty, Rm. 122, x2930,
no later than 10:00 a.m., SATURDAY, MARCH 7, with a copy to this office.
Thank you.
RESPONSE:
See notes.
PHILLIP D. BRADY
Assistant to the President
and Staff Secretary
Ext. 2702
Mark acknnfs ghe than
(Ferguson/Gershowitz)
March 5, 1992
02 MAR 6 P3: 35
Draft One
NLC2
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
MARCH 9, 1992
WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:40 A.M.
[Acknowledgments]
FEMA director Wallace Stickney
Glenda, Sydney, Don Bout
I'm pleased to be here today. I know I spoke to many of you
over television hook-up last December, and it's nice to climb
down from the silver screen to speak with you face to face.
Since December, I've had a chance to talk with several of
222
you in depth about the problems you face. In January, I had an
10 members 46 your leadership
Memous
important meeting in the White House with some of your Stateship members.
Some leadership
Like your organization as a whole, they represented a marvelous
cross-section of urban America's leadership -- Republicans and
Democrats, liberals and conservatives, officials from large and
small and mid-sized cities.
pegingto to
Of course, we're all concerned about the big issues -- jobs,
Set away
family, world peace. Even so, I was struck by the unanimity of
from
the message your board wanted to deliver. It was an insight that
always to
we have been acting on for three years, but it can't be repeated
referring "urban"
often enough in Washington.
Their message was simply this: The enormous problems facing
cities today -- from infant mortality to high drop-out rates to
runaway crime -- are in part symptoms of one larger problem, the
deterioration of the American family.
That is the extraordinarily serious issue I would like to
discuss with you today. I have made the restoration of the
2
American family a priority of this administration. It lies at
the heart of much of what we have done for three years.
We must start with a clear-eyed look at what is really
happening to the family in American communities today -- not just
in poor urban neighborhoods but all across America. Then we must
look inside ourselves, to establish the principles that will
shape our approach. And then we must act.
The urgency is clear. We all know the statistics, the
dreary drumbeat that tells of family breakdown. Today, one out
of every four American children is born out of wedlock. Some
communities have even begun passing out condoms in school -- not
from a lax attitude toward premarital sex, but from sheer
desperation.
22,
SOME arease 80090
Twenty-five percent of our children grow up in households
headed by a single parent. More than two million are called
latch-key kids -- who come from school each afternoon to an empty
home. And a large number of our children grow up without the
love of parents at all.
We know from experience the consequences of family decline.
Neglected children are more susceptible to the lure of crime and
suffer
drugs, are more likely to have poor health and to drop out of
school early, to lead a life without hope.
You on the frontlines know the human costs that statistics
can only dimly sketch. You know, as I do, that for every blip on
a chart or dot on a graph there is a human story to tell, and too
often the story is a tragedy.
3
About ten days ago, I was in San Antonio, meeting with other
American heads of state to intensify our war on drugs. And while
there I noticed a front-page story in the San Antonio Light. A
cabdriver had been murdered last September -- another act of
random, senseless violence -- and his murderer had just been
found guilty.
But what was truly horrifying -- what would horrify any
American -- was this: the murderer was a 12-year-old boy.
As the deputies took the boy from the courtroom, according
to the newspaper story, they had trouble fitting him with
shackles and handcuffs, so slender were his wrists. This
youngster was four-feet tall, not yet a teenager, and now a
convicted murderer.
The drumbeat continues: two teenagers shot dead in a New
York public school -- an LSD ring busted up in an affluent
Northern Virginia suburb -- and the harrowing stories of runaway
kids and the horrors that befall them.
I know that almost all of you could tell stories equally
distressing -- stories from neighborhoods in your cities where
the unthinkable has become the commonplace. Something's wrong
when elderly city-dwellers, with triple-bolted doors, dare not
leave their homes for fear of attack; when babies are born
addicted to crack cocaine; when school children shoot one another
over a pair of sneakers.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I am sure that all
of you in this room took office with high confidence in our
4
ability to solve these problems, only to discover -- sooner
rather than later, I suspect -- that they were far more stubborn
than any of us had supposed. Let's not forget that the trials
our citizens face today were generations in the making. We can't
expect change overnight.
But make no mistake: We will change things. And we will do
it by digging to the root, to the deepest problem underlying so
many others. Each day, as public servants, we must redouble our
efforts to restore the family to its place of primacy in American
life. It's been said that the family is the best Department of
and
Health of Human Services ever devised. That is a singularly
American insight. The genius of our system has always been its
reliance on the family, not government, as the fundamental unit
of social progress.
Families open up the world to individuals. They give older
family members a stake in the future and connect children to
their past.
In restoring the family we restore to coming generations the
values, the sense of right and wrong, the will and confidence to
succeed that only a family can provide a child. And in doing
this, we will reinvigorate our cities as well.
We needn't look far for principles to guide us. They are
the old home truths. Rely on what works, discard what doesn't.
Never be afraid to innovate. The government that is closest to
the people responds best to the needs of the people. And let's
5
not forget this as a guiding principle: if people are to be
responsible, they must be given responsibility.
As a practical matter, that means we must ensure that
parents retain the authority to make the big decisions for their
families. The government's first responsibility is like that of
the physician: Do no harm. And let us never doubt that
government only harms the family when it restricts the family's
autonomy or usurps the authority of responsible parents.
Let me give you an example: Those of us in government can
never plausibly claim to fight for families if we insist that
government, not parents, must choose who cares for their
children. Two years ago, my administration waged a fight in
Congress over this very issue, and we won. We kept choice of
child care out of the hands of government and put it where it
belongs -- in the hands of parents.
Now we're engaged in a similar fight, over whether parents
should have the right to choose their childrens' schools. We
know the benefits of competition; it is the linchpin of American
prosperity. And competition among schools will be the linchpin
of educational excellence, too.
But school choice is important for other reasons: It
restores authority and responsibility to parents. And just as it
makes our schools accountable, so does it make parents
accountable for the decisions they make. Restoring authority and
accountability -- not only in child care and school choice but in
6
other areas as well -- will be a key to healing the American
family.
Another example: For more than a year now we have been
trying to get through Congress our HOPE initiative, which would
offer low-income families a greater opportunity to own their own
homes. HOPE is based on a simple principle: to survive, people
need the intangible values of dignity and self-respect.
Government can't provide those. But homeownership can. An
education can. A job can. And being part of a family can.
of course we will never shirk the federal government's
affirmative role in preserving the family. Our belief in that
role has guided the decisions we've made over the past three
years. Since 1989, for example, we have more than doubled
funding for Head Start, a program that brings children and
parents into the classroom, strengthening family ties and
reinforcing parental responsibility. For the first time in the
program's history, our new budget provides that every eligible
four-year-old will be able to start school ready to learn.
There are many other examples: over the past three years,
we've increased the funding for WIC -- the Supplemental Food
Program for Women, Infants and Children -- by 47 percent, to $2.8
billion next year. We've increased other nutrition programs by
similar percentages. And this year federal support for childhood
immunizations will increase by $52 million, an increase of 18
percent over last year's level.
7
All told, funding for children's programs -- from nutrition
and education to foster care and child immunizations -- has
increased 66 percent since we took office.
But please understand: we do not measure our success in
dollars spent. We measure it by results -- by the degree to
which it keeps children healthy and happy and, most important of
all, increases a family's self-reliance. My administration has
concentrated on funding the programs that work for the family --
that efficiently fulfill government's role in supporting
families and keeping them together.
