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Anna Richter's Files
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Withdrawal/Redaction Sheet
Clinton Library
DOCUMENT NO.
SUBJECT/TITLE
DATE
RESTRICTION
AND TYPE
001. fax
To Margy Waller From Deborah Vincent; RE: addresses/phone
11/21/2000
P6/b(6)
numbers/personal info [partial] (2 pages)
002. fax
To Margy Waller From Deborah Vincent; RE: address/phone
11/27/2000
P6/b(6)
number/personal info [partial] (1 page)
003. paper
Working Families Real People; RE: phone number/personal info
n.d.
P6/b(6)
[partial] (2 pages)
COLLECTION:
Clinton Presidential Records
Domestic Policy Council
Anna Richter
OA/Box Number: 23737
FOLDER TITLE:
Legacy Documents and Drafts [binder] [3]
2011-0638-S
ms153
RESTRICTION CODES
Presidential Records Act - [44 U.S.C. 2204(a)]
Freedom of Information Act - 15 U.S.C. 552(b)]
P1 National Security Classified Information [(a)(1) of the PRA]
b(1) National security classified information [(b)(1) of the FOIAJ
P2 Relating to the appointment to Federal office [(a)(2) of the PRA]
b(2) Release would disclose internal personnel rules and practices of
P3 Release would violate a Federal statute [(a)(3) of the PRAJ
an agency [(b)(2) of the FOIA]
P4 Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential commercial or
b(3) Release would violate a Federal statute [(b)(3) of the FOIA]
financial information [(a)(4) of the PRA]
b(4) Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential or financial
P5 Release would disclose confidential advice between the President
information [(b)(4) of the FOIA]
and his advisors, or between such advisors [a)(5) of the PRA)
b(6) Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
P6 Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy [(b)(6) of the FOIA]
personal privacy [(a)(6) of the PRAJ
b(7) Release would disclose information compiled for law enforcement
purposes [(b)(7) of the FOIA]
C. Closed in accordance with restrictions contained in donor's deed
b(8) Release would disclose information concerning the regulation of
of gift.
financial institutions [(b)(8) of the FOIAJ
PRM. Personal record misfile defined in accordance with 44 U.S.C.
b(9) Release would disclose geological or geophysical information
2201(3).
concerning wells [(b)(9) of the FOIA]
RR. Document will be reviewed upon request.
Children & Families
Living w/ Grandmother
fakawaybromwork
aboutiomiles -
Head
7 Alexiss Carlos
Start
kids 4 $16 months -
started Leceving
TANF money about a year ago
daycareis 5 blks from home
about 2 miles from work
grandmothers house:
no heat - Coldin winter
swamp cooler - Hot in Summer
Safer neighboorhood now- gives
without the Partnership
notable to find a stablejob now have opportunities
infrontot me -
support gave to got confidence
"
Because of Presiden/elinton's leaderhip I we been
aste to move up helpmyself my children & w/outsthe
offor
welfare
houring woucher, been
ask DNARETO work
been ableto make IF to Workevemblan
curryday I maynet have
Inouldnt have you safer negenborhoud is both for my
indy-clope which to work t
daycane
11/21/2000
11:03
OFFICE UH SECRETARY
94567431
NO.845
001
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY
Washington, DC 20410-8000
Tel: (202) 708-0270
Fax: (202) 708-6092 or 4087
FACSIMILE TRANSMITTAL
DATE:
11-21-00
TO:
Margy WalleR
ORGANIZATION:
D.P.C.
FAX: 456-2431 TELEPHONE:
FROM: DEBORAH VINCENT. Acting Deputy Chief of Staff, for Policy
MESSAGE: Please see what you think
about these Weltare-fo-Work
Steries. infermation. I'm still getting additional
NUMBER OF PAGES (including this page): 3
If you experience problems receiving this facsimile, please call (202)708-0270
Withdrawal/Redaction Marker
Clinton Library
DOCUMENT NO.
SUBJECT/TITLE
DATE
RESTRICTION
AND TYPE
001. fax
To Margy Waller From Deborah Vincent; RE: addresses/phone
11/21/2000
P6/b(6)
numbers/personal info [partial] (2 pages)
COLLECTION:
Clinton Presidential Records
Domestic Policy Council
Anna Richter
OA/Box Number: 23737
FOLDER TITLE:
Legacy Documents and Drafts [binder] [3]
2011-0638-S
ms153
RESTRICTION CODES
Presidential Records Act - [44 U.S.C. 2204(a)]
Freedom of Information Act - [5 U.S.C. 552(b)]
P1 National Security Classified Information [(a)(1) of the PRA]
b(1) National security classified information [(b)(1) of the FOIA]
P2 Relating to the appointment to Federal office [(a)(2) of the PRA]
b(2) Release would disclose internal personnel rules and practices of
P3 Release would violate a Federal statute [(a)(3) of the PRAJ
an agency [(b)(2) of the FOIA]
P4 Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential commercial or
b(3) Release would violate a Federal statute [(b)(3) of the FOIA)
financial information [(a)(4) of the PRAJ
b(4) Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential or financial
P5 Release would disclose confidential advice between the President
information |(b)(4) of the FOIA]
and his advisors, or between such advisors [a)(5) of the PRAJ
b(6) Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
P6 Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy |(b)(6) of the FOIA]
personal privacy [(a)(6) of the PRAJ
b(7) Release would disclose information compiled for law enforcement
purposes [(b)(7) of the FOIA]
C. Closed in accordance with restrictions contained in donor's deed
b(8) Release would disclose information concerning the regulation of
of gift.
financial institutions [(b)(8) of the FOIA]
PRM. Personal record misfile defined in accordance with 44 U.S.C.
b(9) Release would disclose geological or geophysical information
2201(3).
concerning wells [(b)(9) of the FOIA]
RR. Document will be reviewed upon request.
0002/12/11
11:03
OFFICE OF SECRETARY + 94567431
NO.845
002
[001]
WELFARE TO WORK SUCCESS STORIES
Ms. Anna M. Lorea
P6/(b)(6)
Place of Employment:
City of Phoenix
The EARN Alliance
520 West Van Buren Street
Phoenix, AZ 85033
(602) 534-1093
(602)534-1715 Fax
[email protected]
Anna is a 20 year old single parent with two children. She was referred to the
Welfare-to-Work program by the state TANF program. She moved into her Section
8 apartment in July 2000. Section 8 permitted her to move to a decent, safe
apartment
P6/(b)(6)
The apartment
moving from
to
is close to the city's public transportation system and is within walking distance to
her childcare center.
u
Anna initially found a temporary job
P6/(b)(6)
P6/(b)(6)
P6/(b)(6)
She is free of welfare assistance and
ts working nun time for the City of Phoenix as a Customer Service Clerk. Anna is
taking computer courses to allow her to be more competitive for advancement
opportunities in the City. a spanish
Anna credits her success to the Section 8 Welfare-to-Work program. She says, "I
never would have been able to do any of this without the Welfare-to-Work voucher -
living in a nice apartment close to daycare and the bus to get to work."
HOW old children?
when on welfare.'
worked before?
11/21/2000
11:03
OFFICE UF SECRETARY
->
94567431
NO.845
903
[001]
Ms. Lonnie Giles
P6/(b)(6)
(801) 487-8211 (work #)
Lonnie is a single mother with a three year old daughter. She received her Welfare-
to-Work voucher in March. 2000.
P6/(b)(6)
P6/(b)(6)
She was able to obtain full time employment in
June, 2000 at Maverik Country Store
P6/(b)(6)
The only
remaining welfare assistance she receives is for childcare expenses. Lonnie is very
enthusiastic about the Welfare-to-Work program and would be happy to share her
experiences and the benefits of the program from her perspective. She can be
reached at her work number 11AM-7PM MST Monday through Friday.
0002/17/II.
10:11
OFFICE OF SECRETARY
94567431
NO. 846
901
CC.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY
anna
Washington, DC 20410-8000
andrea
Tel: (202) 708-0270
Fax: (202) 708-6092 or 4087
FACSIMILE TRANSMITTAL
DATE:
11/24/00
TO:
margy Waller
ORGANIZATION: DPC
FAX: 202-456-7431 TELEPHONE: 202-456-5586
FROM: DEBORAH VINCENT. Acting Deputy Chief of Staff, for Policy
MESSAGE: Are any ot the examples acceptable ?
should I continues to pursue
families ? Please advise thanks.
NUMBER OF PAGES (Including this page): 2
If you experience problems receiving this facsimile, please call (202)708-0270
Withdrawal/Redaction Marker
Clinton Library
DOCUMENT NO.
SUBJECT/TITLE
DATE
RESTRICTION
AND TYPE
002. fax
To Margy Waller From Deborah Vincent; RE: address/phone
11/27/2000
P6/b(6)
number/personal info [partial] (1 page)
COLLECTION:
Clinton Presidential Records
Domestic Policy Council
Anna Richter
OA/Box Number: 23737
FOLDER TITLE:
Legacy Documents and Drafts [binder] [3]
2011-0638-S
ms153
RESTRICTION CODES
Presidential Records Act - [44 U.S.C. 2204(a)]
Freedom of Information Act - 15 U.S.C. 552(b)]
P1 National Security Classified Information [(a)(1) of the PRA]
b(1) National security classified information |(b)(1) of the FOIA]
P2 Relating to the appointment to Federal office [(a)(2) of the PRA]
b(2) Release would disclose internal personnel rules and practices of
P3 Release would violate a Federal statute [(a)(3) of the PRAJ
an agency [(b)(2) of the FOIA]
P4 Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential commercial or
b(3) Release would violate a Federal statute ((b)(3) of the FOIA]
financial information [(a)(4) of the PRA]
b(4) Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential or financial
P5 Release would disclose confidential advice between the President
information [(b)(4) of the FOIA]
and his advisors, or between such advisors {a)(5) of the PRA]
b(6) Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
P6 Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy [(b)(6) of the FOIA]
personal privacy [(a)(6) of the PRAJ
b(7) Release would disclose information compiled for law enforcement
purposes |(b)(7) of the FOIA]
C. Closed in accordance with restrictions contained in donor's deed
b(8) Release would disclose information concerning the regulation of
of gift.
financial institutions |(b)(8) of the FOIA]
PRM. Personal record misfile defined in accordance with 44 U.S.C.
b(9) Release would disclose geological or geophysical information
2201(3).
concerning wells |(b)(9) of the FOIA]
RR. Document will be reviewed upon request.
11/27/2000
10:11
OFFICE OF SECRETARY -> 94567431
NO. 846
002
[002]
Phong Le
P6/(b)(6)
Santa Clara County Housing Authority contact:
Sandi Douglas (408) 572-4200
Phong is a Vietnamese immigrant who escaped adversity in his country and is now building a
better life in the United States with his family. Phong, his wife and two teenage children have
2000. used their WtW voucher to rent a house where they began to receive rental assistance in July
When Phong came to the United States, he did not have skills that he could utilize in the
American workforce, and lacked English language proficiency. Phong enrolled in a community
college to take ESL and electronic assembly classes and completed a series of Welfare-to-Work
Money Management workshops.
Since the start of Phong's participation in the WtW voucher program, he has completed his AS
degree in Electronics Assembly and now has a basic command of the English language. He is no
assembler longer receiving welfare assistance and is working full-time at Flextronics as an electronics
P6/(b)(6)
Phong hopes that he and his family will be able to purchase a new home within the next ten
years.
WORKING FAMILIES REAL PEOPLE
Welfare Reform
Success Stories
Rhonda Costa, Salomon Smith Barney
Rhonda Costa didn't dream much when she was on welfare. She spent her days trying to pay her
bills with a $280 a month welfare check and her nights shielding her two daughters from stray
gunfire in a one-bedroom apartment. Rhonda decided to change her life after her oldest
daughter, Lakiyah, told Rhonda to get up and do something with her life. "It really hit home
when your 11-year-old daughter recognizes that you are not doing anything productive with your
life," said Rhonda. The next day, Rhonda enrolled with Wildcat Service Corporation, a New
York service provider that trains welfare recipients for jobs. After a 16-week training course,
Rhonda was hired by Salomon Smith Barney. Rhonda was recently promoted to office manager
and now has an assistant of her own - a Wildcat graduate. Through Salomon Smith Barney's
tuition reimbursement program, Rhonda is taking a class at Borough of Manhattan Community
College for her business management degree. "It's great when you have a job where you're
excited to get out of bed in the morning," she said. (Introduced POTUS at WH in 5/9798; Update
is from WTW Partnership Summer 2000 Report)
"I want to thank Wildcat Services, Salomon Smith Barney and every business here, who has
given someone a chance to make a better life for themselves. I have made a better life for my
girls and myself. Just because a person was on welfare, doesn't mean that they can't get out and
work. They just need a chance and I'm living proof that it can be done.' (May 27, 1998)
LaTonya R. Stephens, Duncanville, TX
LaTonya Stephens was determined to reach her dreams when she and her two daughters -
Regina and Nakeisha - moved to Dallas three years ago to get a fresh start after living on public
assistance. Her path off welfare began with GED and computer training through the Dallas
Housing Authority, and entrance into a customized training program offered by Goodwill and
Bank of America to train people for jobs as Customer Service Representatives. LaTonya is now
a member of the top performing Call Center team at Bank of America and has won a national
award for her work performance (and a trip to Beverly Hills). With benefits like subsidized child
care, medical, 401(k), life insurance and stock options, LaTonya has purchased a car and is now
closing in on her biggest dream - a house with a backyard. Through the Bank's Associate Home
Ownership program, LaTonya has been working with a personal financial counselor, will take
advantage of an employee $5,000 principal-free loan, will qualify for a mortgage at a discounted
rate, and begin house hunting this summer. From homeless to homeowner in two years -
LaTonya Stephens. (Participated in POTUS WTW Town Hall in 8.99; Update is from WTW
Partnership Summer 2000 Report) [NOTE: Would need to call to get quote.]
