Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Pell, I call up amendment No. 2475.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendments be dispensed with.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Dodd and Senator Pell, I send forth an amendment, and an amendment by Senator Dorgan to the underlying Dole amendment. I will just send those up at this time.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be laid aside.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, there is no objection on this side.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. A number of Senators simply wish to lay down their amendments. This is understood. And there will be no debate, but simply if you would recognize them as they rise, we would appreciate it, sir. Mr. SIMON addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I believe the pending amendment is offered by this Senator under a time agreement of 1\1/2\ hours, equally divided.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Thank you.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Five minutes, and then we can get to this matter then.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may require for an opening statement. Mr. President, I rise in an all but empty Chamber to offer an amendment which is in the nature of a substitute for the bill reported from the Committee on Finance and later amended by the distinguished Republican leader. On May 26, the committee considered the chairman's mark and the bill that I offered, the Family Support Act of 1995. It failed by a vote of 12 to 8 in our committee on party lines, with one exception, and it was not a happy moment, much less a promising moment. It was, indeed, a foreboding one. Had it not been for the 1994 congressional elections, the wave of what George Will called a cymbal-clash change of the electorate, this measure now before the Senate is pretty much the measure we would have been considering. It brings the Family Support Act of 1988 up to the higher standards, higher expectations that we assumed would come with time and which we also assumed in what might seem the innocence of the last decade would be as bipartisan an effort as was the original. The Family Support Act passed the Senate on June 16, 1988, by a vote of 93 to 3. We went to conference. The conference committee agreed. It came back, and on September 29 it passed out of this Senate 96 to 1, and then the following day the conference report was agreed to in the House by a vote of 347 to 53, near to an overwhelming vote. And on October 13, it was signed by President Reagan in a ceremony in the Rose Garden. Then Governor William J. Clinton of Arkansas, the Chairman of the Governors' Association was on hand, as was Governor Mike Castle, then Republican Governor of Delaware. The two of them had helped this bipartisan effort in the Governors' Association. President Reagan said: I'm pleased to sign into law today a major reform of our Nation's welfare system, the Family Support Act. This bill creates a new emphasis on the importance of work for individuals in the welfare system. It basically redefined the Aid to Families with Dependent Children legislation, which dates back to 1935. What had been a widow's pension, meant to phase out as survivor's insurance matured in Social Security, had become a wholly different program for a wholly different population, and within a certain measure of delay, when the time came, we redefined the program, redefined its objectives. We did so, Mr. President, with a measure of realism, even of modesty, in the face of extraordinary change in our social structure, our social system, if you will. This change came suddenly and without warning and to this day it can be quantified but scarcely explained. I refer to the subject that has been spoken about with candor and, I think, understanding, with an openness on the floor in this debate already, which is the rise of out- of-wedlock births, from about 6 percent nationwide in 1960 to about 33 percent today. I have commented several times that this is something we did not know how to talk about, were not sure we ought to talk about, but which Presidents now openly discuss. President Bush was the first President to raise this issue in a State of the Union Message. President Clinton has done the same. President Clinton has suggested projections that we have made in our office which could take us surely to 40 percent, a number without meaning until this moment in history. We could not have imagined it. We created the JOBS Program, one of those acronyms, Jobs Opportunities and Basic Skills. We set quotas, percentages that States had to meet as they moved along with the funds available, and we began to see results. We never promised a very great deal. We made very clear that the persons we were concerned about were the persons most in need, and they are not difficult to define, Mr. President. About 42 percent of persons who enter the welfare system are there for 24 months or less. They typically are women with children whose marriages have dissolved, and it takes them a period to put their life back, their affairs back in order, and they do. A fairly considerable amount of research has indicated they do not need anything but time and a certain amount of income support, which is what the Social Security system is all about. On the other hand, a very large proportion of our children enter this system and stay in it for more than 5 [[Page S 12880]] years, stay in it for much of their childhood. Seventy-six percent of persons on the AFDC rolls at any given time will be on more than 5 years. They are the ones who are most in need. They are the ones who are most difficult to help. Those are the ones, when something succeeds, you have saved a life. We should concentrate on that. We were off to a slow start. We had a recession. We had a rise in the number of out-of-wedlock births. What is worrisome is that the cohort of women age 15-24, the age group disproportionately responsible for out-of-wedlock births, is expected to rise over the next 10 years. We will have more illegitimacy, and consequently more of a need for welfare assistance. That phrase ``demography is destiny''--demography is destiny for the welfare system. In the face of these massive, disturbing, changes in the structure of the family, we enacted the Family Support Act of 1988. For the first time, we said that the single mothers on the welfare rolls must be in education, training, or work to receive their benefits, to the extent State resources permit. We gave States great flexibility to experiment. And we began to get good news from around the country as these programs took effect. The word came out that you can innovate, you ought to try. How many Senators have we heard talking about Riverside, CA? We had the director of that jobs program in to testify before us this spring in the Finance Committee, with enthusiasm, full of energy. He had a blue button that says ``Life works when you work.'' That sort of energy in the executive establishment is to be praised. All across the country, we began to hear of this program and that program taking hold. But