At the same time, we must face another fact: government can
sometimes be a burden as well as a boon. Over the past forty
years, the child tax exemption has lagged far behind the soaring
costs of child-rearing. I have asked Congress to increase the
exemption by $500 per child. For a family w/ of four, that's an
children
increase of $2,000. It's a crucial first step toward redressing
the imbalance, and it's what we can afford. We have also
successfully increased the earned income tax credit for low-
income families. A strain on the family budget is a strain on
the family -- and families don't need the added pressure.
And there's another thing we must do: we must reform our
nation's welfare system. Americans are the most generous people
on earth, but they want to see -- and they're entitled to see --
some relationship between welfare and work. Welfare must never
be what FDR warned it might become: a subtle destroyer of the
spirit. It is not meant to be a way of life, or a family legacy
8
passed from one generation to the next. Welfare can eat away at
the ties that bind a family together.
and local governments.
States/lare beginning to undertaken the brave work of reform.
My administration has vowed to help them. We are acting now to
they
say waive federal requirements that impede reform, for every state
they would long
that asks for it.
I have dwelled today on the role of government -- both
Inspect and you
& that
positive and negative -- because we are men and women of
government. But let us never forget the work of private
some today of
Americans dedicating themselves to the voluntary service of
here
others, who create an environment where families can flourish.
Right now, as we're gathered here, somewhere in America a
in your
Volunteers are
volunteer is reading to a child; a businessman offers job
training to a young man he's just met; a woman teaches young
positions serving or
expectant mothers how to care for the children they will soon
bring into the world; neighbors band together to rid their
littlencial
neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs.
reward no
Each of them is a point of light, offering service with no
thought of reward, though the reward will be reaped by every
American. I urge all of you, when you return to your cities, to
do all in your power to encourage these caring men and women, to
make yours a community of light.
Today I will sign an executive order establishing a
commission on America's urban families. This panel is one result
of my meeting in January with your executive /eadership council. I have
asked Gov. John Ashcroft of Missouri to lead the commission and
and former Mayor of Wallos
Annette Strauss
9
fulfill its mandate: to identify those government programs, at
all levels, that weaken or strengthen urban families; to analyze
ways to improve private efforts to strengthen families; and to
recommend new policies to help families in our cities.
I am convinced that we can correct our mistakes, learn from
our failures, and build on our successes. The future of America
depends on our effort. The family is the irreducible unit of
comfort and love, and from families radiate neighborhoods, from
neighborhoods come towns and cities, and their health determines
the health of our country, for better or worse. Like you I am
committed to making our health whole, and to ensure that our
cities, as Theodore Parker said, remain the fireplaces of
America, radiating heat and light in the darkness.
#
#
#
#
Document No. 313275ss
WHITE HOUSE STAFFING MEMORANDUM
DATE:
3/6/92
ACTION/CONCURRENCE/COMMENT DUE BY: SAT. 3/7/92 10:00 am
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
SUBJECT:
MARCH 9, 1992 - 11:40 am
ACTION FYI
ACTION FYI
VICE PRESIDENT
HORNER
SKINNER
MCBRIDE
SCOWCROFT
MOORE
DARMAN
>
PETERSMEYER
BRADY
PORTER
\
BROMLEY
ROGICH
ROLLINS
>
CALIO
DEMAREST
SMITH
YEUTTER
>
FITZWATER
FINDLAY
>
GRAY
ANDERSON
HOLIDAY
KAUFMAN
MCGROARTY
1
REMARKS:
Please forward your comments directly to Dan McGroarty, Rm. 122, x2930,
no later than 10:00 a.m., SATURDAY, MARCH 7, with a copy to this office.
Thank you.
RESPONSE:
Reasemments
PHILLIP D. BRADY
Assistant to the President
and Staff Secretary
Ext. 2702
(Ferguson/Gershowitz)
March 5, 1992
02 MAR 6 P3: 35
Draft One
NLC2
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
MARCH 9, 1992
WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:40 A.M.
[Acknowledgments]
I'm pleased to be here today. I know I spoke to many of you
over television hook-up last December, and it's nice to climb
down from the silver screen to speak with you face to face.
Since December, I've had a chance to talk with several of
you in depth about the problems you face. In January, I had an
important meeting in the White House with some of your members.
Like your organization as a whole, they represented a marvelous
cross-section of urban America's leadership -- Republicans and
Democrats, liberals and conservatives, officials from large and
small and mid-sized cities.
Of course, we're all concerned about the big issues -- jobs,
family, world peace. Even so, I was struck by the unanimity of
the message your board wanted to deliver. It was an insight that
we have been acting on for three years, but it can't be repeated
often enough in Washington.
Their message was simply this: The enormous problems facing
cities today -- from infant mortality to high drop-out rates to
runaway crime -- are in part symptoms of one larger problem, the
deterioration of the American family.
That is the extraordinarily serious issue I would like to
discuss with you today. I have made the restoration of the
2
American family a priority of this administration. It lies at
the heart of much of what we have done for three years.
We must start with a clear-eyed look at what is really
happening to the family in American communities today -- not just
in poor urban neighborhoods but all across America. Then we must
look inside ourselves, to establish the principles that will
shape our approach. And then we must act.
The urgency is clear. We all know the statistics, the
Delete?
dreary drumbeat that tells of family breakdown. Today, one out
of every four American children is born out of wedlock.
Some
E
communities have even begun passing out condoms in school -- not
from a lax attitude toward premarital sex, but from sheer
desperation
Twenty-five percent of our children grow up in households
headed by a single parent. More than two million are called
latch-key kids -- who come from school each afternoon to an empty
home. And a large number of our children grow up without the
love of parents at all.
We know from experience the consequences of family decline.
Neglected children are more susceptible to the lure of crime and
drugs, are more likely to have poor health and to drop out of
school early, to lead a life without hope economic advancement.
You on the frontlines know the human costs that statistics
can only dimly sketch. You know, as I do, that for every blip on
a chart or dot on a graph there is a human story to tell, and too
often the story is a tragedy.
3
About ten days ago, I was in San Antonio, meeting with other
American heads of state to intensify our war on drugs. And while
there I noticed a front-page story in the San Antonio Light. A
cabdriver had been murdered last September -- another act of
random, senseless violence -- and his murderer had just been
found guilty.
But what was truly horrifying -- what would horrify any
American -- was this: the murderer was a 12-year-old boy.
As the deputies took the boy from the courtroom, according
to the newspaper story, they had trouble fitting him with
shackles and handcuffs, so slender were his wrists. This
youngster was four-feet tall, not yet a teenager, and now a
convicted murderer.
The drumbeat continues: two teenagers shot dead in a New
York public school -- an LSD ring busted up in an affluent
Northern Virginia suburb -- and the harrowing stories of runaway
kids and the horrors that befall them.
I know that almost all of you could tell stories equally
distressing -- stories from neighborhoods in your cities where
the unthinkable has become the commonplace. Something's wrong
when elderly city-dwellers, with triple-bolted doors, dare not
leave their homes for fear of attack; when babies are born
addicted to crack cocaine; when school children shoot one another
over a pair of sneakers.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I am sure that all
of you in this room took office with high confidence in our
4
ability to solve these problems, only to discover -- sooner
rather than later, I suspect -- that they were far more stubborn
than any of us had supposed. Let's not forget that the trials
our citizens face today were generations in the making. We can't
expect change overnight.