Maria Mercado, Boston, MA
Maria Mercado never graduated from high school, but now, she can't stop thinking about
college. After spending nine years on welfare before landing a job with Marshalls, Maria has
started college funds for her two daughters Elixmarie, 11, and Maria Ellena, 7. "I want them tto
have the opportunity to follow their dreams," she said. For almost a decade, she dreamed of
getting off welfare. In the autumn of 1998, Maria entered The First Step Transition to Work
Program, which is a collaborative program between The TJX Companies, Inc. and Morgan
Memorial Goodwill Industries. The program led to an internship at Marshalls, where Maria
discovered her natural ability for retail. She was promoted from intern to full-time sales
associate to a merchandising lead sales position. Each accomplishment gave her more
confidence and inspired her to pursue additional responsibility. Maria is now training in TJX's
Bridges To Management program and is well on her way to becoming an Assistant Store
Manager. She is studying to earn her GED and hopes to pursue an accounting degree. "I learned
that nothing is impossible," said Maria. (Participated in POTUS WTW Town Hall in 8.99;
Update is from WTW Partnership Summer 2000 Report)
"I am very proud of myself that I had accomplished SO much in SO short time, and become a
dependable person. With the support of my two beautiful daughters, my family, Goodwill,
Marshalls, and the thanks from my bottom of my heart to TJX company. (August 3, 2000)
Business Stories:
United Airlines
Gerald Greenwald, Chairman Emeritus, United Airlines and Chairman of the Board, The
Welfare to Work Partnership
United Airlines is one of the five founding companies of the Welfare to Work Partnership and
expects to reach their goal of hiring 2,000 former welfare recipients before the end of the year.
United has used the Partnership as a tool to enhance morale and a better working environment
for all United employees, which has resulted in nearly doubling their retention rate. One
innovative step this company has taken to help former welfare to work employ esrecipients
transition into a -their new job at United is through a volunteer mentoring program with current
United employees. The mentors are there to be a friend, help with workplace questions, and to
offer encouragement. This foundation has contributed in the company's success in hiring and
retaining welfare to work employees.
United Parcel Service of America
James Kelly, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, UPS
UPS has been a leader in recruiting and hiring welfare recipients for the past 25 years and as one
of the five founding members of the Welfare to Work Partnership, UPS has become even more
involved in hiring welfare recipients and encouraging other companies to get involved since
1997. To date, UPS has hired 2535,000 [35,000 since 1997 per the info the Partnership just sent
me for recent POTUS letters to Rodney and Jim Kelly] welfare to work employees in 40
locations throughout the country including Atlanta, Camden, Chicago, Philadelphia and San
Diego. In the Philadelphia area, Rodney Carroll (formerly Operations Division Manager, UPS
and now, Chief Operating Executive Officer and President, The Welfare to Work Partnership)
and UPS helped to create a bus system with SEPTA (South Eastern Philadelphia Transit
Authority), that allowed Rodney to personally hire more than 700 people from welfare to work at
UPS. Transportation has been one of the major roadblocks in welfare to work success, and the
program he created, which started in 1996 with 4 buses and has grown today to a total of 54
buses, now moves thousands of people to their jobs daily.
Loews Hotels (Miami, FL)
Jonathan Tisch, Chief Executive Officer
A board member of the Welfare to Work Partnership since 1997, Jonathan Tisch leads a rapidly
expanding chain of 15 [still?] hotels and resorts. Loews empowers individuals and communities
by partnering with organizations to create jobs for and assist in the training of welfare recipients.
A prime example of this welfare to work effort is in Miami, where Loews and 44 other members
of the Greater Miami & the Beaches Hotel Association worked with Mayor Alex Penelas's
office, the local WAGES coalition, and service providers such as Lockheed Martin and America
Works, to meet the need for enthusiastic well-trained employees. To date, Loews has hired 40
[up to date?] responsible and qualified individuals from the welfare rolls into well-paying jobs
with growth opportunities in their new 800-room hotel in Miami Beach. The success of this
venture has inspired Loews to replicate this model at all of their new properties, while
maintaining a strong commitment to hire welfare recipients at pre-existing sites.
CVS Corporation
Tom Ryan, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President
Since the inception of CVS's involvement in welfare to work, the company has hired 3,788 [up
to date?] welfare recipients with a 60 percent retention rate, double the industry standard. With
active welfare to work programs throughout the eastern United States, CVS has an established
record of hiring harder-to-place welfare recipients, and has made internal promotion a company
policy. In the metropolitan D.C. area, CVS/Pharmacy and the District of Columbia
Apprenticeship Council have developed an apprenticeship program for Pharmacy Technicians.
This program has delivered quality employment and training opportunities.
Citigroup
Marjorie Magner, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer, The Global
Consumer, a division of Citigroup
Citigroup's welfare to work model is unique in that they have developed partnerships between
Salomon Smith Barney and Wildcat, a New York City-based service provider. The welfare to
work employees are trained at Wildcat to use the specific software and computer systems at
Salomon Smith Barney. Once this training is complete, the former welfare recipients are
prepared and qualified to work at Salomon Smith Barney, and it has proven such a success that
Citigroup is replicating this program at other Citigroup subsidiaries around the country and in
England. The retention rate for this Partnership is 90 percent.
Small Businesses:
Automated Data Sciences (Santa Monica, CA)
Rena Burns, President
Rena Burns, a 47-year-old, small business owner, runs an information technology/software
development firm which employs 50 people, and has been a winner of the Small Business
Administration's Regional Welfare to Work Entrepreneur Award. Although she did not set out
to hire welfare recipients, Burns experienced such success with one welfare to work employee
that she has now hired four welfare to work employees, and is using the local One-Stop Center as
a hiring source. She believes the small business environment is a good one for welfare to work
hires, as they are able to be more versatile in providing the personal attention, encouragement,
and coaching which she feels are key factors to the success of these new workers. Having been
on welfare as one of five children with a single mother, Rena works hard to provide others with
the chances she never had growing up. She also believes that as a business owner it is her
responsibility to give back to the community that supports her business.
Rachel's Bus Company, Inc.
E. Rachel Hubka, Owner and Chief Executive Officer
Rachel's Bus Company, Inc. is a contract carrier for Chicago Public Schools. Rachel is a former
welfare recipient who firmly believes that small businesses like hers should make a personal
commitment to hire qualified welfare recipients and help them maintain their employment.
Approximately 40 percent of her 150 employees have come from a welfare background. Ms.
Hubka thinks that the welfare to work program has provided her with motivated workers, and "In
return, I have been able to help my employees improve their self-esteem and gain hope for
themselves and their children's futures. Because our future depends on continuing to hire from
the welfare rolls, my commitment is to hire and train as many qualified individuals as are
available."
General Converters and Assemblers, Inc.
George Stinson, Chairman of the Board, GCA
General Converters and Assemblers, Inc. is a contract packaging and manufacturing company
located in Racine, Wisconsin. George Stinson has been hiring former welfare recipients for
more than thirty years, and today more than half of his employees were once welfare
beneficiaries. Mr. Stinson claims that, "Welfare to work has been crucial to GCA's expansion
over the last thirty years. We are living proof that you can help your community and improve
your bottom line at the same time." Mr. Stinson has also been active in recruiting and educating
other companies about the Welfare to Work Partnership and has partnered with local
organizations, such as the Workforce Investment Board and the One Stop Job Center, to provide
job-specific training and personal mentors for welfare to work employees.
Earned Income Tax Credit Expansion
Jessica Cupp, of Thurmont, MD, is a married mother of 2-year-old triplet girls. Her husband,
Tommy Cupp, has been working for B&J Insulators in Frederick, MD for three years. In
September 1997, Jessica and Tommy quickly went from a 2 person, 2 income earner family to a
5 person, 1 income earner family. The Cupp triplets were born 26 weeks into Jessica's
pregnancy at very low birth weights and with several medical problems. Jessica was forced to
stop her work at a childcare center in order to care for her own three children. In bothFor -1997
and 1998through 1999, the Cupp family applied for and received an-Earned Income Tax Credit
refunds as well as a child tax credits that they would not have received had it not been for the
1993 EITC expansion and the new child tax credit promoted by this Administration. -This
money has enabled the family to pay off debt accrued when the triplets were born, to move into a
home more suited for raising 3 children, to trade in their 2-door vehicle for a van, and has
allowed Jessica to stay home and care for their three growing daughters.
"With the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit we were able to pay off our debts,
SO we could afford the mortgage payments to buy a home and we bought a used van that we fixed
Withdrawal/Redaction Marker
Clinton Library
DOCUMENT NO.
SUBJECT/TITLE
DATE
RESTRICTION
AND TYPE
003. paper
Working Families Real People; RE: phone number/personal info
n.d.
P6/b(6)
[partial] (2 pages)
COLLECTION:
Clinton Presidential Records
Domestic Policy Council
Anna Richter
OA/Box Number: 23737
FOLDER TITLE:
Legacy Documents and Drafts [binder] [3]
2011-0638-S
ms 153
RESTRICTION CODES
Presidential Records Act - [44 U.S.C. 2204(a)|
Freedom of Information Act - [5 U.S.C. 552(b)]
P1 National Security Classified Information |(a)(1) of the PRA]
b(1) National security classified information [(b)(1) of the FOIA]
P2 Relating to the appointment to Federal office |(a)(2) of the PRAJ
b(2) Release would disclose internal personnel rules and practices of
P3 Release would violate a Federal statute [(a)(3) of the PRA]
an agency |(b)(2) of the FOIA]
P4 Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential commercial or
b(3) Release would violate a Federal statute |(b)(3) of the FOIA]
financial information |(a)(4) of the PRA]
b(4) Release would disclose trade secrets or confidential or financial
P5 Release would disclose confidential advice between the President
information [(b)(4) of the FOIA]
and his advisors, or between such advisors |a)(5) of the PRA]
b(6) Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
P6 Release would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy [(b)(6) of the FOIA)
personal privacy |(a)(6) of the PRAJ
b(7) Release would disclose information compiled for law enforcement
purposes [(b)(7) of the FOIA]
C. Closed in accordance with restrictions contained in donor's deed
b(8) Release would disclose information concerning the regulation of
of gift.
financial institutions [(b)(8) of the FOIA]
PRM. Personal record misfile defined in accordance with 44 U.S.C.
b(9) Release would disclose geological or geophysical information
2201(3).
concerning wells [(b)(9) of the FOIA]
RR. Document will be reviewed upon request.
[003]
up. The EITC was worth a mortgage payment for (1 month. That was a boost that my husband
and / really appreciated. It kind of rewarded the hard work he put in, just when we really
needed it. " (January 12, 2000)
[NOTE: This family was featured at an event to highlight a FY2001 budget proposal to expand
the EITC for families with 3 children, which we did not get this year. They benefited from ETTC
in 1997 and 1998, but as of the event were no longer eligible because of an increase in income.]
Fatherhood
Carlos Rosas, of St. Paul, MN, is a 33 year old father from St. Paul, Minnesota, who enrolled in a
fathers' employment and training program in October 1996 when he was not earning enough
money to keep up with his child support obligation for his son, Ricardo, who is now 13 years
old. At that time, Ricardo's mother was receiving welfare. During his time with the program
operated by the Ramsey County Child Support office, Carlos worked hard to upgrade his skills
and increase his earning power SO he could meet his child support responsibilities, save money to
send Ricardo to college, and improve his own future. In January 1999, when he introduced the
President at an event on responsible fatherhood and Welfare-to-Work, Carlos was balancing a
full time job as a head maintenance worker with finishing his degree at a two-year Electronics
Technology/Computer Sciences program. In May 1999, Carlos graduated from St. Paul
Technical College and-started a full-time job as an In-Shop Technician at Stringer Business
Systems. In January 2000, he was invited to join the First Lady in viewing the President's State
of the Union Address. In July 2000, Carlos was recommended to and hired by Check
Technology Corporation as a Systems Technician, and he received a significant raise and great
benefits.
