Clinton Calls for Tougher Child Support Enforcement : Welfare reform: The President sees crackdown on delinquent parents as way to help children and cut costs. He calls on Republicans to back tougher laws as debate on GOP plan opens this week.

With the House poised to begin a historic debate over a Republican-sponsored welfare reform bill, President Clinton on Saturday called on Congress to tighten enforcement of child-support laws by requiring states to revoke the driver’s and professional licenses of absent parents who are delinquent in their payments.

“Millions of children of working parents would have more secure lives and much brighter futures if the errant parents--absent parents--paid what they owe,” Clinton said in his weekly radio address.

Faced with having to watch the Republicans open debate Tuesday on an issue that had once been his, the President used his radio speech to draw subtle contrasts between welfare reform GOP-style and the kind he prefers. But his remarks were notably free of the sharply worded partisan barbs he has employed in the past, and the White House has stopped short of a veto threat on the issue.

Instead, the President and his advisers are taking a wait-and-see approach in hopes that the provisions of the GOP bill can be amended by Democrats in the House or altered later in the Senate.

By homing in on deadbeat parents, Clinton sought to accomplish several political ends at once: Republicans have already indicated some willingness to go along with tougher enforcement of child-support laws and the White House believes that this is one provision for which Clinton will be able to take credit.

The President is also using the issue to emphasize two central themes in his vision for welfare reform: that parents should be held financially responsible for their children and that the federal government should retain a significant role in the welfare system by providing job training and child care as well by enforcing child-support laws.

“We all agree we have to end welfare as we know it,” Clinton said, repeating one of his most popular campaign themes. “I think to do it we’ll have to offer more opportunity to move people from welfare to work and demand more responsibility in return.”

By contrast, a central theme of the GOP proposal is that the federal government should relinquish its authority over the national safety net for the poor and transfer the responsibility to the states.

The Republicans estimate that their plan would save as much as $60 billion over five years, largely by denying most federal benefits to legal immigrants who are not yet citizens, by cutting the income support that goes to hundreds of thousands of disabled children and by restraining the growth of food stamps and other similar programs.

Unlike the plan put forward unsuccessfully by Clinton last year, the Republican proposal would not provide extra money for training or educating people who are dropped from the welfare rolls.

But perhaps the most radical aspect of the GOP plan is that it would take away the federal government’s responsibility for welfare and give it to the states.

“Republicans recognize that Washington doesn’t have all the answers and (they) are willing to give states real flexibility and resources to try what they find works,” Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said Saturday in the GOP response to Clinton’s address. “We know today’s welfare system is full of perverse incentives that destroy families, denigrate the work ethic and trap people in a cruel cycle of government dependency.”

Under the GOP bill, states would place more emphasis on changing behavior than on supporting families.

“The federal government is inherently unable to do behavior change, so the states are stepping into the vacuum,” said Doug Besharov, a welfare specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute research center.

A central piece of the Republican proposal gives states broad flexibility over the shape of the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, which is now administered by the federal government at a cost of $17 billion a year.

The bill sets only a few new requirements: States would be forbidden from giving cash assistance to mothers younger than 18, mothers who refused to identify the father of their children, families who have been on the welfare rolls for five years and parents who refuse to work for their benefits after two years on the rolls.

States also would be prohibited from increasing the size of cash grants to families on welfare who have additional children. States could choose to be tougher than required, but not more generous.

The GOP proposal also would revamp the food stamp program, slowing the annual increases and requiring able-bodied recipients between the ages of 18 and 50 without dependent children to work for their food stamps after three months in the program.

The package also would replace the federal school meal program with lump-sum grants to states to provide free and reduced price meals to children at school.

As with cash welfare, school meals and child-care assistance, states would be given lump-sum grants from the federal government for their child welfare systems. They would have broad flexibility to determine eligibility and set restrictions and penalties for the various programs. States could transfer up to 30% of the funds from one so-called block grant to another.

Currently, states receive money for each child and must abide by detailed federal regulations.

Liberals argue that needy children would go without services under the new system, especially if rolls grow because of recessions or other regional or national hardships.

The GOP plan would also revamp Supplemental Security Income by making people who are disabled because of drug or alcohol dependence ineligible for aid and tightening eligibility for children with disabilities, so that only those who would otherwise be institutionalized would qualify for income support.

It also provides for the country’s first nationwide system for tracking parents who owe child support.

This is one provision in the welfare reform plan offered by Clinton last year that has been largely adopted by the Republicans in Congress.

In his radio address, Clinton cited a new report by the Department of Health and Human Services that says that denying driver’s and professional licenses to delinquent parents would increase child-support collections by $24 billion and reduce welfare costs by $4 billion in 10 years.

At least one Republican lawmaker, Rep. Marge Roukema of New Jersey, plans to introduce an amendment that would make the change Clinton desires. At the committee level, Republicans opted to put a “sense of Congress” statement in the bill that supports the measures but does not mandate that states implement them.