But make no mistake: We will change things. And we will do
it by digging to the root, to the deepest problem underlying so
many others. Each day, as public servants, we must redouble our
efforts to restore the family to its place of primacy in American
life. It's been said that the family is the best Department of
Health and of Human Services ever devised. That is a singularly
American insight. The genius of our system has always been its
reliance on the family, not government, as the fundamental unit
of social progress.
Families open up the world to individuals. They give older
family people members a stake in the future and connect children to
their past.
In restoring the family we restore to coming generations the
values, the sense of right and wrong, the will and confidence to
succeed that only a family can provide a child. And in doing
this, we will reinvigorate our cities as well.
We needn't look far for principles to guide us. They are
the old home truths. Rely on what works, discard what doesn't.
Never be afraid to innovate. The government that is closest to
the people responds best to the needs of the people. And let's
5
not forget this as a guiding principle: if people are to be
responsible, they must be given responsibility.
As a practical matter, that means we must ensure that
parents retain the authority to make the big decisions for their
families. The government's first responsibility is like that of
the physician: Do no harm. And let us never doubt that
government only harms the family when it restricts the family's
autonomy or usurps the authority of responsible parents.
Let me give you an example: Those of us in government can
never plausibly claim to fight for families if we insist that
government, not parents, must choose who cares for their
children. Two years ago, my administration waged a fight in
Congress over this very issue, and we won. We kept choice of
child care out of the hands of government and put it where it
belongs -- in the hands of parents.
Now we're engaged in a similar fight, over whether parents
should have the right to choose their childrens' schools. We
know the benefits of competition; it is the linchpin of American
prosperity. And competition among schools will be the linchpin
of educational excellence, too.
But school choice is important for other reasons: It
restores authority and responsibility to parents. And just as it
also
makes our schools accountable, so does itn makes parents
accountable for the decisions they make. Restoring authority and
accountability -- not only in child care and school choice but in
6
other areas as well -- will be a key to healing the American
family.
Another example: For more than a year now we have been
trying to get through Congress our HOPE initiative, which would
offer low-income families a greater opportunity to own their own
homes. HOPE is based on a simple principle: to survive, people
need the intangible values of dignity and self-respect.
Government can't provide those. But homeownership can. An
education can. A job can. And being part of a family can.
of course we will never shirk the federal government's
affirmative role in preserving the family. Our belief in that
role has guided the decisions we've made over the past three
years. Since 1989, for example, we have more than doubled
funding for Head Start, a program that brings children and
parents into the classroom, strengthening family ties and
reinforcing parental responsibility. For the first time in the
program's history, our new budget provides that every eligible
four-year-old will be able to start school ready to learn.
There are many other examples: over the past three years,
we've increased the funding for WIC -- the Supplemental Food
Program for Women, Infants and Children -- by 47 percent, to $2.8
billion next year. We've increased other nutrition programs by
similar percentages. And this year federal support for childhood
immunizations will increase by $52 million, an increase of 18
percent over last year's level.
7
All told, funding for children's programs -- from nutrition
and education to foster care and child immunizations -- has
increased 66 percent since we took office.
But please understand: we do not measure our success in
dollars spent. We measure it by results -- by the degree to
which it keeps children healthy and happy and, most important of
all, increases a family's self-reliance. My administration has
concentrated on funding the programs that work for the family --
that efficiently fulfill government's role in supporting
families and keeping them together.
At the same time, we must face another fact: government can
sometimes be a burden as well as a boon. Over the past forty
years, the child tax exemption has lagged far behind the soaring
costs of child-rearing. I have asked Congress to increase the
exemption by $500 per child. For a family of four, that's an
increase of $2,000. It's a crucial first step toward redressing
the imbalance, and it's what we can afford. We have also
successfully increased the earned income tax credit for low-
income families. A strain on the family budget is a strain on
the family -- and families don't need the added pressure.
And there's another thing we must do: we must reform our
nation's welfare system. Americans are the most generous people
on earth, but they want to see -- and they're entitled to see --
some relationship between welfare and work. Welfare must never
be what FDR warned it might become: a subtle destroyer of the
spirit. It is not meant to be a way of life, or a family legacy
8
passed from one generation to the next. Welfare can eat away at
the ties that bind a family together.
States are beginning to undertake the brave work of reform.
My administration has vowed to help them. We are acting now to
waive federal requirements that impede reform, for every state
that asks for it.
I have dwelled today on the role of government -- both
positive and negative -- because we are critical men and women of
government. But let us never forget the a work of private
Americans dedicating themselves to the voluntary service of
others, who create an environment where families can flourish.
Right now, as we're gathered here, throughout somewhere in America
s are
children;
e are
volunteer, is reading to a child; a businessman offers ob
people they have
women are
training to a young man he's he just met; a woman teaches young
expectant mothers how to care for the children they will soon
are
bring into the world; neighbors band together to rid their
neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs.
Each of them is a boint of ight, offering service with no
thought of reward, though the reward will be reaped by every
American. I urge all of you, when you return to your cities, to
and
do all in your power to encourage these caring men and women to encourage
all leaders of businesses Chirches schools, and other groups who Can mobilize people to Follow Their example
make yours a community of light.
Help make your city a Community of hight.
Today I will sign an executive order establishing a
commission on America's urban families. This panel is one result
of my meeting in January with your executive council. I have
asked Gov. John Ashcroft of Missouri to lead the commission and
9
fulfill its mandate: to identify those government programs, at
all levels, that weaken or strengthen urban families; to analyze
ways to improve private efforts to strengthen families; and to
recommend new policies to help families in our cities.
I am convinced that we can correct our mistakes, learn from
our failures, and build on our successes. The future of America
depends on our effort. The family is the irreducible unit of
comfort and love, and from families radiate neighborhoods, from
neighborhoods come towns and cities, and their health determines
the health of our country, for better or worse. Like you I am
committed to making our health whole, and to ensure that our
cities, as Theodore Parker said, remain the fireplaces of
America, radiating heat and light in the darkness.
#
#
#
#
Document No. 313275ss
WHITE HOUSE STAFFING MEMORANDUM
92 MAR 6 P6: 21
DATE:
3/6/92
ACTION/CONCURRENCE/COMMENT DUE BY: SAT. 3/7/92 10:00 am
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
SUBJECT:
MARCH 9, 1992 - - 11:40 am
ACTION FYI
ACTION FYI
VICE PRESIDENT
HORNER
SKINNER
MCBRIDE
SCOWCROFT
MOORE
>
DARMAN
PETERSMEYER
BRADY
PORTER
>
ROGICH
>
BROMLEY
ROLLINS
>
CALIO
DEMAREST
SMITH
>
YEUTTER
FITZWATER
>
GRAY
FINDLAY
ANDERSON
HOLIDAY
KAUFMAN
\
MCGROARTY
REMARKS:
Please forward your comments directly to Dan McGroarty, Rm. 122, x2930,
no later than 10:00 a.m., SATURDAY, MARCH 7, with a copy to this office.
Thank you.
RESPONSE:
from Mark Partetta Mark Pattetta
PHILLIP D. BRADY
Assistant to the President
and Staff Secretary
Ext. 2702
(Ferguson/Gershowitz)
March 5, 1992
02 MAR 6 P3: 35
Draft One
NLC2
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
MARCH 9, 1992
WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:40 A.M.
[Acknowledgments]
I'm pleased to be here today. I know I spoke to many of you
over television hook-up last December, and it's nice to climb
down from the silver screen to speak with you face to face.