P6/(b)(6)
"With the help of this [fatherhood] program 1 am proud to say that / am on my way to a
rewarding career in électronics technology and computer science, and am again paying my child
support regularly. / know that Ricardo is proud of me. and I am glad that I can be a good role
model for him. I want to thank the President for supporting fathers and programs for fathers
like the one I am involved in. (January 25, 1999)
Could get quotes/statments from the following people:
Joe Jones, President
The Center for Fathers, Families & Workforce Development (CFWD)
Baltimore, MD
410-367-42465691
Joe Jones is a nationally recognized leader in promoting responsible fatherhood, especially
among low-income fathers or 'dead broke dads'. He has played a key role in contributing to the
development of the Administration's policy on responsible fatherhood, including participating in
the 1994 Family Reunion Conference that Al and Tipper Gore held on involving men in their
children's lives that is widely hailed as a pivotal point in the development of the fatherhood
movement. At the same time, he has implemented a successful local program in Baltimore. Joe
was raised by a single mother in a Baltimore housing project, and got involved in drugs as a
[003]
teenager. He eventually shed his addictions after he entered a rehabilitation program, and then
decided to enter the social services field to help others who faced similar challenges. In 1993, he
worked with the Baltimore human services agency to found the Men's Services component of
Baltimore's federally-funded Healthy Start Program. Today, the Center for Fathers, Families and
Workforce Development that he started has served more than 700 fathers, providing
employment, parenting classes, helping fathers meet their child support obligations, and offering
other critical services including domestic violence counseling.
P6/(b)(6)
Transportation
KK: since you don't have similar context for other people, you may not need this at all, but if
you do leave it in, I'd revise/update as follows
On February 2223, 2000 the President announced several new initiatives to help low-income
families get on the road to work and opportunity by making it easier for them to own a car or
obtain public transportationa new regulation that enabled 150.000 individuals to own a reliable
car without losing eligibility for food stamps. He also called on Congress to enact three
legislative proposals in his FY20001 budget that will: 1) Since then, FY 2001 appropriations
bills signed by the President will enable 245,000 more families-people to own a car and still get
food stamps by allowing states to use the more generous rules already put in place for their
welfare reform programs and will provide $100;2) double funding to $150-million for Access to
Jobs grants to support innovative, locally-designed transportation solutions. And, a final Food
Stamp regulation announced by the President on November 18th will allow over 100,000 more
low-income individuals to own a reliable car without losing food stamp eligibility; and 3) allow
low income families to use Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) to save for a car.
Michael Alexander, from Brockton, NY, is a 24-year-old single father of two children. Mr.
Alexander is working hard to find jobs to support his family, but because he resides in an area
with very limited public transportation and he did not own a car, it was very difficult for him to
maintain steady employment.
P6/(b)(6)
Through the help of a [federally funded2Jfederally-funded, MW, you checked this with Irene,
right? -county run program, EARNA CAR, Mr. Alexander was recently able to purchase a used
vehicle. He attended classes about car maintenance, helped repair a donated car, and with the
help of a local bank worked out a manageable loan payment. Now he is working part-time at
Dunn Tire and attending classes in computer repair at a local community college. He is in the
process of moving into full-time employment, SO he can fully support his children and leave
public assistance [does this reflect updates you just got?]. Without this car, it would be
extremely difficult for him to balance his responsibilities at home with his current work and
school schedule, much less pursue the full-time employment that would make him completely
self-sufficient. [Introduced POTUS at 2/23/00 event - see above]
"Because of my new, reliable car, I now will be able to get to and maintain a full-time job I
know that this car will be very helpful in reaching my goal of leaving public assistance and
supporting my family on my own... I am glad the President understands how important it is for
people like me to have reliable transportation as they are working to support their families. "
(February 232, 2000)
Tiffany Smith, Philadelphia, PA
UPS
[WTW Partnership to find out if area received federal funds to improve transportation system]
Julie T. Bosland
11/14/2000 10:32:40 AM
Record Type:
Record
To:
Karin Kullman/OPD/EOP@EOP Anna Richter/OPD/EOP@EOP
CC:
Subject: Fatherhood contacts
Joe Jones, President
The Center for Fathers, Families & Workforce Development (CFWD)
Baltimore, MD
410-367-4246
Jeff Johnson, President/CEO
National Center for Strategic Nonprofit Planning and Community Leadership
Washington, D.C.
202-822-6725
Preston Garrison, Executive Director
National Practitioners Network for Fathers and Families
Washington, D.C.
202-737-6683
Welfare to work - - Businesses & People - Dorian calling KK today
Childsupport:
Center for Law & Social Policy (CLASP)
3285140
JerriJensen X
1
Fatherhood:
JoeJones- Role of fathers emphasized
Carlos-
Families quote in that
Lexis
Thansportations:
Food stamps
"98 , slater WHEVENA
AccesstoJobs
July 14 1999
TANF Flexibility
Michael
Lexts Teen Pregnancy:
Brandy- - VPOTUS / POTUS (Events
Campaign-
-
Tobacco:
Campaign
Lexis Housing:
- Validators
Page 3
1ST DOCUMENT of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Public Papers of the Presidents
May 20, 1997
CITE: 33 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 744
LENGTH: 2633 words
HEADLINE: Remarks Launching the Welfare to Work Partnership
BODY:
Thank you, George Stinson, for your wonderful introduction, your remarks, and
most importantly, for your very, very powerful example. I thank the Governors,
Tom Carper and Tommy Thompson, my former colleagues and friends, for being here
and for the power of their example. I thank the Members of Congress, and most of
all, I thank all the business leaders who are here, Gerry Greenwald and the
leaders of the other companies that were with us when we just had 5, and all of
you who are part of our first 105 thank you all.
And I want to say a special word of thanks to my friend Eli Segal. He'd be a
lot richer man if he'd never met me. [Laughter] I have but I have made him
America's reigning expert in public startups. [Laughter] He is truly the father
of AmeriCorps, the national service program that I love. And I can say, as I've
been around the country now for nearly 4 1/2 years, more people have come up to
me and said of AmeriCorps, that changed my life for the better than anything I
have done as President, except now this will be more numerous.
Because now you know, Eli and I were just sitting around talking one day,
and he said, "Now, what can I do for you now?" And I said, "Well, we passed this
welfare reform law," and I said, "I really believe in it, but I mean, you know,
there's no way in the world we're going to get there. We've got the deficit,
we've got to balance the budget, and we can't possibly meet the hiring targets
of the welfare reform law unless we can organize the private sector and maximize
in every State all the options to give people incentives to hire people in the
private sector to move people from welfare to work. Oh, we can get a little
money to put into the very high unemployment areas for the community service
jobs and Congress has agreed to do that, but we've got to have the private
sector." And he said, "We can do that." Then he found Gerry and the other first
4 that were here, who are here in the audience, and then there were 100, and
soon there will be 1,000. And I thank you all very much.
I would like to talk about this today, a little bit, from my perspective as
President, but first let me say that I respect the fact that those of you who
come here, come here as Americans. You come here primarily as business people.
Some of you are Republicans; some of you are Democrats; some of you probably
wish you had never met a politician. [Laughter] But you all recognize that this
is not a partisan issue, that it is a moral obligation for our country. It is
America's business, and therefore, it must be the work of American business.
How did we get this goal of moving a million people from welfare to work by
the year 2000? How did you get here, to make a difference, as you can, as you
saw from the young women who have been introduced here, to help people to move
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Public Papers of the Presidents
from a lifetime of dependence to one of independence, to move from burdening
their children with a legacy of despair to leaving their children with an
inheritance of hope? Well, it all goes back to the effort we have made now as
a nation. Some of us, as you heard the Governors talking, have been involved
with this welfare reform issue a long time.
But when I became President, I was convinced that we had to change both the
economic policy and the social policy of the country if we wanted America to
work again for everyone; that we had to do something to get the deficit down and
expand trade and, at the same time, invest more money in education and science
and technology and research and the things that would grow the economy; but that
we had to prove that America could work again in a fundamental human way. So we
had to deal with crime. We had to deal with our great diversity and get people
to come together across the lines that divide us and a stronger community. We
had to deal with the conflicts people feel with family and work, that working
people are having trouble raising their kids too and meeting their obligations
at work.
And a big part of this mosaic was to change the culture of dependency that
had arisen around our welfare system. There was lots of evidence that nobody
really liked the welfare system very much, especially the people that were on
it. There was also, frankly, a lot of evidence that, for about half the people
that were on it, it worked reasonably well, just because, for those people,
you'd have to practically throw them up against a wall to stop them from doing
all right in life people that hit a rough patch in life, and they'd be on
public assistance and they'd go on. But increasingly, to the point where we
wound up with slightly more. than half of people on welfare were long-term
dependents who felt literally unable to come back into the mainstream of
American life.
Well, we've seen a lot of progress in the last few years, and a lot of it's
been helped by the fact that we've got the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years,
and for the first time ever, our economy produced about 12 million jobs in a 4
year administration period. In that time, the welfare rolls had their biggest
reduction ever in that short a period of time. And SO I began to think, well,
maybe we can make the welfare reform targets. And then I realized I asked the
Council of Economic Advisers to study this, and I said "How much of this welfare
decline is due to the economy doing better, and how much of it is due to the
fact that most States now are really working hard on welfare reform with us?
They've gotten waivers from the Federal Government to get out from under rules
and regulations and move people to work."
And the study indicated that about 40 percent a little more of the
people moved from welfare to work because the economy got better and just the
labor markets got tighter. About over a third, more or less, got there because
most States were aggressively working with us either statewide or in parts of
their States on welfare reform, and about a quarter got there for some other
reason. But one of the reasons was that child support collections were increased
by 50 percent in the last 4 years.
So then we said, "Okay, let's change. Let's go another step. Let's tell
people that if they're able-bodied, they can only have 5 years of welfare over
the course of a lifetime and no more than 2 years at one time, and let's give
the States responsibility and the power and the money to design State by State a
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Public Papers of the Presidents
welfare reform system that will work and, in effect, will have to be designed
community by community." That was the import of the welfare reform law. And in
that law, as the Congressman here will tell you, they set up very strict
targets. But essentially, about 40 percent of the population has to be fully
into this law over the next 4 years. That's how we got to this burden you're
undertaking, because I want all of you who signed on to understand what is at
stake here.
Now, what that means, bottom line, is that we have to move about another
900,000 to one million people in the work force in the next 4 years to meet the
requirements of the law, which will move about 2.5 million people off welfare,
because the average welfare family is about 2.5, 2.6 million, something like
that.
Now, if we produce another 12 million jobs, we'll get close anyway. But it
would be the first time in history that we ever did it 8 years in a row, since
we've only done it once 4 years in a row, and we just came out of that. Maybe we
can do it. And I'd be the last to say we couldn't. But even if we did that
here's the point I want to make even if we did that, if we don't have people
like this man and like all of you, the people who would come off would be those
who might make it off under any circumstances. And what we are trying to do
here, the import of the reform welfare law, was to change, challenge, and end
the culture of poverty, which means you have to find people who don't think they
can make it, who have no idea what a resume is, who never had to show up on time
before.
There are people in this audience today have helped find people like that
before, and I wish all of you who have actually hired people from welfare to
work were up here speaking today. But what this is about is saying that we are
going to go beyond what the normal economy would produce; we're going to make an
extra effort. And the Government will do its part, but it has to be led by the
private sector.
Now, in April, the Vice President and I announced that we would hire at least
10,000 welfare recipients in the next 4 years without replacing anybody, just
through job turnover, in an area where we will expand employment, which I think
is a pretty good thing in a Federal Government that's 300,000 people smaller
than it was 4 years ago when I took office. We'll do 10,000. And with the help
of Secretary Slater and some of our other Cabinet Secretaries, we're going to
work with our private contractors, the people that do direct business with us,
to hire 10,000 more. And we believe we can do that.
When we reached the budget agreement historic budget agreement with the
leaders of Congress to balance the budget, it not only will give us the first
balanced budget in almost 30 years, it contains the elements that we agree
jointly should be a part of our contribution to your welfare reform effort. So
let me mention them.
First, it provides, as I said earlier, $ 3 billion to help cities and States
to create jobs and subsidize jobs, either community service jobs or subsidized
private sector jobs. That money will be targeted to very high unemployment areas
where you cannot reasonably expect any effort to deal with the time deadlines.
Second, it encourages employers to hire and retain welfare recipients by
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Public Papers of the Presidents
giving a 50 percent tax credit over 2 years for up to $ 10,000 in wages for
every long-term welfare recipient hired that does not displace someone else.
Now, these two things will help. But in addition to that, we have other big
problems. One of the biggest problems that we think we need to get more help
on is transportation. You heard Governor Carper talking about child care.
