Many ‘Injured by the Helping Hand’

The following are excerpts from the speech President Bush delivered on welfare reform:

America began a war on poverty more than three decades ago. A story of good intention but conflicted results. There were important successes, no doubt about it; there were some good successes.

Yet many Americans . . . were injured by the helping hand. The welfare system became an enemy of individual effort and responsibility, with dependence passed from one generation to the next. Between 1965 and 1995, federal and state spending on poor and low-income families increased from around $40 billion to more than $350 billion a year.

Yet . . . we made virtually no progress . . . in reducing child poverty. And the number of children born out of wedlock grew from 1 in 13 to 1 in 3. By the mid-1990s, few denied there was need for change. In sweeping reforms passed by Congress, welfare benefits were transferred into temporary help, not a permanent way of life. The new system honors work, by requiring work, and helps people find jobs.

States are required to promote independence, and they are given the flexibility to seek that goal, in new ways, with dollars that were once used for welfare payments, for example, now being used for child care and other ways to help working families.

Critics initially called these changes brutal and mean-spirited. Yet the results of reform have proven them wrong. Many lives have been dramatically improved. Since 1996, welfare caseloads dropped by more than half. Today, 5.4 million fewer people live in poverty than in 1996, including 2.6 million fewer children. Child poverty for African American children is at its lowest level ever. For the first time in generations, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has leveled off, and the unwed teen birthrate has declined since the mid-1990s.

Some analysts try to dismiss all these gains as the product of good economic times. Yet we have had good economic times before and the number of people on welfare went up.

We ended welfare as we’ve known it, yet it is not a post-poverty America. Child poverty is still too high. Too many families are strained and fragile and broken. Too many Americans still have not found work and the purpose it brings.

. . . We will strengthen the work requirements for those on welfare. Work is the pathway to independence and self-respect. Yet, because of a quirk in the 1996 law, states on average must require work of only 5% of the adults receiving welfare. This is certainly not what Congress had in mind when it wrote the reforms in 1996. So I’m recommending that the law be changed and every state be required within five years to have 70% of the welfare recipients working, so that more Americans know the independence and the dignity of work.

. . . At the heart of all these proposals is a single commitment to return an ethic of work to an important place in all American lives. . . . We will work to strengthen marriage. As we reduce welfare caseloads, we must improve the lives of children. And the most effective, direct way to improve the lives of children is to encourage the stability of American families.

--From White House transcript