Since December, I've had a chance to talk with several of
you in depth about the problems you face. In January, I had an
important meeting in the White House with some of your members.
Like your organization as a whole, they represented a marvelous
cross-section of urban America's leadership -- Republicans and
Democrats, liberals and conservatives, officials from large and
small and mid-sized cities.
of course, we're all concerned about the big issues -- jobs,
family, world peace. Even so, I was struck by the unanimity of
the message your board wanted to deliver. It was an insight that
we have been acting on for three years, but it can't be repeated
often enough in Washington.
Their message was simply this: The enormous problems facing
cities today -- from infant mortality to high drop-out rates to
runaway crime -- are in part symptoms of one larger problem, the
deterioration of the American family.
That is the extraordinarily serious issue I would like to
discuss with you today. I have made the restoration of the
2
American family a priority of this administration. It lies at
the heart of much of what we have done for three years.
We must start with a clear-eyed look at what is really
happening to the family in American communities today -- not just
in poor urban neighborhoods but all across America. Then we must
look inside ourselves, to establish the principles that will
shape our approach. And then we must act.
The urgency is clear. We all know the statistics, the
dreary drumbeat that tells of family breakdown. Today, one out
of every four American children is born out of wedlock. Some
communities have even begun passing out condoms in school
not
from a lax attitude toward premarital sex, but from sheer
desperation.
Twenty-five percent of our children grow up in households
headed by a single parent. More than two million are called
latch-key kids -- who come from school each afternoon to an empty
home. And a large number of our children grow up without the
love of parents at all.
We know from experience the consequences of family decline.
Neglected children are more susceptible to the lure of crime and
drugs, are more likely to have poor health and to drop out of
school early, to lead a life without hope.
You on the frontlines know the human costs that statistics
can only dimly sketch. You know, as I do, that for every blip on
a chart or dot on a graph there is a human story to tell, and too
often the story is a tragedy.
3
About ten days ago, I was in San Antonio, meeting with other
American heads of state to intensify our war on drugs. And while
there I noticed a front-page story in the San Antonio Light. A
cabdriver had been murdered last September -- another act of
random, senseless violence -- and his murderer had just been
found guilty.
But what was truly horrifying -- what would horrify any
American -- was this: the murderer was a 12-year-old boy.
As the deputies took the boy from the courtroom, according
to the newspaper story, they had trouble fitting him with
shackles and handcuffs, so slender were his wrists. This
youngster was four-feet tall, not yet a teenager, and now a
convicted murderer.
The drumbeat continues: two teenagers shot dead in a New
York public school -- an LSD ring busted up in an affluent
Northern Virginia suburb -- and the harrowing stories of runaway
kids and the horrors that befall them.
I know that almost all of you could tell stories equally
distressing -- stories from neighborhoods in your cities where
the unthinkable has become the commonplace. Something's wrong
when elderly city-dwellers, with triple-bolted doors, dare not
leave their homes for fear of attack; when babies are born
addicted to crack cocaine; when school children shoot one another
over a pair of sneakers.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I am sure that all
of you in this room took office with high confidence in our
4
ability to solve these problems, only to discover -- sooner
rather than later, I suspect -- that they were far more stubborn
than any of us had supposed. Let's not forget that the trials
our citizens face today were generations in the making. We can't
expect change overnight.
But make no mistake: We will change things. And we will do
it by digging to the root, to the deepest problem underlying so
many others. Each day, as public servants, we must redouble our
efforts to restore the family to its place of primacy in American
life. It's been said that the family is the best Department of
Health of Human Services ever devised. That is a singularly
American insight. The genius of our system has always been its
reliance on the family, not government, as the fundamental unit
of social progress.
Families open up the world to individuals. They give older
family members a stake in the future and connect children to
their past.
In restoring the family we restore to coming generations the
values, the sense of right and wrong, the will and confidence to
succeed that only a family can provide a child. And in doing
this, we will reinvigorate our cities as well.
We needn't look far for principles to guide us. They are
the old home truths. Rely on what works, discard what doesn't.
Never be afraid to innovate. The government that is closest to
the people responds best to the needs of the people. And let's
5
not forget this as a guiding principle: if people are to be
responsible, they must be given responsibility.
As a practical matter, that means we must ensure that
parents retain the authority to make the big decisions for their
families. The government's first responsibility is like that of
the physician: Do no harm. And let us never doubt that
government only harms the family when it restricts the family's
autonomy or usurps the authority of responsible parents.
Let me give you an example: Those of us in government can
never plausibly claim to fight for families if we insist that
government, not parents, must choose who cares for their
children. Two years ago, my administration waged a fight in
Congress over this very issue, and we won. We kept choice of
child care out of the hands of government and put it where it
belongs -- in the hands of parents.
Now we're engaged in a similar fight, over whether parents
should have the right to choose their childrens' schools. We
know the benefits of competition; it is the linchpin of American
prosperity. And competition among schools will be the linchpin
of educational excellence, too.
But school choice is important for other reasons: It
restores authority and responsibility to parents. And just as it
makes our schools accountable, so does it make parents
accountable for the decisions they make. Restoring authority and
accountability -- not only in child care and school choice but in
6
other areas as well -- will be a key to healing the American
family.
Another example: For more than a year now we have been
trying to get through Congress our HOPE initiative, which would
offer low-income families a greater opportunity to own their own
homes. HOPE is based on a simple principle: to survive, people
need the intangible values of dignity and self-respect.
Government can't provide those. But homeownership can. An
education can. A job can. And being part of a family can.
of course we will never shirk the federal government's
affirmative role in preserving the family. Our belief in that
role has guided the decisions we've made over the past three
years. Since 1989, for example, we have more than doubled
funding for Head Start, a program that brings children and
parents into the classroom, strengthening family ties and
reinforcing parental responsibility. For the first time in the
program's history, our new budget provides that every eligible
four-year-old will be able to start school ready to learn.
There are many other examples: over the past three years,
we've increased the funding for WIC -- the Supplemental Food
Program for Women, Infants and Children -- by 47 percent, to $2.8
billion next year. We've increased other nutrition programs by
similar percentages. And this year federal support for childhood
immunizations will increase by $52 million, an increase of 18
percent over last year's level.
7
All told, funding for children's programs -- from nutrition
and education to foster care and child immunizations -- has
increased 66 percent since we took office.
But please understand: we do not measure our success in
dollars spent. We measure it by results -- by the degree to
which it keeps children healthy and happy and, most important of
all, increases a family's self-reliance. My administration has
concentrated on funding the programs that work for the family --
that efficiently fulfill government's role in supporting
families and keeping them together.
At the same time, we must face another fact: government can
sometimes be a burden as well as a boon. Over the past forty
years, the child tax exemption has lagged far behind the soaring
costs of child-rearing. I have asked Congress to increase the
exemption by $500 per child. For a family of four, that's an
increase of $2,000. It's a crucial first step toward redressing
the imbalance, and it's what we can afford. We have also
successfully increased the earned income tax credit for low-
income families. A strain on the family budget is a strain on
the family -- and families don't need the added pressure.
And there's another thing we must do: we must reform our
nation's welfare system. Americans are the most generous people
on earth, but they want to see -- and they're entitled to see --
some relationship between welfare and work. Welfare must never
be what FDR warned it might become: a subtle destroyer of the
spirit. It is not meant to be a way of life, or a family legacy
and unduty
unnecessaly red 8 tape
passed from one generation to the next. Welfare can eat away at
the ties that bind a family together.
States are beginning to undertake the brave work of reform.