There's $ 4 billion more in the welfare reform bill for child care. But there
was a study that came out of Georgia recently which said that of the entry-level
jobs in the inner city in fast food establishments, for example, something like,
I don't know, 80 percent of the jobs were held by people who were low-income
adults. In the suburbs, just a little more than half of those jobs were held by
people who were low-income adults. The transportation barrier kept them from
maximizing their ability to move from dependence to independence.
So since two out of three new jobs are created in the suburbs and a
significant percentage of people on welfare live in urban centers, it is very
important that we do more on that. Today, we're awarding seed grants to 24
States to develop transportation schemes to help people go and get the jobs
where the jobs are. And the legislation that we proposed in the new
transportation bill would provide $ 600 million to help States and local
communities put these plans into action. It also was approved in the budget
agreement, SO that's a very, very good thing.
And let me just say one other thing since we've got two very innovative
Governors here, and Governor Thompson, you've seen, they've had a huge drop in
Wisconsin and a sizeable drop in Delaware. If you look around the country,
there's still a lot of unevenness in how much the welfare rolls have dropped.
Part of it is due to underlying economic conditions. But part of it is due to
how comprehensive the efforts are.
One of the things that I think is important is that the States really do get
together and steal the best ideas from each other. You should know that among
other things, the States now have the power under this new law to take what was
the welfare check and give all or part of it to an employer for a period of time
as an employment or training subsidy. And a lot of States are doing that as
well. There are lots of options out there.
So I want to say to all of you who are part of this first hundred, you have
to work with the Governors and with the State legislators, too, and with the
mayors and the community-based operators. We've got to have a system here that's
community-based.
Finally, let me say that if you look at the numbers, a million people sounds
like a huge amount over 4 years, but in an American economy that has well over
100 million people in the work force, that produced 12 million new jobs in the
last 4 years, with these extra incentives around the edges, with committed
private sector employers, small, medium, and large businesses, this is not a
problem. This is a startup enterprise that can be stunningly successful. But as
far as I know, there is no exact precedent for it in our history. There has
never been anything quite like this, and this is something we're trying to do
together. I will do my best to do my part, but I thank all of you from the
bottom of my heart, starting with Eli and Gerry and encompassing all of you, for
doing your part.
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Public Papers of the Presidents
You know, I've tried to learn about what a lot of you are doing. And Mr.
Marriott here has this Pathways to Independence program that supports the
transition from welfare to work. I've seen that. Then I meet a man with a small
business, and more than half his employees are people who were on welfare. We
were in Kansas City not very long ago, and I met a man who stores data for the
Federal Government, way out in Kansas City - - that's what computers do for you
these days -- and he had 25 people in his business, in this data storage
business, and 5 of them were people that he had hired from the welfare rolls.
Every time he expands now, he tries to hire somebody from welfare.
I know we can do this. I just want to say to you, when you leave here today I
want you to imagine what it is you would like your country to look like when we
enter the 21st century. There will always be people who, for one reason or
another, are out of work. There will always be people who, for one reason or
another, have a rough spot in life. And as long as we're a nation of immigrants,
there will always be people who start out below whatever the Federally
established poverty line is. But we do not have to have a country with an
intolerable crime rate, with an intolerable failure rate among young people in
poverty and addiction and violence. And we do not have to have a country with a
permanent culture of dependence. We do not have to have that.
We just had this service summit in Philadelphia where we said, "We're all
going to get together, without regard to party, try to give every child in
America five things, a healthy start in life, a safe place to grow up, a decent
education, a mentor with a caring adult, and a chance to serve and give
something back, no matter how modest the child's resources are."
I'll tell you, we could do more to get that done by liberating their parents
from the culture of dependence than anything else. You are making the America we
ought to have for the 21st century. And I hope when you leave here today, you'll
be even more dedicated to it because the future of our children is riding on it.
Thank you, and God bless you.
NOTE: The President spoke at 2:50 p.m. in the East Room at the White House.
In his remarks, he referred to George R. Stinson, chairman and president,
General Converters and Assemblers, Inc.; Gov. Tom Carper of Delaware; Gov. Tommy
G. Thompson of Wisconsin; Gerald Greenwald, chief executive officer, United
Airlines; Eli Segal, president, Welfare to Work Partnership; J. W. Marriott,
Jr., chairman, president, and chief executive officer, Marriott International,
Inc.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: August 14, 1997
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
August 22, 1996
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT THE SIGNING OF THE
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND
WORK OPPORTUNITY RECONCILIATION ACT
The Rose Garden
11:15 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Lillie, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Vice President, to the members of the
Cabinet. All of the members of Congress who are here, thank you very
much.
I'd like to say to Congressman Castle, I'm especially glad
to see you here, because eight years ago about this time when you were
the Governor of Delaware and Governor Carper was the Congressman from
Delaware, you and I were together at a signing like this.
Thank you, Senator Long, for coming here. Thank you,
Governors Romer, Carper, Miller and Caperton.
I'd also like to thank Penelope Howard and Janet Ferrel for
coming here. They, too, have worked their way from welfare to
independence and we're honored to have them here. I'd like to thank all
of the people who worked on this bill who have been introduced from our
staff and Cabinet, but I'd also like to especially thank Bruce Reed, who
did a lot to do with working on the final compromises of this bill; I
thank him.
Lillie Harden was up there talking, and 1 want to tell you
how she happens to be here today. Ten years ago, Governor Castle and I
were asked to cochair a Governors Task Force on Welfare Reform, and we
were asked together on it, and when we met at Hilton Head in South
Carolina, we had a little panel. And 41 governors showed up to listen
to people who were on welfare from several states.
So I asked Carol Rasco to find me somebody from our state
who had been in one of our welfare reform programs and had gone to work.
She found Lillie Harden and Lillie showed up at the program. And I was
conducting this meeting and I committed a mistake that they always tell
lawyers never to do: never ask a question you do not know the answer
to. (Laughter.)
But she was doing so well talking about it, as you saw how
well-spoken she was today -- and I said, "Lillie, what's the best thing
about being off welfare?" And she looked me straight in the eye and
said, "When my boy goes to school and they say what does your mama do
for a living, he can give an answer." I have never forgotten that.
(Applause.) And when I saw the success of all of her children and the
success that she's had in the past 10 years, I can tell you, you've had
a bigger impact on me than I've had on you. And I thank you for the
power of your example, for your family's. And for all of America, thank
you very much. (Applause.)
What we are trying to do today is to overcome the flaws of
the welfare system for the people who are trapped on it. We all know
that the typical family on welfare today is very different from the one
that welfare was designed to deal with 60 years ago. We all know that
there are a lot of good people on welfare who just get off of it in the
ordinary course of business, but that a significant number of people are
trapped on welfare for a very long time, exiling them from the entire
community of work that gives structure to our lives.
Nearly 30 years ago, Robert Kennedy said, "Work is the
meaning of what this country is all about. We need it as individuals,
we need to sense it in our fellow citizens, and we need it as a society
and as a people." He was right then, and it's right now.
From now on, our nation's answer to this great social
challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare, it will be
the dignity, the power and the ethic of work. Today, we are taking an
historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second
chance, not a way of life.
The bill I'm about to sign, as I have said many times, is
far from perfect, but it has come a very long way. Congress sent me two
previous bills that I strongly believe failed to protect our children
and did too little to move people from welfare to work. I vetoed both
of them. This bill had broad bipartisan support and is much, much
better on both counts.
The new bill restores America's basic bargain of providing
opportunity and demanding in return responsibility. It provides $14
billion for child care, $4 billion more than the present law does. It
is good because without the assurance of child care it's all but
impossible for a mother with young children to go to work. It requires
states to maintain their own spending on welfare reform and gives them
powerful performance incentives to place more people on welfare in jobs.
It gives states the capacity to create jobs by taking money now used for
welfare checks and giving it to employers as subsidies as incentives to
hire people. This bill will help people to go to work SO they can stop
drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck.
It's also better for children. It preserves the national
safety net of food stamps and school lunches. It drops the deep cuts
and the devastating changes in child protection, adoption, and help for
disabled children. It preserves the national guarantee of health care
for poor children, the disabled, the elderly, and people on welfare --
the most important preservation of all.
It includes the tough child support enforcement measures
that, as far as I know, every member of Congress and everybody in the
administration and every thinking person in the country has supported
for more than two years.
It's the most sweeping crackdown on deadbeat parents in
history. We have succeeded in increasing child support collection 40
percent, but over a third of the cases where there's delinquencies,
involve who cross state lines. For a lot of women and children, the
only reason they're on welfare today -- the only reason -- is that the
father up and walked away when he could have made a contribution to the
welfare of the children. That is wrong. If every parent paid the child
support that he or she owes legally today, we could move 800,000 women
and children off welfare immediately.
With this bill we say, if you don't pay the child support
you owe we'll garnish your wages, take away your driver's license, track
you across state lines; if necessary, make you work off what you pay --
what you owe. It is a good thing and it will help dramatically to
reduce welfare, increase independence, and reenforce parental
responsibility. (Applause.)
As the Vice President said, we strongly disagree with a
couple of provisions of this bill. We believe that the nutritional cuts
are too deep, especially as they affect low-income working people and
children. We should not be punishing people who are working for a
living already; we should do everything we can to lift them up and keep
them at work and help them to support their children. We also believe
that the congressional leadership insisted in cuts in programs for legal
immigrants that are far too deep.
These cuts, however, have nothing to do with the
fundamental purpose of welfare reform. I signed this bill because this
is an historic chance -- where Republicans and Democrats got together
and said, we're going to take this historic chance to try to recreate
the nation's social bargain with the poor. We're going to try to change
the parameters of the debate. We're going to make it all new again and
see if we can't create a system of incentives which reenforce work and
family and independence.
We can change what is wrong. We should not have passed
this historic opportunity to do what is right. And so I want to ask all
of you, without regard to party, to think through the implications of
these other non-welfare issues on the American people and let's work
together in good spirits and good faith to remedy what is wrong. We can
balance the budget without these cuts, but let's not obscure the
fundamental purpose of the welfare provisions of this legislation which
are good and solid, and which can give us at least the chance to end the
terrible, almost physical isolation of huge numbers of poor people and
their children from the rest of mainstream America. We have to do that.
(Applause.)
Let me also say that there's something really good about
this legislation. When I sign it we all have to start again. And this
becomes everybody's responsibility. After I sign my name to this bill,
welfare will no longer be a political issue. The two parties cannot
attack each other over it. Politicians cannot attack poor people over
it. There are no encrusted habits, systems and failures that can be
laid at the foot of someone else. We have to begin again. This is not
the end of welfare reform, this is the beginning. And we have to all
assume responsibility. (Applause.)
Now that we are saying with this bill we expect work, we
have to make sure the people have a chance to go to work. If we really
value work, everybody in this society -- businesses, non-profits,
religious institutions, individuals, those in government -- all have a
responsibility to make sure the jobs are there.
These three women have great stories. Almost everybody on
welfare would like to have a story like that. And the rest of us now
have a responsibility to give them that story. We cannot blame the
system for the jobs they don't have anymore. If it doesn't work now,
it's everybody's fault -- mine, yours, and everybody else. There is no
longer a system in the way. (Applause.)
I've worked hard over the past four years to create jobs
and to steer investment into places where there are large numbers of
people on welfare because there's been no economic recovery. That's
what the empowerment zone program was all about. That's what the
community development bank initiative was all about. That's what our
urban Brownfield cleanup initiative was all about -- trying to give
people the means to make a living in areas that had been left behind.
I think we have to do more here in Washington to do that,
and I'll have more to say about that later. But let me say again, we
have to build a new work and family system. And this is everybody's
responsibility now. The people on welfare are people just like these
three people we honor here today and their families. They are human
beings. And we owe it to all of them to give them a chance to come
back.
I talked the other day when the Vice President and I went
down to Tennessee and we were working with Congressman Tanner's
district, we were working on a church that had burned. And there was a
pastor there from a church in North Carolina that brought a group of his
people in to work. And he started asking me about welfare reform, and I
started telling him about it. And I said, "You know what you ought to
do? You ought to go tell Governor Hunt that you would hire somebody on
welfare to work in your church if he would give you the welfare check as
a wage supplement, you'd double their pay and you'd keep them employed
for a year or so and see if you couldn't train them and help their
families and see if their kids were all right." I said, "Would you do
that?" He said, "In a heartbeat."
I think there are people all over America like that.
(Applause.) I think there are people all over America like that.
That's what I want all of you to be thinking about today -- what are we
going to do now? This is not over, this is just beginning. The
Congress deserves our thanks for creating a new reality, but we have to
fill in the blanks. The governors asked for this responsibility; now
they've got to live up to it. There are mayors that have
responsibilities, county officials that have responsibilities. Every
employer in this country that ever made a disparaging remark about the
welfare system needs to think about whether he or she should now hire
somebody from welfare and go to work. Go to the state and say, okay,
you give me the check, I'll use it as an income supplement, I'll train
these people, I'll help them to start their lives and we'll go forward
from here.
