Nothing is done more to undermine our sense of common responsibility than
our failed welfare system. This is one of the problems we have to face here
in Washington in our New Covenant. It rewards welfare over work, it
undermines family values, it lets millions of parents get away without
paying their child support, it keeps a minority--but a significant
minority--of the people on welfare trapped on it for a very long time.
I worked on this problem for a long time--nearly 15 years now. As a
Governor I had the honor of working with the Reagan Administration to write
the last welfare reform bill back in 1988.
In the last two years we made a good start in continuing the work of
welfare reform. Our Administration gave two dozen states the right to slash
through Federal rules and regulations to reform their own welfare systems
and to try to promote work and responsibility over welfare and dependency.
Last year, I introduced the most sweeping welfare reform plan ever
presented by an Administration. We have to make welfare what it was meant
to be--a second chance, not a way of life.
We have to help those on welfare move to work as quickly as possible, to
provide child care and teach them skills, if that's what they need, for up
to two years. But after that, there ought to be a simple, hard rule. Anyone
who can work must go to work.
If a parent isn't paying child support, they should be forced to pay.
We should suspend driver's licenses, track them across state lines, make
them work off what they owe. That is what we should do. Governments do not
raise children, people do. And the parents must take responsibility for the
children they bring into this world.
I want to work with you, with all of you, to pass welfare reform. But our
goal must be to liberate people and lift them from dependence to
independence, from welfare to work, from mere childbearing to responsible
parenting. Our goal should not be to punish them because they happen to be
poor.
We should--we should require work and mutual responsibility. But we
shouldn't cut people off just because they're poor, they're young or even
because they're unmarried. We should promote responsibility by requiring
young mothers to live at home with their parents or in other supervised
settings, by requiring them to finish school. But we shouldn't put them and
their children out on the street.
And I know all the arguments pro and con and I have read and thought about
this for a long time: I still don't think we can, in good conscience,
punish poor children for the mistakes of their parents.
My fellow Americans, every single survey shows that all the American people
care about this, without regard to party or race or region. So let this be
the year we end welfare as we know it.
But also let this be the year that we are all able to stop using this issue
to divide America.
No one is more eager to end welfare.
I may be the only President who's actually had the opportunity to sit in
the welfare office, who's actually spent hours and hours talking to people
on welfare, and I am telling you the people who are trapped on it know it
doesn't work. They also want to get off.
So we can promote, together, education and work and good parenting. I have
no problem with punishing bad behavior or the refusal to be a worker or a
student or a responsible parent. I just don't want to punish poverty and
past mistakes. All of us have made our mistakes and none of us can change
our yesterdays, but every one of us can change our tomorrows.
And America's best example of that may be Lynn Woolsey, who worked her way
off welfare to become a Congresswoman from the state of California.