My administration has vowed to help them. We are acting now to
5
waive federal requirements that impede reform. for every state
that asks for it.
(whering induly burden and tape
I have dwelled today on the role of government -- both
positive and negative -- because we are men and women of
government. But let us never forget the work of private
Americans dedicating themselves to the voluntary service of
others, who create an environment where families can flourish.
Right now, as we're gathered here, somewhere in America a
volunteer is reading to a child; a businessman offers job
training to a young man he's just met; a woman teaches young
expectant mothers how to care for the children they will soon
bring into the world; neighbors band together to rid their
neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs.
Each of them is a point of light, offering service with no
thought of reward, though the reward will be reaped by every
American. I urge all of you, when you return to your cities, to
do all in your power to encourage these caring men and women, to
make yours a community of light.
Today I will sign an executive order establishing a
commission on America's urban families. This panel is one result
of my meeting in January with your executive council. I have
asked Gov. John Ashcroft of Missouri to lead the commission and
9
fulfill its mandate: to identify those government programs, at
all levels, that weaken or strengthen urban families; to analyze
ways to improve private efforts to strengthen families; and to
recommend new policies to help families in our cities.
I am convinced that we can correct our mistakes, learn from
our failures, and build on our successes. The future of America
depends on our effort. The family is the irreducible unit of
comfort and love, and from families radiate neighborhoods, from
neighborhoods come towns and cities, and their health determines
the health of our country, for better or worse. Like you I am
committed to making our health whole, and to ensure that our
cities, as Theodore Parker said, remain the fireplaces of
America, radiating heat and light in the darkness.
#
#
#
#
2 MAR
Document No. 313275ss
P6:
WHITE HOUSE STAFFING MEMORANDUM
09
DATE:
3/6/92
ACTION/CONCURRENCE/COMMENT DUE BY: SAT. 3/7/92 10:00 am
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
SUBJECT:
MARCH 9, 1992 - 11:40 am
ACTION FYI
ACTION FYI
VICE PRESIDENT
HORNER
SKINNER
MCBRIDE
SCOWCROFT
MOORE
>
DARMAN
PETERSMEYER
BRADY
PORTER
>
BROMLEY
ROGICH
CALIO
ROLLINS
>
DEMAREST
SMITH
>
YEUTTER
FITZWATER
>
GRAY
FINDLAY
>
HOLIDAY
ANDERSON
KAUFMAN
\
MCGROARTY
REMARKS:
Please forward your comments directly to Dan McGroarty, Rm. 122, x2930,
no later than 10:00 a.m., SATURDAY, MARCH 7, with a copy to this office.
Thank you.
RESPONSE:
A few thoughts - -
30 for 88
PHILLIP D. BRADY
Assistant to the President
and Staff Secretary
Ext. 2702
(Ferguson/Gershowitz)
March 5, 1992
02 MAR 6 P3: 35
Draft One
NLC2
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
MARCH 9, 1992
WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:40 A.M.
[Acknowledgments]
I'm pleased to be here today. I know I spoke to many of you
over television hook-up last December, and it's nice to climb
down from the silver screen to speak with you face to face.
Since December, I've had a chance to talk with several of
our cities
you in depth about the problems you face. In January, I had an
informative
important meeting in the White House with some of your members.
Like your organization as a whole, they represented a marvelous
cross-section of urban America's leadership -- Republicans and
Democrats, liberals and conservatives, officials from large and
small and mid-sized cities.
of course, we're all concerned about the big issues -- jobs,
family, world peace. Even so, I was struck by the unanimity of
the message your board wanted to deliver. It was an insight that
we have been acting on for three years, but it can't be repeated
often enough in Washington.
Their message was simply this: The enormous problems facing
cities today -- from infant mortality to high drop-out rates to
runaway crime -- are in part symptoms of one larger problem, the
deterioration of the American family.
That is the extraordinarily serious issue I would like to
discuss with you today. I have made the restoration of the
2
American family a priority of this administration. It lies at
the heart of much of what we have done for three years.
We must start with a clear-eyed look at what is really
happening to the family in American communities today -- not just
in poor urban neighborhoods but all across America. Then we must
look inside ourselves, to establish the principles that will
shape our approach. And then we must act.
The urgency is clear. We all know the statistics, the
dreary drumbeat that tells of family breakdown. Today, one out
of every four American children is born out of wedlock. Some
communities have even begun passing out condoms in school -- not
from a lax attitude toward premarital sex, but from sheer
desperation.
Twenty-five percent of our children grow up in households
headed by a single parent. More than two million are called
latch-key kids -- who come from school each afternoon to an empty
home. And a large number of our children grow up without the
love of parents at all.
We know from experience the consequences of family decline.
Neglected children are more susceptible to the lure of crime and
drugs, are more likely to have poor health and to drop out of
school early, to lead a life without hope.
You on the frontlines know the human costs that statistics
can only dimly sketch. You know, as I do, that for every blip on
a chart or dot on a graph there is a human story to tell, and too
often the story is a tragedy.
3
About ten days ago, I was in San Antonio, meeting with other
American heads of state to intensify our war on drugs. And while
there I noticed a front-page story in the San Antonio Light. A
cabdriver had been murdered last September -- another act of
random, senseless violence -- and his murderer had just been
found guilty.
But what was truly horrifying -- what would horrify any
American -- was this: the murderer was a 12-year-old boy.
As the deputies took the boy from the courtroom, according
to the newspaper story, they had trouble fitting him with
shackles and handcuffs, so slender were his wrists. This
youngster was four-feet tall, not yet a teenager, and now a
convicted murderer.
The drumbeat continues: two teenagers shot dead in a New
York public school -- ah LSD ring busted up in an affluent
Northern Virginia suburb -- and the harrowing stories of runaway
kids and the horrors that befall them.
I know that almost all of you could tell stories equally
distressing -- stories from neighborhoods in your cities where
the unthinkable has become the commonplace. Something's wrong
when elderly city-dwellers, with triple-bolted doors, dare not
leave their homes for fear of attack; when babies are born
addicted to crack cocaine; when school children shoot one another
over a pair of sneakers.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I am sure that all
of you in this room took office with high confidence in our
4
ability to solve these problems, only to discover -- sooner
rather than later, I suspect -- that they were far more stubborn
than any of us had supposed. Let's not forget that the trials
our citizens face today were generations in the making. We can't
expect change overnight.
But make no mistake: We will change things. And we will do
it by digging to the root, to the deepest problem underlying so
many others. Each day, as public servants, we must redouble our
efforts to restore the family to its place of primacy in American
life. It's been said that the family is the best Department of
Health of Human Services ever devised. That is a singularly
American insight. The genius of our system has always been its
reliance on the family, not government, as the fundamental unit
of social progress.
Families open up the world to individuals. They give older
family members a stake in the future and connect children to
their past.
In restoring the family we restore to coming generations the
values, the sense of right and wrong, the will and confidence to
succeed that only a family can provide a child. And in doing
this, we will reinvigorate our cities as well.
We needn't look far for principles to guide us. They are
the old home truths. Rely on what works, discard what doesn't.
Never be afraid to innovate. The government that is closest to
the people responds best to the needs of the people. And let's
5
not forget this as a guiding principle: if people are to be
responsible, they must be given responsibility.
As a practical matter, that means we must ensure that
parents retain the authority to make the big decisions for their
families. The government's first responsibility is like that of
the physician: Do no harm. And let us never doubt that
government only harms the family when it restricts the family's
autonomy or usurps the authority of responsible parents.