Every single person needs to be thinking -- every person in
America tonight who sees a report of this who has ever said a
disparaging word about the welfare system should now say, "Okay, that's
gone. What is my responsibility to make it better?" (Applause.)
Two days ago we signed a bill increasing the minimum wage
here and making it easier for people in small businesses to get and keep
pensions. Yesterday we signed the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill which makes
health care more available to up to 25 million Americans, many of them
in lower-income jobs where they're more vulnerable.
The bill I'm signing today preserves the increases in the
earned income tax credit for working families. It is now clearly better
to go to work than to stay on welfare -- clearly better. Because of
actions taken by the Congress in this session, it is clearly better.
And what we have to do now is to make that work a reality.
I've said this many times, but, you know, most American
families find that the greatest challenge of their lives is how to do a
good job raising their kids and do a good job at work. Trying to
balance work and family is the challenge that most Americans in the
workplace face. Thankfully, that's the challenge Lillie Harden's had to
face for the last 10 years. That's just what we want for everybody. We
want at least the chance to strike the right balance for everybody.
Today, we are ending welfare as we know it. But I hope
this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began
-- a new day that offers hope, honors responsibility, rewards work, and
changes the terms of the debate so that no one in America ever feels
again the need to criticize people who are poor on welfare, but instead
feels the responsibility to reach out to men and women and children who
are isolated, who need opportunity, and who are willing to assume
responsibility, and give them to opportunity and the terms of
responsibility. (Applause.)
Now, I'd like to ask Penelope Howard, Janet Ferrel, Lillie
Harden, the governors and the members of Congress from both parties who
are here to come up and join me as I sign the welfare reform bill.
Q Mr. President, before you sign the bill, can you tell us
whether you think it's right to regulate tobacco or nicotine as a drug?
THE PRESIDENT: You know, Wolf, under the law, I have to
wait until the OMB makes a recommendation to me. I think we have to
anticipate things. I can't say more than that right now.
(The bill is signed.)
Q Mr. President, some of your core constituencies are
furious with you for signing this bill. What do you say to them?
THE PRESIDENT: Just what I said up there. We saved
medical care. We saved food stamps. We saved child care. We saved the
aid to disabled children. We saved the school lunch program. We saved
the framework of support. What we did was to tell the state, now you
have to create a system to give everyone a chance to go to work who is
able-bodied, give everyone a chance to be independent. And we did --
that is the right thing to do.
And now, welfare is no longer a political football to be
kicked around. It's a personal responsibility of every American who
ever criticized the welfare system to help the poor people now to move
from welfare to work. That's what I say.
This is going to be a good thing for the country. We're
going to monitor it and we're going to fix whatever is wrong with it.
Q What guarantees are there that these things will be
fixed, Mr. President, especially if Republicans remain in control of
Congress?
THE PRESIDENT: That's what we have elections for.
END
11:33 A.M. EDT
Karin Kullman
11/13/2000 04:43:37 PM
Record Type:
Record
To:
Anna Richter/OPD/EOP@EOP
CC:
Subject: Quotes/stories for legacy doc
fyi
Forwarded by Karin Kullman/OPD/EOP on 11/13/2000 04:43 PM
Margy Waller
11/13/2000 04:39:22 PM
Record Type:
Record
To:
Karin Kullman/OPD/EOP@EOP
CC:
Julie T. Bosland/OPD/EOP
Subject: Quotes/stories for legacy doc
I'm not aware of 'real people' we already know for stories on food stamps or housing. The Center on
Budget could be or find a validator on FS. Barbara Sard from the Center or Sheila Crowley from The
National Low Income Housing Coalition could be a validator on housing.
Others who managed these issues before me might recall stories. Do you want us to check with Eric,
Paul, etc?
Forwarded by Margy Waller/OPD/EOP on 11/13/2000 04:36 PM
Julie T. Bosland
11/13/2000 04:07:30 PM
Record Type:
Record
To:
Karin Kullman/OPD/EOP@EOP
CC:
Margy Waller/OPD/EOP@EOP
Subject: Quotes/stories for legacy doc
Karin:
Okay, Andrea suggested the following:
Welfare to work:
Dorian calling KK 11/14
WTW Partnership report (real person)
WTW Partnership business (validator quote)
Child Support:
woman with twins who participated in the signing of the Deadbeat Dads Punishment Act; - Lookup -
spring/summer 1998, signing in the Oval Office (real person)
Vicki Turetsky, CLASP (validator quote) - Centertor Law Andsocial Policy
possibly Jerri Jensen from ACES for validator quote
X
Fatherhood:
Carlos Rosas (sp?) [she said you'd know who this was] (real person)
Joe Jones (or Jeff Johnson) (validator quote)
Transportation:
Michael (not sure of last name) from February transportation event (real person) may 99
Food Stamps:
Real person or validator?? (checking with Margy)
Housing:
Real person?? (checking with Margy)
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (validator quote)
Good PHA?? (we could probably track something down)
Teen Pregnancy:
Brandy (not sure of last name); did several events with VPOTUS and FLOTUS (real person)
Someone from Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (validator quote)
Feel free to page her if you want to discuss further
DRAFT
President Clinton's Legacy: Strengthening American Families
In 1992, the economy was stagnant and middle class families were working longer for less money.
Parents juggled responsibilities and tried to balance work and family, but found they were getting no
help from their government. Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act to allow parents to
take unpaid leave to care for a child or a sick relative only to see President Bush veto the
legislation twice. At the same time, welfare rolls were growing and Americans knew the system had
to be changed. Polls showed that 75 percent of Americans agreed with raising the minimum wage in
order to make work more attractive than welfare, and 86 percent thought that the system needed to
be reformed.
Improving the Lives of America's Working Families
President Clinton was elected with a commitment to put people first. From the first day on the job,
he worked to improve the lives of all Americans and to give Americans the opportunities they
needed to build strong families and a better future. He fought to reform the welfare system fairly,
and enacted new measures to make work pay and to help parents balance work and family.
Transformed the welfare system to one that moves Americans from welfare to work, but refused
to do so in a way that punished children. President Clinton rejected two punitive welfare reform
bills before signing the bipartisan 1996 Personal Responsibility Act, which removed barriers that
keep people trapped in the welfare system and provided incentives like job training, expanded
child care and increased child support enforcement to help them go to work.
Helped families succeed on the job and at home by enacting the Family and Medical Leave Act -
- the first law President Clinton signed in 1993. President Clinton won other important victories
for children and families including signing a $500 child tax credit, a $1 per hour increase in the
minimum wage, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, enacting the largest expansion of
health insurance for children ever, and creating incentives for adoption and foster care.
Improved the access, affordability and quality of child care by nearly doubling funding for Head
Start and enacting critical quality improvements to the program. The President has more than
doubled funding for child care subsidies and passed an Early Learning Fund to improve child
care quality.
Took on the tobacco industry by developing and implementing the first-ever plan to protect our
children from tobacco and end tobacco marketing targeted to young people.
Gave parents new tools to protect their children from media violence by enacting legislation
requiring the installation of anti-violence screening chips (V-chips) in all new televisions so that
parents can screen out television programs they believe are inappropriate for their children. The
President worked with the television industry to create a television ratings system, and called on
the FCC to enforce the rule requiring broadcasters to provide three hours of educational
programming for children a day.
The Results: Stronger Families
President Clinton's efforts to strengthen families have led to reduce welfare rolls and the lowest tax
burden on middle class families in a generation.
The tax burden on middle class families has dropped to 22.8 percent, the lowest middle-class tax
burden since 1978.
Millions of American families have taken time off to care for a new child or sick relatives.
Teen pregnancy rates have dropped by 20 percent to the lowest level ever recorded.
DRAFT
Welfare rolls have been cut in half -- from over 14 million people in 1993 to less than 7 million
today - to the lowest level since 1968. The number of welfare recipients moving to work has
increased by 82 percent.
Child support collections have broken new records, doubling federal and state collections from
$8 billion in 1993 to $16 billion last year.
The child poverty rate has dropped by 16 percent since 1993 to the lowest rate since 1980.
Investments in child care have doubled and now help parents provide care for 1.5 million
children.
Adoptions increased 29 percent between 1996 and 1998.
Real Stories Go Here
Page 2
LEVEL 1 - 3 OF 10 STORIES
Copyright M2 Communications Ltd 1996
M2 PRESSWIRE
August 23, 1996
LENGTH: 3494 words
HEADLINE: THE WHITE HOUSE
Remarks by President at signing of Personal Responsibility Act
HIGHLIGHT:
The Rose Garden
BODY:
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Lillie, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Vice President, to the members of the Cabinet. All of the members
of Congress who are here, thank you very much.
I'd like to say to Congressman Castle, I'm especially glad to see you here,
because eight years ago about this time when you were the Governor of Delaware
and Governor Carper was the Congressman from Delaware, you and I were together
at a signing like this.
Thank you, Senator Long, for coming here. Thank you, Governors Romer,
Carper, Miller and Caperton.
I'd also like to thank Penelope Howard and Janet Ferrel for coming here.
They, too, have worked their way from welfare to independence and we're honored
to have them here. I'd like to thank all of the people who worked on this bill
who have been introduced from our staff and Cabinet, but I'd also like to
especially thank Bruce Reed, who did a lot to do with working on the final
compromises of this bill; I thank him.
Lillie Harden was up there talking, and I want to tell you how she happens
to be here today. Ten years ago, Governor Castle and I were asked to cochair a
Governors Task Force on Welfare Reform, and we were asked together on it, and
when we met at Hilton Head in South Carolina, we had a little panel. And 41
governors showed up to listen to people who were on welfare from several states.
So I asked Carol Rasco to find me somebody from our state who had been in
one of our welfare reform programs and had gone to work. She found Lillie Harden
and Lillie showed up at the program. And I was conducting this meeting and I
committed a mistake that they always tell lawyers never to do: never ask a
question you do not know the answer to. (Laughter.)
But she was doing SO well talking about it, as you saw how well-spoken she
was today and I said, "Lillie, what's the best thing about being off welfare?"
And she looked me straight in the eye and said, "When my boy goes to school and
they say what does your mama do for a living, he can give an answer." I have
never forgotten that. (Applause.) And when I saw the success of all of her
children and the success that she's had in the past 10 years, I can tell you,
you've had a bigger impact on me than I've had on you. And I thank you for the
Page 3
M2 PRESSWIRE August 23, 1996
power of your example, for your family's. And for all of America, thank you very
much. (Applause.)
What we are trying to do today is to overcome the flaws of the welfare
system for the people who are trapped on it. We all know that the typical family
on welfare today is very different from the one that welfare was designed to
deal with 60 years ago. We all know that there are a lot of good people on
welfare who just get off of it in the ordinary course of business, but that a
significant number of people are trapped on welfare for a very long time,
exiling them from the entire community of work that gives structure to our
lives.
Nearly 30 years ago, Robert Kennedy said, "Work is the meaning of what this
country is all about. We need it as individuals, we need to sense it in our
fellow citizens, and we need it as a society and as a people.' He was right
then, and it's right now.
From now on, our nation's answer to this great social challenge will no
longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare, it will be the dignity, the power and
the ethic of work. Today, we are taking an historic chance to make welfare what
it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.
The bill I'm about to sign, as I have said many times, is far from perfect,
but it has come a very long way. Congress sent me two previous bills that I
strongly believe failed to protect our children and did too little to move
people from welfare to work. I vetoed both of them. This bill had broad
bipartisan support and is much, much better on both counts.
The new bill restores America's basic bargain of providing opportunity and
demanding in return responsibility. It provides $14 billion for child care, $4
billion more than the present law does. It is good because without the assurance
of child care it's all but impossible for a mother with young children to go to
work. It requires states to maintain their own spending on welfare reform and
gives them powerful performance incentives to place more people on welfare in
jobs. It gives states the capacity to create jobs by taking money now used for
welfare checks and giving it to employers as subsidies as incentives to hire
people. This bill will help people to go to work SO they can stop drawing a
welfare check and start drawing a paycheck.
It's also better for children. It preserves the national safety net of food
stamps and school lunches. It drops the deep cuts and the devastating changes in
child protection, adoption, and help for disabled children. It preserves the
national guarantee of health care for poor children, the disabled, the elderly,
and people on welfare - the most important preservation of all.
It includes the tough child. support enforcement measures that, as far as I
know, every member of Congress and everybody in the administration and every
thinking person in the country has supported for more than two years.
It's the most sweeping crackdown on deadbeat parents in history. We have
succeeded in increasing child support collection 40 percent, but over a third of
the cases where there's delinquencies, involve who cross state lines. For a lot
of women and children, the only reason they're on welfare today - the only
reason - is that the father up and walked away when he could have made a
Page 4
M2 PRESSWIRE August 23, 1996
contribution to the welfare of the children. That is wrong. If every parent paid
the child support that he or she owes legally today, we could move 800,000 women
and children off welfare immediately.
With this bill we say, if you don't pay the child support you owe we'll
garnish your wages, take away your driver's license, track you across state
lines; if necessary, make you work off what you pay - what you owe. It is a good
thing and it will help dramatically to reduce welfare, increase independence,
and reenforce parental responsibility. (Applause.)
As the Vice President said, we strongly disagree with a couple of provisions
of this bill. We believe that the nutritional cuts are too deep, especially as
they affect low-income working people and children. We should not be punishing
people who are working for a living already; we should do everything we can to
lift them up and keep them at work and help them to support their children. We
also believe that the congressional leadership insisted in cuts in programs for
legal immigrants that are far too deep.
These cuts, however, have nothing to do with the fundamental purpose of
welfare reform. I signed this bill because this is an historic chance - where
Republicans and Democrats got together and said, we're going to take this
historic chance to try to recreate the nation's social bargain with the poor.
We're going to try to change the parameters of the debate. We're going to make
it all new again and see if we can't create a system of incentives which
reenforce work and family and independence.
We can change what is wrong. We should not have passed this historic
opportunity to do what is right. And SO I want to ask all of you, without regard
to party, to think through the implications of these other non-welfare issues on
the American people and let's work together in good spirits and good faith to
remedy what is wrong. We can balance the budget without these cuts, but let's
not obscure the fundamental purpose of the welfare provisions of this
legislation which are good and solid, and which can give us at least the chance
to end the terrible, almost physical isolation of huge numbers of poor people
and their children from the rest of mainstream America. We have to do that.
(Applause.)
Let me also say that there's something really good about this legislation.
When I sign it we all have to start again. And this becomes everybody's
responsibility. After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a
political issue. The two parties cannot attack each other over it. Politicians
cannot attack poor people over it. There are no encrusted habits, systems and
failures that can be laid at the foot of someone else. We have to begin again.
This is not the end of welfare reform, this is the beginning. And we have to all
assume responsibility. (Applause.)
Now that we are saying with this bill we expect work, we have to make sure
the people have a chance to go to work. If we really value work, everybody in
this society - businesses, non-profits, religious institutions, individuals,
those in government - all have a responsibility to make sure the jobs are there.
These three women have great stories. Almost everybody on welfare would like
to have a story like that. And the rest of us now have a responsibility to give
them that story. We cannot blame the system for the jobs they don't have
Page 5
M2 PRESSWIRE August 23, 1996
anymore. If it doesn't work now, it's everybody's fault - mine, yours, and
everybody else. There is no longer a system in the way. (Applause.)
I've worked hard over the past four years to create jobs and to steer
investment into places where there are large numbers of people on welfare
because there's been no economic recovery. That's what the empowerment zone
program was all about. That's what the community development bank initiative was
all about. That's what our urban Brownfield cleanup initiative was all about -
trying to give people the means to make a living in areas that had been left
behind.
I think we have to do more here in Washington to do that, and I'll have more
to say about that later. But let me say again, we have to build a new work and
family system. And this is everybody's responsibility now. The people on welfare
are people just like these three people we honor here today and their families.
They are human beings. And we owe it to all of them to give them a chance to
come back.
I talked the other day when the Vice President and I went down to Tennessee
and we were working with Congressman Tanner's district, we were working on a
church that had burned. And there was a pastor there from a church in North
Carolina that brought a group of his people in to work. And he started asking me
about welfare reform, and I started telling him about it. And I said, "You know
what you ought to do? You ought to go tell Governor Hunt that you would hire
somebody on welfare to work in your church if he would give you the welfare
check as a wage supplement, you'd double their pay and you'd keep them employed
for a year or so and see if you couldn't train them and help their families and
see if their kids were all right.' I said, "Would you do that?" He said, "In a
heartbeat. "
I think there are people all over America like that. (Applause.) I think
there are people all over America like that. That's what I want all of you to be
thinking about today - what are we going to do now? This is not over, this is
just beginning. The Congress deserves our thanks for creating a new reality, but
we have to fill in the blanks. The governors asked for this responsibility; now
they've got to live up to it. There are mayors that have responsibilities,
county officials that have responsibilities. Every employer in this country that
ever made a disparaging remark about the welfare system needs to think about
whether he or she should now hire somebody from welfare and go to work. Go to
the state and say, okay, you give me the check, I'll use it as an income
supplement, I'll train these people, I'll help them to start their lives and
we'll go forward from here.
Every single person needs to be thinking - every person in America tonight
who sees a report of this who has ever said a disparaging word about the welfare
system should now say, "Okay, that's gone. What is my responsibility to make it
better?" (Applause.)
Two days ago we signed a bill increasing the minimum wage here and making it
easier for people in small businesses to get and keep pensions. Yesterday we
signed the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill which makes health care more available to up
to 25 million Americans, many of them in lower-income jobs where they're more
vulnerable.
Page 6
M2 PRESSWIRE August 23, 1996
The bill I'm signing today preserves the increases in the earned income tax
credit for working families. It is now clearly better to go to work than to stay
on welfare - clearly better. Because of actions taken by the Congress in this
session, it is clearly better. And what we have to do now is to make that work a
reality.
I've said this many times, but, you know, most American families find that
the greatest challenge of their lives is how to do a good job raising their kids
and do a good job at work. Trying to balance work and family is the challenge
that most Americans in the workplace face. Thankfully, that's the challenge
Lillie Harden's had to face for the last 10 years. That's just what we want for
everybody. We want at least the chance to strike the right balance for
everybody.
Today, we are ending welfare as we know it. But I hope this day will be
remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began - a new day that offers
hope, honors responsibility, rewards work, and changes the terms of the debate
so that no one in America ever feels again the need to criticize people who are
poor on welfare, but instead feels the responsibility to reach out to men and
women and children who are isolated, who need opportunity, and who are willing
to assume responsibility, and give them to opportunity and the terms of
responsibility. (Applause.)
Now, I'd like to ask Penelope Howard, Janet Ferrel, Lillie Harden, the
governors and the members of Congress from both parties who are here to come up
and join me as I sign the welfare reform bill.
I Mr. President, before you sign the bill, can you tell us whether you think
it's right to regulate tobacco or nicotine as a drug?
THE PRESIDENT: You know, Wolf, under the law, I have to wait until the OMB
makes a recommendation to me. I think we have to anticipate things. I can't say
more than that right now.
(The bill is signed.)
Q Mr. President, some of your core constituencies are furious with you for
signing this bill. What do you say to them?
THE PRESIDENT: Just what I said up there. We saved medical care. We saved
food stamps. We saved child care. We saved the aid to disabled children. We
saved the school lunch program. We saved the framework of support. What we did
was to tell the state, now you have to create a system to give everyone a chance
to go to work who is able-bodied, give everyone a chance to be independent. And
we did - that is the right thing to do.
And now, welfare is no longer a political football to be kicked around. It's
a personal responsibility of every American who ever criticized the welfare
system to help the poor people now to move from welfare to work. That's what I
say.
This is going to be a good thing for the country. We're going to monitor it
and we're going to fix whatever is wrong with it.
Page 7
M2 PRESSWIRE August 23, 1996
Q What guarantees are there that these things will be fixed, Mr. President,
especially if Republicans remain in control of Congress?
THE PRESIDENT: That's what we have elections for.
LANGUAGE: English
LOAD-DATE: May 23, 1997
Page 2
LEVEL 1 - 1 OF 53 STORIES
Copyright 2000 Sentinel Communications Co.
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL
September 17, 2000 Sunday, METRO
SECTION: INSIGHT; Pg. G1
LENGTH: 748 words
HEADLINE: BIG CITIES REMAIN BIG ON WELFARE RELIANCE;
WELFARE NUMBERS ARE DECLINING, BUT IT'S HARD TO TELL THAT BY LOOKING AT
AMERICA'S URBAN AREAS.
BYLINE: Amy Goldstein, Washington Post
BODY:
WASHINGTON -- As welfare rolls have plummeted in recent years, families that
still rely on government assistance are increasingly concentrated in big cities,
which indicates that welfare reform is failing to ease the burden of poverty on
urban America.
Nearly three in five people on welfare can be found in the 100 largest U.S.
cities -- even though they contain just one-third of the nation's population - -
because people there are being weaned from assistance more slowly than in most
suburban and rural communities.
Those findings come from a recent study by the Brookings Institution, a
Washington, D.C.-based liberal think tank. They provide the latest signs of how
the face of welfare has changed in the four years since the federal government
replaced the historical welfare safety net with a state-run system that pays
temporary benefits and steers people toward jobs.
The evidence that welfare recipients are becoming clustered in big cities
follows other recent findings that the program is becoming racially isolated,
with African-Americans and Hispanics accounting for a growing share of the
families who remain on the rolls.
The data for Florida fits with the national trend, with more than half the
state's welfare families subject to time limits for cash assistance living in
Miami, Jacksonville, Tampa-St. Petersburg and Orlando. Miami's share of
Florida's welfare rolls leaped from 24 percent in 1996 to 39 percent in 2000, a
more than 50 percent increase. However, in Central Florida, Orange County, the
one with the largest urban core Orlando things are different. Orange County's
share of the region's welfare recipients has remained constant since 1997 36
percent.
"One story emerging in welfare reform is that size does matter and the task
is tougher," said Don Winstead, welfare administrator with the Florida
Department of Children and Families.
These trends have significant implications. In two years, Congress must
decide what to do when the bill that overhauled the welfare system is due to
Page 3
Orlando Sentinel Tribune, September 17, 2000
expire.
Already, there is political pressure to curtail the amount of money the
government allots to states to help welfare recipients prepare for and keep
jobs.
Researchers at Brookings and elsewhere, along with officials struggling with
welfare reform in several major cities, contend that urban communities will not
be able to finish the work of welfare reform without outside help from
neighboring suburbs and from state and federal governments.
Moving people off welfare is more difficult in many cities, these officials
say, because they face a shortage of entry-level jobs, poverty-ridden
neighborhoods where education and work experience are scarce, and poor mass
transportation to the suburbs, where jobs tend to be more plentiful.
"The new jobs are inaccessible to our citizens,' said Timothy M. Kaine, the
mayor of Richmond, Va., which has less than 3 percent of Virginia's population
but 11 percent of its welfare cases. Only a few weeks ago, Kaine noted, did
local officials in Chesterfield County, a neighboring suburb where jobs are
abundant, agree to start allowing city bus routes to enter the county.
By examining the geography of welfare reform, Brookings researchers draw a
portrait considerably less promising than the common wisdom about what has
happened under welfare reform.
After 1994, the year when caseloads were the highest, the number of families
on welfare fell by half, to about 2.5 million last September, according to the
most recent federal figures.
But that decline, far greater than advocates of welfare reform had hoped for,
obscures the uneven pace of progress, according to Bruce Katz, director of
Brookings' Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. The disproportionate burden
of welfare on urban communities, Katz said, "is a massive blindspot in welfare
policy.'
The findings being released by Brookings are not the first clue that certain
cities are struggling with welfare. But the new analysis, building on two
earlier, smaller Brookings studies, is the most comprehensive and detailed of
its kind, calculating the growing burden of welfare on a large number of
individual cities and on the urban landscape as a whole.
Between 1994 and last year, the findings show, the proportion of the nation's
welfare families that live in the 100 largest cities swelled from 47 percent to
58 percent. The study analyzed cities by looking at urban counties, which in
some cases included inner suburbs.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Changing the system. President Clinton hugs
former welfare recipient Lillie Harden, of Little Rock, Ark., in the
Rose Garden of the White House, where he signed legislation
overhauling America's welfare system in 1996.
DENIS PAQUIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Page 4
Orlando Sentinel Tribune, September 17, 2000
LOAD-DATE: September 18, 2000
Page 5
LEVEL 1 - 2 OF 53 STORIES
Copyright 1999 N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
The New York Post
August 4, 1999, Wednesday
SECTION: All Editions; Pg. 031
LENGTH: 863 words
HEADLINE: WELFARE: IT'S NOT OVER YET
BYLINE: Michael Kelly
BODY:
IT'S official: The reform of the welfare system is a great triumph of social
policy - so great, indeed, as to restore some legitimacy to the whole concept of
large-scale social policy.
When the 1996 law ending welfare as an entitlement was under consideration,
the Department of Health and Human Services and the nongovernmental Urban
Institute predicted that the proposed reform would push more than a million
children into poverty. Critics warned of social catastrophe. This week, after
studying the data for 1998 - the first full year of data available - HHS and the
Urban Institute have returned their verdicts: The pessimists were wrong. Welfare
reform did not give rise to catastrophe. It did not fling a million dependent
children into the streets; it did rescue from the grinding tyranny of the dole
millions of dependent adults.