Let me give you an example: Those of us in government can
never plausibly claim to fight for families if we insist that
government, not parents, must choose who cares for their
children. Two years ago, my administration waged a fight in
Congress over this very issue, and we won. We kept choice of
child care out of the hands of government and put it where it
belongs -- in the hands of parents.
Now we're engaged in a similar fight, over whether parents
should have the right to choose their childrens' schools. We
know the benefits of competition; it is the linchpin of American
prosperity. And competition among schools will be the linchpin
of educational excellence, too.
But school choice is important for other reasons: It
restores authority and responsibility to parents. And just as it
makes our schools accountable, so does it make parents
accountable for the decisions they make. Restoring authority and
accountability -- not only in child care and school choice but in
6
other areas as well -- will be a key to healing the American
family.
Another example: For more than a year now we have been
trying to get through Congress our HOPE initiative, which would
offer low-income families a greater opportunity to own their own
homes. HOPE is based on a simple principle: to survive, people
need the intangible values of dignity and self-respect.
Government can't provide those. But homeownership can. An
education can. A job can. And being part of a family can.
of course we will never shirk the federal government's
affirmative role in preserving the family. Our belief in that
role has guided the decisions we've made over the past three
years. Since 1989, for example, we have more than doubled
funding for Head Start, a program that brings children and
parents into the classroom, strengthening family ties and
reinforcing parental responsibility. For the first time in the
program's history, our new budget provides that every eligible
four-year-old will be able to start school ready to learn.
There are many other examples: over the past three years,
we've increased the funding for WIC -- the Supplemental Food
Program for Women, Infants and Children -- by 47 percent, to $2.8
billion next year. We've increased other nutrition programs by
similar percentages. And this year federal support for childhood
immunizations will increase by $52 million, an increase of 18
percent over last year's level.
Start
Weatthy
mention
7
All told, funding for children's programs -- from nutrition
and education to foster care and child immunizations -- has
increased 66 percent since we took office.
But please understand: we do not measure our success in
dollars spent. We measure it by results -- by the degree to
which it keeps children healthy and happy and, most important of
all, increases a family's self-reliance. My administration has
concentrated on funding the programs that work for the family --
that efficiently fulfill government's role in supporting
families and keeping them together.
At the same time, we must face another fact: government can
sometimes be a burden as well as a boon. Over the past forty
years, the child tax exemption has lagged far behind the soaring
costs of child-rearing. I have asked Congress to increase the
exemption by $500 per child. For a family of four, that's an
increase of $2,000. It's a crucial first step toward redressing
the imbalance, and it's what we can afford. We have also
successfully increased the earned income tax credit for low-
income families. A strain on the family budget is a strain on
the family -- and families don't need the added pressure.
And there's another thing we must do: we must reform our
nation's welfare system. Americans are the most generous people
on earth, but they want to see -- and they're entitled to see --
some relationship between welfare and work. Welfare must never
be what FDR warned it might become: a subtle destroyer of the
spirit. It is not meant to be a way of life, or a family legacy
8
passed from one generation to the next. Welfare can eat away at
the ties that bind a family together.
States are beginning to undertake the brave work of reform.
My administration has vowed to help them. We are acting now to
waive federal requirements that impede reform, for every state
that asks for it.
I have dwelled today on the role of government -- both
positive and negative because we are men and women of
government But let us never forget the work of private
Americans dedicating themselves to the voluntary service of
others, who create an environment where families can flourish.
Right now, as we're gathered here, somewhere in America a
volunteer is reading to a child; a businessman offers job
training to a young man he's just met; a woman teaches young
expectant mothers how to care for the children they will soon
bring into the world; neighbors band together to rid their
neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs.
Each of them is a point of light, offering service with no
thought of reward, though the reward will be reaped by every
American. I urge all of you, when you return to your cities, to
do all in your power to encourage these caring men and women, to
make yours a community of light.
Today I will sign an executive order establishing a
commission on America's urban families. This panel is one result
of my meeting in January with your executive council. I have
asked Gov. John Ashcroft of Missouri to lead the commission and
9
fulfill its mandate: to identify those government programs, at
all levels, that weaken or strengthen urban families; to analyze
ways to improve private efforts to strengthen families; and to
recommend new policies to help families in our cities.
I am convinced that we can correct our mistakes, learn from
our failures, and build on our successes. The future of America
depends on our effort. The family is the irreducible unit of
comfort and love, and from families radiate neighborhoods, from
neighborhoods come towns and cities, and their health determines
the health of our country , wer better of warse Like you I am
committed to making our health whole, and to ensure that our
cities, as Theodore. Parker said, remain the fireplaces of
?
America, radiating heat and light in the darkness.
#
#
#
#
Thank you, + G.Bler the us S ofA
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Date: 3-6-42
TO: ANDREW Ferguson
FROM: GARY R. BLUMENTHAL
Deputy Assistant to the President
for Cabinet Liaison
Room 231, OEOB, x6630
Cam Fundlay thinks you
the attached in the League
may want to use some of
of cities speech.
Call of you have questions.
Jay JayJef Kocorty
GEORGE BUSH ON WELFARE REFORM
Statement of Principles
Americans are the most generous people on earth. But we
have to go back to the insight of Franklin Roosevelt who,
when he spoke of what became the welfare program, warned
that it must not become "a narcotic" and a "subtle destroyer
of the human spirit."
Welfare was never meant to be a lifestyle; it was never
meant to be a habit; it was never supposed to be passed from
generation to generation like a legacy. It's time to
replace the assumptions of the welfare state and help reform
the welfare system.
States throughout the country are beginning to operate with
new assumptions: that when able-bodied people receive
government assistance, they have responsibilities to the
taxpayer. A responsibility to seek work, education or job
training; a responsibility to get their lives in order; a
responsibility to hold their families together and refrain
from having children out of wedlock; and a responsibility to
obey the law.
President Bush
State of the Union address
January 28, 1992
There are three primary areas where the Administration
supports efforts to reform the welfare system. This policy is
intended to promote:
Individual responsibility -- to help people reduce their
dependency on drugs, and to keep students from dropping out
of school.
Family responsibility -- to prevent out-of-wedlock
childbearing, to remove the disincentives to marriage and
encourage families to stay together, and to penalize parents
whose children to skip school.
Economic independence -- to give individuals greater
incentives to save money, to encourage welfare recipients to
enroll in job training programs, and to help people start
their own microenterprises.
The Current Welfare System
Welfare programs are operated by individual states under
guidelines from government agencies. The Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS) oversees Aid to Families with Dependent
1
Children (AFDC) and Medicaid; the Department of Agriculture
oversees the Food Stamps program; and the Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) oversees housing programs.
Although states must abide by Federal statutes and
regulations in administering welfare programs, they have
substantial flexibility in their design. Should a state wish to
redesign its welfare programs, it can do so in two ways. First,
a state can make permanent changes in its welfare programs, if
the modifications accord with current law, by amending its state
plan. Permanent changes that run counter to current require
Federal legislation.
Second, a state can test experimental policies for which
Federal matching funds are not available under current law by
means of a demonstration project. Demonstration projects can
receive waivers from the relevant agency when they have met
criteria of good evaluation design and cost-neutrality.
Administration policy has been to require a rigorous evaluation,
since the project is for demonstration purposes, and cost-
neutrality, so that costs to the Federal government do not rise.
This often-lengthy process is the one that the President pledged
to simplify in his State of the Union address.