The principal aim of the 1996 law was to require the states to move adults
off the welfare rolls and into work. In 1998, the states were obliged to show
that 30 percent of adult welfare recipients were working at least 20 hours per
week. The actual results, released this week by HHS: On average, 35 percent were
working. In some states - Oregon, Montana, Wisconsin, Iowa and Wyoming - more
than 55 percent of welfare recipients were working at least half-time.
The Urban Institute also released a report this week. Studying women who left
welfare between 1995 and 1997, the institute found that a majority - 60 percent
- were employed at the time they were interviewed. And, as President Clinton
justifiably boasted Tuesday, the welfare rolls have been cut in half since 1993,
shrinking from 14.1 million to 7.3 million.
The first question about welfare reform's success is: Why? Recall that only a
decade ago, the welfare system seemed frozen utterly and forever: We called it,
in its seeming permanence, the welfare state. In the media-warped public
discussion, the politics of welfare were also locked in place, with liberal
Democratic humanists protecting women and children from cruel Reaganite
ketchup-as-vegetable-heads How did we ever get out of this great dismal swamp?
The first answer is political. Here is one of those rare happy occasions when
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The New York Post August 4, 1999, Wednesday
everyone takes credit and everyone deserves credit.
Governors - Republicans mostly, but some Democrats too - led reform well in
advance of the administration and Congress, and they get credit for forcing and
driving the issue - and, in many states, for implementing reform so
aggressively and creatively as to outstrip the law's requirements.
Newt Gingrich and his revolutionary Republican Congress of 1994 get credit
for drafting three welfare-reform bills, sticking with the cause through two
Clinton vetoes, and holding the president's feet to an election-year fire to win
enactment the third time out.
Bill Clinton gets credit for making the governors' crusade a national
promise, with his 1992 campaign pledge to "end welfare as we know it," and for
keeping that pledge. It is perhaps true that he kept it reluctantly, but he kept
it, and more. Clinton worked to undo some of the more draconian and underthought
elements of the law, and to strongly support the reworked version. In so doing,
as a Democratic president, Clinton legitimized the reform; he did something
crucial that no Republican could have done, and no other Democrat had ever dared
to do.
The second answer to the question of why is one of economics, and one of
considerable debate. Some - Clinton, for one - hold that the 1996 law is
responsible for almost all of the reform's success. Others believe the fantastic
economy largely did the job. Isabel Sawhill, a policy analyst at the Brookings
Institute, is probably right to figure that the economy accounted for half the
gain and the other half was due to policy changes (including the 1996 bill, the
increase in the earned income tax credit, improvements in child care for the
poor and the increase in the minimum wage).
Sawhill's analysis raises a last, critical point: Welfare reform's success is
fledgling and fragile. As the Urban Institute's study shows, many of the women
who have left welfare are barely making it. A recession of any length could
threaten much of what has been accomplished.
What this suggests is that we must plan for a recession, and to defeat a
recession. Incredibly, House Speaker Dennis Hastert thinks differently. The
states have been SO successful at getting people off welfare that at least $4
billion in unclaimed welfare block grants have piled up in Treasury accounts.
The states have been wisely content to leave the money there for now, as
rainy-day cushions against recession's ability to undo the hard-won gains upon
which millions of reclaimed lives depend.
Hastert has proposed that Congress glom the cash instead, and spend it on
something else. It would be interesting to know what the speaker thinks is more
important than the rescue of what was long thought to be a permanent underclass.
GRAPHIC: President Clinton with Lillie Harden, a former welfare recipient who
found work at a supermarket deli. But is there any guarantee she won't need
welfare again in the future? Reuters
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
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The New York Post August 4, 1999, Wednesday
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The New York Post August 4, 1999, Wednesday
everyone takes credit and everyone deserves credit.
Governors - Republicans mostly, but some Democrats too - led reform well in
advance of the administration and Congress, and they get credit for forcing and
driving the issue - and, in many states, for implementing reform SO
aggressively and creatively as to outstrip the law's requirements.
Newt Gingrich and his revolutionary Republican Congress of 1994 get credit
for drafting three welfare-reform bills, sticking with the cause through two
Clinton vetoes, and holding the president's feet to an election-year fire to win
enactment the third time out.
Bill Clinton gets credit for making the governors' crusade a national
promise, with his 1992 campaign pledge to "end welfare as we know it, and for
keeping that pledge. It is perhaps true that he kept it reluctantly, but he kept
it, and more. Clinton worked to undo some of the more draconian and underthought
elements of the law, and to strongly support the reworked version. In SO doing,
as a Democratic president, Clinton legitimized the reform; he did something
crucial that no Republican could have done, and no other Democrat had ever dared
to do.
The second answer to the question of why is one of economics, and one of
considerable debate. Some - Clinton, for one - hold that the 1996 law is
responsible for almost all of the reform's success. Others believe the fantastic
economy largely did the job. Isabel Sawhill, a policy analyst at the Brookings
Institute, is probably right to figure that the economy accounted for half the
gain and the other half was due to policy changes (including the 1996 bill, the
increase in the earned income tax credit, improvements in child care for the
poor and the increase in the minimum wage).
Sawhill's analysis raises a last, critical point: Welfare reform's success is
fledgling and fragile. As the Urban Institute's study shows, many of the women
who have left welfare are barely making it. A recession of any length could
threaten much of what has been accomplished.
What this suggests is that we must plan for a recession, and to defeat a
recession. Incredibly, House Speaker Dennis Hastert thinks differently. The
states have been so successful at getting people off welfare that at least $4
billion in unclaimed welfare block grants have piled up in Treasury accounts.
The states have been wisely content to leave the money there for now, as
rainy-day cushions against recession's ability to undo the hard-won gains upon
which millions of reclaimed lives depend.
Hastert has proposed that Congress glom the cash instead, and spend it on
something else. It would be interesting to know what the speaker thinks is more
important than the rescue of what was long thought to be a permanent underclass.
GRAPHIC: President Clinton with Lillie Harden, a former welfare recipient who
found work at a supermarket deli. But is there any guarantee she won't need
welfare again in the future? Reuters
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
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The New York Post August 4, 1999, Wednesday
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Copyright 1997 SOFTLINE INFORMATION, INC.
The Ethnic NewsWatch
Los Angeles Sentinel
March 12, 1997
SECTION: Vol. 62; No. 50; Pg. A6
LENGTH: 745 words
HEADLINE: Leaving Welfare
BYLINE: Shabazz, Betty
BODY:
Leaving Welfare.
Ms. Lillie Harden is one of 1.9 million Americans who have left the welfare
rolls and headed for lives of independence since President Clinton took office.
And two million fewer people are using food stamps during the same period.
These are more than just hard numbers. In the case of graduates from welfare
to work, we're talking about 1.3 million more homes where bright-eyed young
children will learn, many from an early age, what it means to go out and earn a
living. In the case of people no longer using food stamps, it's two million more
homes where children will learn the connection between employment and
sustenance, from seeing at least one parent use their own money when buying
groceries. The important lessons in these developments cannot be underestimated
for this generation and the next.
Critics should note that President Clinton is looking to make fixes in
welfare policy in the current term. But that intent aside, he has been working
all along to make sure that changes in welfare policy are not happening in a
vacuum, to make sure that welfare recipients are not pushed out like skydivers
being shoved from an airplane. From day one, the president has worked to help
build a parachute to soften the landing for these Americans. He has implemented
a series of economic initiatives to help working families trapped at the bottom
of the socioeconomic ladder, and these same strategies are helping people go
from welfare to work.
For example. Americans, like Ms. Harden, have been helped through the
difficult but doable transition by Clinton strategies like an expansion of the
Earned Income Tax Credit, which has provided a tax cut to 15 million poor
working families; an increase in the minimum wage that amounts to an $1,800
annual raise for the working poor; and expanded Head Start and child care
programs that make it easier for welfare recipients to leave home for job
interviews and jobs.
But help along the pathway to independence and success doesn't end there. As
these workers advance in society, hopefully moving toward the mainstream, the
president hopes they will be able to work and build promising new lives for
their families more easily with the help of several pro-family initiatives for
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The Ethnic NewsWatch, March 12, 1997
which he has worked. These include the Kennedy-Kassebaum law, which protects
people against health insurance loss when they switch jobs; the Family and
Medical Leave law, which protects workers' jobs when they have to take care of
a family member emergency; a variety of home ownership-boosting strategies for
low-and middle income families to add 8 million new homeowners by the year 2000;
and greater pension security to protect workers' hard-earned resources for use
in retirement.
In the coming years, as we navigate our way through welfare reform, our
country must find room for approximately two million more Americans like Ms.
Harden to say goodbye to welfare and hello to work; goodbye to social isolation
and denigration and hello to richer, more satisfying lives. Economists say it
can be done in a 130-million plus job economy like ours.
But as African Americans, we cannot and must not depend on the optimism of
economists or help from the government alone to create these jobs. While the
economists are optimistic about job creation and while the president is
proposing tax incentives and grants to help spur the hiring of workers from
welfare rolls, it is still up to us to make this work.
We must reach out-churches, community groups, entrepreneurs, fraternal and
sorority groups, and professional organizations--and link more people in our
communities to jobs and to skills development training opportunities that lead
to employment.
That's what the president meant when he said during his acceptance speech at
the Democratic National Convention: "There is no more 'who's to blame' on
welfare. Now the only question is what to do. And we all have a responsibility
to give poor people a chance to grow and support their families.'
As African Americans, charting a new destiny for African American welfare
recipients is to know and understand these words from Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.: "We are all inextricably linked. If they, welfare recipients, do well, we
do well. And that's how our communities will grow and prosper into the 21st
century.
(The writer, Dr. Betty Shabazz, is the widow of the late Malcolm X and was
vice chair of the Clinton-Gore '96 presidential election campaign.)
ETHNIC-GROUP: African American/Caribbean/African
LANGUAGE: English
LOAD-DATE: July 3, 1997
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Copyright 1997 The Dallas Morning News
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
January 19, 1997, Sunday, HOME FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1623 words
HEADLINE: Clinton's citizens;
President draws on real people to focus the issues
BYLINE: Susan Feeney, Washington Bureau of The Dallas Morning News
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
WASHINGTON - Four years ago, President Clinton's inaugural festivities
included a celebrated luncheon with 53 Faces of Hope, everyday Americans he had
met and bonded with during his first presidential campaign.
He won't be paying to bring such regular Joes and Janes to Washington this
time. There are too many of them. In this White House, the cultivation of
"real people" has become a cottage industry.
From campaign encounters, the mail or even the morning newspapers, Mr.
Clinton harvests tales of American life far from the trappings of the Oval
Office. He has told people privately that he worries about the potential
isolation of the White House.
The president latches on to these personal stories, concerns and triumphs,
aides said, retelling them in public and private, in speeches and policy
deliberations and drawing inspiration from them.
One person's saga - the New York hotel worker worried about crime, an
Arkansas woman who moved off welfare - can crystallize a national need or
reinforce the president's resolve on policy. White House aides say they fill
files with memorandums from the president that originated with someone's
personal experience.
Ronald Reagan told jokes and folksy yarns. George Bush wrote mountains of
personal notes. Bill Clinton, even as he is under fire for trading access for
campaign contributions, traffics in personal anecdotes.
Sometimes the president highlights individual stories as validation of his
efforts. At a rally in Texas last fall, he met with Longview Vietnam veteran
Steve Snider and his 12-year-old daughter, Emily. She suffers from spina bifida
and is paralyzed from the chest down, a condition family doctors suspect is tied
to Mr. Snider's exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.
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THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, January 19, 1997
While Mr. Clinton worked the crowd after his speech, he leaned over a rail to
hold little Emily's face in his hands. Mr. Snider, a bulldozer operator, spoke
with the president about providing more financial help for veterans whose
children have illnesses stemming from a parent's military service.
"He doesn't know about that bill we signed yesterday," the president said to
personal aide Andrew Friendly, referring to a veterans' appropriations bill.
The aide collected Mr. Snider's address and telephone number and promised to
follow up with more information - which another White House staffer did within a
week.
In later remarks, Mr. Clinton touted the Sniders as a reason he should be
re-elected.
"Because of a bill I signed yesterday
they are finally going to get
the medical attention and the disability support they need,' the president said.
Suspicious eye
Some of Mr. Clinton's often-moving encounters with citizens are as
serendipitous as they appear. But critics and skeptical journalists cast a
suspicious eye when the president comes upon someone whose experience precisely
illustrates his point.
Indeed, the White House most certainly already knew how to reach the Sniders.
People identifying themselves as Clinton staff invited the family to the Clinton
rally, gave them V.I.P. passes to get up front and telephoned them twice to make
sure that they'd be attending.
Mr. Snider, a Republican who believes his family came to the administration's
attention through Agent Orange experts, said he was honored to meet Mr. Clinton.
"I'm a pretty fair judge of character. I really think he was sincere in the
emotion he was showing," said Mr. Snider, who declined to say how he voted. "I
don't agree with him on a lot of stuff. I'm just trying to get help for my
little girl."