Proposals For Reform
The Administration can help states by: (1) facilitating the
process of granting waivers; (2) pursuing legislation to allow
states to implement successful waiver demonstrations as permanent
program changes; and (3) pursuing wider Federal waiver authority.
In order to help states change their welfare plans, the
Administration will continue to pursue the legislation it sent to
Congress last year to greatly widen the Federal government's
waiver authority. The President will also provide personal
political support for efforts in individual states to reduce or
restructure welfare programs.
In order to facilitate the process of granting waivers for
demonstration projects, the President will direct his Cabinet
agencies to work closely with state officials prior to the
submission of waiver applications in order to anticipate and
eliminate any potential problems. The FY93 Budget states that
the Administration will institute an interagency review process
to coordinate and expedite state requests for waivers.
Waivers that have been granted by the Administration
The Federal government has approved several welfare reform
demonstration projects including the following:
2
Wisconsin's Learnfare program requires all teenagers on AFDC
(dependent children and heads of families) who have not
graduated from high school or earned a high school
equivalency diploma to attend school on a regular basis;
New Jersey's REACH (Realizing Economic Achievement) program
broadened the scope of those required to participate in
employment-related activities; and
Washington State's FIP (Family Independence Program)
provides financial incentives to those who participate in
education, training or employment activities.
State Welfare Reform Initiatives
Many innovative welfare reforms are being considered at the
state level create incentives to modify individual behavior by
penalizing dependency-creating behavior such as out-of-wedlock
childbearing, dropping out of school and drug use. The various
welfare reforms being considered at the state level include:
Paying AFDC benefits at the level of the state in which the
recipient previously lived (California, Wisconsin);
Reducing AFDC payments to families headed by non-disabled
adults, either after an initial transitional period
(California), or if they refuse to participate in
appropriate work, training or education (New Jersey);
Limiting AFDC payments based on the size of the family at
the inception of benefits (California, New Jersey,
Wisconsin);
Expanding AFDC eligibility to married couples and two-
parent families (New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin);
Extending earned income disregards (California, Vermont);
Requiring specific parental responsibilities including
receipt of preventive health services and regular payment of
rent (Maryland, Vermont); and
Mandating regular school attendance of youth (California,
Maryland, Wisconsin, Florida).
Proposed Talking Points for the President
As I noted in my State of the Union address, many states
have already begun reforming their welfare systems in order
to help people become self-sufficient. Certainly, the
passage of the Family Support Act in 1988, which I strongly
supported, has given important impetus to this process.
3
I know that states may need waivers of statutes and
regulations from Federal agencies in order to demonstrate
how to refashion the categorical programs which make up the
current system. I am ready to take immediate action to help
this movement.
In order to speed up the process by which we review waiver
requests, I will direct my Cabinet agencies to work closely
with state official prior to the submission of waiver
applications in order to anticipate and eliminate any
potential problems.
Last year we sent up legislation to Congress in order to
widen the Federal government's waiver authority. Congress
should pass that legislation as quickly as possible.
I support efforts to reform the welfare system by placing
greater emphasis on family and parental responsibility and
by discouraging dependency-creating behavior such as out-
of-wedlock childbearing, dropping out of school and drug
use.
I have always felt that states can be the best laboratories
for new and innovative programs. I look forward to making
it easier for states to develop new approaches to welfare
policy.
4
March 5, 1992
MEMORANDUM FOR ANDY
FROM: CAROL
RE: Out-of-wedlock births in Minneapolis
1970: 1,533
1982: 1,769
It is a 15% increase from 1970 - 1982
Other years--
1985: 2,189
1986: 2,362
1988: 2,646
1989: 2,723
OF 1 CELIM
EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20503
92 MAR 6 P6: 52
MAR 6 1992
NOTICE:
Enclosed are comments from staff members of the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB). Such comments do not necessarily
represent the official position of the Director of OMB or of the
Office of Management and Budget. If you wish to have the
Director's personal comments, please let me know -- and contact
me if you have any questions.
If our proposed substantive changes are not made, please let
us know before the material is prepared in final.
James C. Marr
Associate Director for
Legislative Reference
and Administration
Document No. 313275ss
WHITE HOUSE STAFFING MEMORANDUM
DATE:
3/6/92
ACTION/CONCURRENCE/COMMENT DUE BY: SAT. 3/7/92 10:00 am
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
SUBJECT:
MARCH 9, 1992 - 11:40 am
ACTION FYI
ACTION FYI
VICE PRESIDENT
HORNER
SKINNER
MCBRIDE
SCOWCROFT
MOORE
>
DARMAN
PETERSMEYER
BRADY
PORTER
\
BROMLEY
ROGICH
>
CALIO
ROLLINS
>
DEMAREST
SMITH
>
>
YEUTTER
FITZWATER
>
GRAY
FINDLAY
HOLIDAY
ANDERSON
KAUFMAN
\
MCGROARTY
REMARKS:
Please forward your comments directly to Dan McGroarty, Rm. 122, x2930,
no later than 10:00 a.m., SATURDAY, MARCH 7, with a copy to this office.
Thank you.
RESPONSE:
See Comments
PHILLIP D. BRADY
Assistant to the President
and Staff Secretary
Ext. 2702
(Ferguson/Gershowitz)
March 5, 1992
02 MAR 6 P3: 35
Draft One
NLC2
PRESIDENTIAL REMARKS: NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES
MARCH 9, 1992
WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:40 A.M.
[Acknowledgments]
I'm pleased to be here today. I know I spoke to many of you
over television hook-up last December, and it's nice to climb
down from the silver screen to speak with you face to face.
Since December, I've had a chance to talk with several of
you in depth about the problems you face. In January, I had an
important meeting in the White House with some of your members.
Like your organization as a whole, they represented a marvelous
cross-section of urban America's leadership -- Republicans and
Democrats, liberals and conservatives, officials from large and
small and mid-sized cities.
of course, we're all concerned about the big issues -- jobs,
family, world peace. Even so, I was struck by the unanimity of
the message your board wanted to deliver. It was an insight that
we have been acting on for three years, but it can't be repeated
often enough in Washington.
Their message was simply this: The enormous problems facing
cities today -- from infant mortality to high drop-out rates to
runaway crime -- are in part symptoms of one larger problem, the
deterioration of the American family.
That is the extraordinarily serious issue I would like to
discuss with you today. I have made the restoration of the
2
American family a priority of this administration. It lies at
the heart of much of what we have done for three years.
We must start with a clear-eyed look at what is really
happening to the family in American communities today -- not just
in poor urban neighborhoods but all across America. Then we must
look inside ourselves, to establish the principles that will
shape our approach. And then we must act.
The urgency is clear. We all know the statistics, the
dreary drumbeat that tells of family breakdown. Today, one out
of every four American children is born out of wedlock. Some
communities have even begun passing out condoms in school -- not
from a lax attitude toward premarital sex, but from sheer
desperation.
live
scully
5178
Twenty-five percent of our children grow up in households
(?)source
headed by a single parent. More than two million are called
latch-key kids -- who come from school each afternoon to an empty
home. And a large number of our children grow up without the
love of parents at all.
We know from experience the consequences of family decline.
Neglected children are more susceptible to the lure of crime and
drugs, are more likely to have poor health and to drop out of
school early, to lead a life without hope.
You on the frontlines know the human costs that statistics
can only dimly sketch. You know, as I do, that for every blip on
a chart or dot on a graph there is a human story to tell, and too
often the story is a tragedy.
3
About ten days ago, I was in San Antonio, meeting with other
American heads of state to intensify our war on drugs. And while
there I noticed a front-page story in the San Antonio Light. A
cabdriver had been murdered last September -- another act of
random, senseless violence -- and his murderer had just been
found guilty.
But what was truly horrifying -- what would horrify any
American -- was this: the murderer was a 12-year-old boy.
As the deputies took the boy from the courtroom, according
to the newspaper story, they had trouble fitting him with
shackles and handcuffs, so slender were his wrists. This
youngster was four-feet tall, not yet a teenager, and now a
convicted murderer.
The drumbeat continues: two teenagers shot dead in a New
York public school -- an LSD ring busted up in an affluent
Northern Virginia suburb -- and the harrowing stories of runaway
kids and the horrors that befall them.
I know that almost all of you could tell stories equally
distressing -- stories from neighborhoods in your cities where
the unthinkable has become the commonplace. Something's wrong
when elderly city-dwellers, with triple-bolted doors, dare not
leave their homes for fear of attack; when babies are born
addicted to crack cocaine; when school children shoot one another
over a pair of sneakers.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong. I am sure that all
of you in this room took office with high confidence in our
4
ability to solve these problems, only to discover -- sooner
rather than later, I suspect -- that they were far more stubborn
than any of us had supposed. Let's not forget that the trials
our citizens face today were generations in the making. We can't
expect change overnight.
But make no mistake: We will change things. And we will do
it by digging to the root, to the deepest problem underlying so
many others. Each day, as public servants, we must redouble our
efforts to restore the family to its place of primacy in American
life. It's been said that the family is the best Department of
Health of Human Services ever devised. That is a singularly
American insight. The genius of our system has always been its
reliance on the family, not government, as the fundamental unit
of social progress.
Families open up the world to individuals. They give older
family members a stake in the future and connect children to
their past.
In restoring the family we restore to coming generations the
values, the sense of right and wrong, the will and confidence to
succeed that only a family can provide a child. And in doing
this, we will reinvigorate our cities as well.
We needn't look far for principles to guide us. They are
the old home truths. Rely on what works, discard what doesn't.
Never be afraid to innovate. The government that is closest to
the people responds best to the needs of the people. And let's
5
not forget this as a guiding principle: if people are to be
responsible, they must be given responsibility.
As a practical matter, that means we must ensure that
parents retain the authority to make the big decisions for their
families. The government's first responsibility is like that of
the physician: Do no harm. And let us never doubt that
government only harms the family when it restricts the family's
autonomy or usurps the authority of responsible parents.
Let me give you an example: Those of us in government can
never plausibly claim to fight for families if we insist that
government, not parents, must choose who cares for their
children. Two years ago, my administration waged a fight in
Congress over this very issue, and we won. We kept choice of
child care out of the hands of government and put it where it
belongs -- in the hands of parents.
Now we're engaged in a similar fight, over whether parents
should have the right to choose their childrens' schools. We
know the benefits of competition; it is the linchpin of American
prosperity. And competition among schools will be the linchpin
of educational excellence, too.
But school choice is important for other reasons: It
restores authority and responsibility to parents. And just as it
makes our schools accountable, so does it make parents
accountable for the decisions they make. Restoring authority and
accountability -- not only in child care and school choice but in
(vew senteme
Regly
It took
another year to get Congress
to 6 provide even partial funding
for it even though
other areas as well -- will be a key to healing the American
family.
It took
to get our HOPE initiative
Another example: For more than a year now we have been
HOPE
trying to get through Congress peniod our HOPE initiative, which would
offer low-income families a greater opportunity to own their own
homes. HOPE is based on a simple principle: to survive, people
need the intangible values of dignity and self-respect.
Government can't provide those. But homeownership can. An
education can. A job can. And being part of a family can.
of course we will never shirk the federal government's
affirmative role in preserving the family. Our belief in that
role has guided the decisions we've made over the past three
years. Since 1989, for example, we have more than doubled
funding for Head Start, a program that brings children and
parents into the classroom, strengthening family ties and
reinforcing parental responsibility. For the first time in the
supports 1 year of HEADSTART Four
program's history, our new budget provides that every eligible
four year old will be able to start school ready to learn.
children wanting to participate in the program.
Since 1989,
There are many other examples: over the past three years,
5178
we've increased the funding for WIC -- the Supplemental Food
Program for Women, Infants and Children -- by 47 percent, to $2.8
billion next year. We've increased other nutrition programs by
in FY93
similar percentages. And this year federal support for childhood
grants
immunizations will increase by $52 million, an increase of 18
percent over last year's level.
7
All told, funding for children's programs -- from nutrition
and education to foster care and child immunizations -- has
increased 66 percent since we took office.
But please understand: we do not measure our success in
dollars spent. We measure it by results -- by the degree to
which it keeps children healthy and happy and, most important of
all, increases a family's self-reliance. My administration has
concentrated on funding the programs that work for the family --
that efficiently fulfill government's role in supporting
families and keeping them together.
At the same time, we must face another fact: government can
sometimes be a burden as well as a boon. Over the past forty
years, the child tax exemption has lagged far behind the soaring
costs of child-rearing. I have asked Congress to increase the
exemption by $500 per child. For a family of four, that's an
increase of $2,000. It's a crucial first step toward redressing
the imbalance, and it's what we can afford. We have also
successfully increased the earned income tax credit for low-
income families. A strain on the family budget is a strain on
the family -- and families don't need the added pressure.
And there's another thing we must do: we must reform our
nation's welfare system. Americans are the most generous people
on earth, but they want to see -- and they're entitled to see --
some relationship between welfare and work. Welfare must never
be what FDR warned it might become: a subtle destroyer of the
spirit. It is not meant to be a way of life, or a family legacy
8
passed from one generation to the next. Welfare can eat away at
the ties that bind a family together.
States are beginning to undertake the brave work of reform.
My administration has vowed to help them. We are acting now to
waive federal requirements that impede reform, for every state
that asks for it.
I have dwelled today on the role of government -- both
positive and negative -- because we are men and women of
government. But let us never forget the work of private
Americans dedicating themselves to the voluntary service of
others, who create an environment where families can flourish.
Right now, as we're gathered here, somewhere in America a
volunteer is reading to a child; a businessman offers job
training to a young man he's just met; a woman teaches young
expectant mothers how to care for the children they will soon
bring into the world; neighbors band together to rid their
neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs.
Each of them is a point of light, offering service with no
thought of reward, though the reward will be reaped by every
American. I urge all of you, when you return to your cities, to
do all in your power to encourage these caring men and women, to
make yours a community of light.
Today I will sign an executive order establishing a
commission on America's urban families This panel is one result
of my meeting in January with your executive council. I have
asked Gov. John Ashcroft of Missouri to lead the commission and
5044
delets reference to executive order
Damure/504
9
fulfill its mandate: to identify those government programs, at
all levels, that weaken or strengthen urban families; to analyze
ways to improve private efforts to strengthen families; and to
recommend new policies to help families in our cities.
I am convinced that we can correct our mistakes, learn from
our failures, and build on our successes. The future of America
depends on our effort. The family is the irreducible unit of
comfort and love, and from families radiate neighborhoods, from
neighborhoods come towns and cities, and their health determines
the health of our country, for better or worse. Like you I am
committed to making our health whole, and to ensure that our
cities, as Theodore Parker said, remain the fireplaces of
America, radiating heat and light in the darkness.
#
#
#
#