White House aides say they work hard to gather personal stories.
Real life experiences are among the best ways to illustrate the country's
challenges and solutions, aides said.
"They symbolize the values that he's fighting for," said Bruce Reed, Mr.
Clinton's domestic policy adviser.
Such tales are "a filter that the president works through on major policy,'
said presidential adviser Rahm Emanuel.
And people who have told their stories to Mr. Clinton - a feat that once
seemed unimaginable to them - reject the notion that they are plants or props.
"It worked for me. It works for him. It works for the country.
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THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, January 19, 1997
It works for everybody," said New York City hotel waiter Dimitrios Theofanis,
who gets frequent presidential mention for his 1992 plea to Mr. Clinton to make
the streets safe for his son.
Such stories help to focus the president and staff, Mr. Reed said.
"It's good to be reminded of the people your policies affect.
Real people are always the best to help us cut through the underbrush of what
we're doing, the aide said.
Related strategy
A related strategy was at work at the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago in August when nonpoliticians and their stories dominated the first
day's proceedings. Republicans employed some of the same tactics at their
convention in San Diego a few weeks earlier.
Before his inauguration four years ago, Mr. Clinton promised the Faces of
Hope:
"Every day I'll remember you. And I'll remember who sent us here. And I'll
remember that this town
doesn't amount to a hill of beans unless we are
spending all the money that you send us to try to help deal with your problems
in an honest and forthright way. 11
In office, he has kept in close contact with the "faces."
Through Ann Walker of the White House research staff, the Faces of Hope keep
the president abreast of their lives and concerns.
Nancy Henreich, director of Oval Office operations, maintains a database of
the president's other citizen contacts. The president has set up his own
private ZIP code where old friends or special acquaintances can write him
directly.
Ms. Walker sends the president detailed memos about the Faces of Hope and he
often directs her to act on particular matters or to provide him with more
information. He wants to know when any of them are in Washington and wants to
see them when he visits their hometowns, Ms. Walker said.
Two former South Central Los Angeles gang members keep Mr. Clinton up to
speed on their mentoring program. During one Clinton visit, they brought 10 of
their charges to meet him at the foot of the stairs to Air Force One.
Dr. Patricia Wetzel, a Fort Worth physician who was infected with HIV on the
job, said she still presses the president about the need for more AIDS
education. Her connection with Mr. Clinton also gives her a receptive ear at
the Centers for Disease Control and other federal agencies.
"I feel very fortunate that I have just a slight little pull, maybe, " Dr.
Wetzel said.
Mr. Theofanis, the New York waiter, also has pressed the president about
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THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, January 19, 1997
improving public education. The two usually talk when Mr. Clinton is in New
York. The Greek immigrant and his son traveled on the president's train to the
Democratic convention. A framed photograph of Ricky Ray, a Florida boy who died
of AIDS, sits on the credenza behind Mr. Clinton's desk. It was given to him by
Clifford and Louise Ray, both Faces of Hope, who have two other sons with the
disease.
Health care push
What institutionalized White House efforts to find and showcase real people
was the 1993-94 push to pass health care reform. It was aide Julia Moffett's
nearly full-time job to sift though a blizzard of mail to find compelling
individuals.
Wherever the president or first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled,
Americans shared their health care struggles.
At the White House in August, when the president signed welfare reform
legislation, he was joined by Lillie Harden, perhaps the longest-tenured of the
president's "real people. in She worked her way off of welfare 10 years ago, when
Mr. Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
"I can tell you," the president told her at the Rose Garden signing ceremony,
"you've had a bigger impact on me than I've had on you."
Last month, he defended his veto of a bill that would have banned certain
late-term abortions by recounting the traumas of several women who said they
needed the procedure. Those women were at his side when he vetoed the
legislation.
Republicans contend that the president exploited a family tragedy with a
campaign television ad last year featuring Kenneth and Rosemarie Weaver and
their gravely ill daughter Melissa - who has since died. The Port Lavaca,
Texas, family expressed gratitude for the Family and Medical Leave Act, which
Mr. Clinton signed in 1993.
These stories take a wide variety of routes from their source to Mr.
Clinton's ear.
Beverly Burnett met Gene Sperling, the president's economic adviser, in line
at the Phoenix airport last fall. She noted that her son in Iowa was grateful
to take advantage of unpaid leave for the birth of his son.
Mr. Sperling told Paul Begala, a consultant who was helping prepare Mr.
Clinton for the presidential debate in San Diego that evening. Halfway into the
debate, Mr. Clinton mentioned Mrs. Burnett.
"Had I heard this and it wasn't me, I think I would have said, Sure, someone
really said that, " laughed Mrs. Burnett, a health care administrator. "It
gave me a little more faith."
Mr. Clinton is always rooting around for stories, aides said.
On Christmas Day 1994, he read a story in The New York Times about Faith
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THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, January 19, 1997
Bowman, a single mother so financially strapped that she and her 8-year-old
daughter painted their Christmas tree on the kitchen wall. She had come into a
welcome $ 3,000 windfall when the Internal Revenue Service verified her
eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit - a program Mr. Clinton has touted
and helped to expand.
"I should write her a letter of encouragement, the president wrote to aides
in his rounded longhand. "Send a W.H. ornament for next year We can use her
as an example of EITC! BC"
GRAPHIC: PHOTO (S) : (1-2 The Dallas Morning News: David Woo) 1. Fireworks
illuminate the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capitol on
Saturday. 2. People stand in line Saturday despite the frigid weather to enter
the Technology Playground on the National Mall in Washington. The playground, a
multimedia center created for inauguration festivities, gives visitors Internet
access. CHART (S) : /MAP (S) : (DMN/KRT) THE 53rd PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION. ; PHOTO
LOCATION NOTE: Photo #2 was not archived.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: February 20, 1997
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Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
August 23, 1996, Friday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk
LENGTH: 1303 words
HEADLINE: CLINTON SIGNS BILL CUTTING WELFARE; STATES IN NEW ROLE
BYLINE: By FRANCIS X. CLINES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 22
BODY:
In a sweeping reversal of Federal policy, President Clinton today ended six
decades of guaranteed help to the nation's poorest children by signing into law
a vast welfare overhaul requiring the 50 states to deal more directly with the
social burdens and the budget expense of poverty.
"Today we are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to
be: a second chance, not a way of life," Mr. Clinton declared in signing the
measure, which will affect tens of millions of poor Americans, largely by
mandating work requirements and imposing a five-year lifetime limit on welfare
help to needy families.
With his signature, at a Rose Garden ceremony, the President eliminated a
pillar of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal social welfare program, delighting
the Republican-controlled Congress in this election year and incensing many of
his fellow Democrats.
Mr. Clinton, hailing the law as "good and solid" progress, expressed hope
that the partisan edge would now be eliminated from the nation's frustrations
over welfare. But moments after the signing, the Presidential campaign of Bob
Dole commented, "By selling out his own party, Bill Clinton has proven he is
ideologically adrift."
On the Democratic side, the enactment was decried as a "moment of shame" by
Marion Wright Edelman, the president of the Children's Defense Fund and a
longtime friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was the fund's co-chairwoman
until the 1992 election. Another frequent Clinton defender, Senator Paul Simon,
Democrat of Illinois, rued the President's signature by declaring, "This isn't
welfare reform, it's welfare denial."
Mr. Clinton took care to have three former welfare mothers at his side in the
sunshine as he signed the measure, praising it for restoring "America's basic
bargain of providing opportunity and demanding in return responsibility.
Page 16
The New York Times, August 23, 1996
He claimed credit for gaining a $3.5 billion increase in child care from
Congress, for a total of $14 billion to help single mothers while they seek
work.
The heart of the complex new law abolishes Aid to Families With Dependent
Children, the Government's welfare bulwark, which provides monthly cash benefits
to 12.8 million people, including more than 8 million children.
This is to be replaced by a system of block grants and vast new authority for
the states, in the hope that they can fashion new work and welfare programs to
solve the long-intractable problem of dependence on government. Job creation
will be a particular state burden, since the law requires most poor adults to
find a job within two years of first receiving aid.
Critics, including the nation's Roman Catholic bishops, have asked how states
already laboring to meet their own budget-crimping priorities can manage welfare
better when the new law will provide less Federal revenue for the task, $55
billion less over six years.
"The governors,' Mr. Clinton noted, "asked for this responsibility. Now
they've got to live up to it. " He celebrated that "there is no longer a system
in the way. "
But Representative Carrie P. Meek, a Florida Democrat with a large welfare
constituency, said it was more accurate to say, "Now we'll have 50 welfare
systems, all doing different things. 11
Mr. Clinton, who had vetoed two earlier welfare-overhaul measures, hailed the
final legislation, on balance, as a historic chance to "re-create the nation's
social bargain with the poor. He vowed to fight what he described as its
shortcomings, particularly a six-year, $24 billion cut in food stamp help to 25
million poor Americans and the barring of future legal immigrants from most
welfare assistance.
Those two cuts account for most of the law's budget savings. Realistically,
Mr. Clinton's VOW to return to Congress to fight those reversals, and to
initiate job-creation programs for the poor, would require his leading the
Democrats back to power in Congress this November.
The President, already deep into his own re-election campaign, candidly
admitted that he was hoping to neutralize the risky welfare issue, which has
hounded him since his 1992 campaign VOW to "end welfare as we know it."
"After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political
issue, he contended rather wishfully even as Republicans claimed credit for
forcing his hand through a combination of public pressure and his own
re-election strategy of preferring centrist compromise to ideological standoff.
"The two parties cannot attack each other over it," the President insisted
moments before taking pen in hand. "The politicians cannot attack poor people
over it. There are no encrusted habits, systems and failures that can be laid at
the foot of someone else. We have to begin again. This is not the end of welfare
reform; this is the beginning. And we have to all assume responsibility.
Mr. Dole, former Senate majority leader, issued a statement welcoming the
Page 17
The New York Times, August 23, 1996
President's signature on a bill that the Republican challenger pronounced
similar to "my welfare reform proposal."
"When they look beyond President Clinton's election-year calculation," he
said, "the American people know Republican leadership delivered welfare reform.'
The Rose Garden ceremony was remarkable for the dearth of Democratic leaders
in attendance and the presence of beaming Republicans. Even Senator Christopher
J. Dodd of Connecticut, the general chairman of the Democratic National
Committee, who is now busily working for the President's re-election, had
denounced the measure as an "unconscionable retreat."
Democratic pickets have already begun dogging the President, notably at his
birthday celebration last weekend in New York, and White House officials
privately concede that there are likely to be some heated moments over the issue
next week at Mr. Clinton's re-nomination convention in Chicago.
Even before he signed the bill, the Administration was quietly granting
last-minute waivers from current law to allow states to offer extensions beyond
the five-year lifetime limit on aid, provided recipients keep looking for work.
Republicans have accused the President of already trying to undermine the new
law in the face of liberal counterpressure.
Some Democrats hope this proves true. "I'm upset about the bill, but as I
read it I figure most states will be able to get out from under the toughest
parts with waivers,' said Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado. "After
a lot of tinkering and tuning, this all may prove nothing more than an
election-year brouhaha."
Attending to the accusation that he was severing his party's New Deal
taproot, the President declared, "The typical family on welfare today is very
different from the one that welfare was designed to deal with 60 years ago. In
contrast to needy Depression-era Americans, he said, modern Americans who get
aid "are trapped on welfare for a very long time, exiling them from the entire
community of work that gives structure to our lives."
As he signed the measure, a long line of protesters stretched along the block
north of the White House, out of sight of the Rose Garden, in a rally organized
by the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women and the
Feminist Majority. "We intend to fix the political climate that makes the
President and Congress think they can get away with writing off the poor,"
declared Patricia Ireland, president of NOW.
Mr. Clinton, to the contrary, depicted himself as delivering creatively on a
promise. "Today we are ending welfare as we know it," he insisted. "But I hope
this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began: a new
day that offers hope, honors responsibility, rewards work and changes the terms
of the debate SO that no one in America ever feels again the need to criticize
people who are poor or on welfare.'
GRAPHIC: Photos: While President Clinton signed a bill overhauling the welfare
system, demonstrators on Pennsylvania Avenue protested the measure. (Paul
Hosefros/The New York Times) (pg. A22); Lillie Harden, left, and Janet Ferrel,
former welfare recipients, watched President Clinton sign the welfare bill
yesterday in the Rose Garden. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) (pg. A1)
Page 18
The New York Times, August 23, 1996
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11/02/00
*
****
*
EEEEE
N
N
DDDD
*
*
E
N N
D D
*
*
E
NN N
D D
*
*
EEE
N N N
D D
*
*
E
N NN
D D
*
*
E
N N
D D
*
*
EEEEE
N N
DDDD
*
SEND TO: RICHTER, ANNA
OPD - DOMESTIC POLICY COUNCIL
ROOM 308
OLD EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 20502-0308