still, the welfare caseload grew. As I said yesterday, our assessment in the Congressional Budget Office is that about half the growth was due to the increase in out-of- wedlock births. About a quarter of the decline of the economy is the increase in unemployment. There is a measure in which the economy affects welfare dependency. But primarily, welfare dependency derives from single-parent families. It is affected by the rise in the business cycle--but marginally. We are dealing with something very different, very new, just learning our way. And yet, while we simply do not know how to change the behavior which is driving illegitimacy, we are learning how to get welfare recipients off the rolls and into jobs. What we have learned we have learned under the Family Support Act. That is why it has come as a source of dismay to many students of the subject, scholars such as Lawrence Mead, of New York University, who certainly wishes himself to be understood as conservative in these matters. He said recently of the legislation before us, what we voted on yesterday and what we will vote on: The main effect of block grants would be to disestablish the jobs program which has been the major force pushing States with large caseloads to reform. Dr. Meade has commented that even New York is beginning to get the message. Well, that is a large event. You cannot break the mindset of a half century instantly. There is a sort of law of retarded response, that large bureaucracies established to provide benefits on a permanent basis to permanently dependent persons, widows react slowly to change, and it will take a generation to get it understood that this is no longer the reality. I knew Frances Perkins rather well. She was very much in evidence here in Washington in the early sixties. We began to notice this welfare problem, and I would talk with her about it. When it began, she would describe the typical recipient of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The typical recipient was a West Virginia miner's widow. There was no expectation that she would go to work in the mines. In time, the survivors insurance would take care of that. In time the survivors insurance did. Only about 71 percent of the persons receiving Social Security benefits are retired persons. The rest are spouses, children of deceased workers, and persons of that order. We knew we were changing and we knew the change would be difficult, but we built into our legislation very careful evaluation to find what works. We particularly looked to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation based in New York, which had provided the basic data on which we enacted the legislation, and they have now reported. They are not easily impressed. They quantify, they measure, and they are very realistic. This is what they recently wrote about an assessment of the program Nationwide: This report represents early evidence that well- implemented, highly mandatory jobs programs that use job search followed by a range of short-term education, training, and other services to promote rapid job entry can produce dramatic reductions in welfare receipt and substantial increases in employment and earnings. May I say, Mr. President, the MDRC is not in the habit of referring to dramatic reductions. But they have done it. Indeed, we see our caseloads beginning to decline over the last year. They have dropped by a quarter of a million, 240,000 or almost 5 percent. Most of the decline has come in the 44 smaller States that have about half the caseload. Forty-four States have half of the AFDC cases; six have the other half. I have spoken to you, Mr. President, about the degree to which so many of our cities are effectively overwhelmed by this social disorder, as it now is. In the city of Chicago, in a given year, 46 percent of all children will be on welfare. In Detroit, 67 percent will be. In Philadelphia, 57 percent. In New York, 39 percent. These are numbers that overwhelm a political and a social system. They will stay overwhelmed. It will be a generation before we are out of this. But if we now abandon efforts which are beginning to show results, we will regret it. We will regret it if we remember having done it. I have, several times, referred to a remark made on the Charlie Rose show by the new director of the National Urban League, Mr. Hugh Price, who said that what we are proposing is something equal to the measures of the deinstitutionalization of mental patients in the 1960's. I happen to have been much involved in that. The program began in the 1950's in New York State, where the first tranquilizers were developed. I was on hand, Mr. President, when on October 31, 1963, President John F. Kennedy had his last public bill signing ceremony. He signed the Community Mental Health Construction Act of 1963. He gave me a pen, and I have had it framed. We were going to build 2,000 community mental health centers between then and 1980. We were going to empty out our mental institutions and treat people in their communities. Well, we emptied out our mental institutions, but we did not build the centers. We built about 400 and then forgot what we were doing. Then the problem of the homeless appeared, and people said, ``Where did these homeless persons come from?" In my city of New York they said, well, it is obviously the problem of lack of affordable housing. It was not a lack of affordable housing. It is schizophrenia, found in a basic incidence of large populations. We did something terribly wrong and we cannot even recover the memory. If in 10 years' time we find children sleeping on grates, picked up in the morning frozen, and we ask, why are they scavenging, being awful to themselves, awful to one another? Would anyone remember how it began? It would have begun on the House floor this spring and the Senate Chamber this autumn. You will have half a million children in New York City with altogether inadequate provision, if any. It will almost be forgotten. Such is the amnesiac quality of so much of our politics, that there was a time when the Federal Government said it had a responsibility. These children are all our children and we are all responsible for them. If you had more intelligent federalism it would sort so many things out. We have so many things we are doing at the Federal level in which we have no business. It was remarked yesterday that when the Food Stamp Program began, States were free to set their own levels and they set them at wildly different levels, and many were quite inadequate. President Nixon came along and said, no, children are children, they are all American children. We will have a national standard. President Nixon proposed a guaranteed income. The distinguished Presiding Officer was presiding the other day when just by coincidence a Brazilian [[Page S 12881]] Senator happened to be in Washington and came to watch us, observe us. I went out to introduce myself and asked him to come and join us on the floor. Senator Eduardo Suplicy, who gave us a copy of a bill that has passed the Brazilian Senate which provided a guaranteed minimum income--all families with children up to age 14. Brazil is doing it, moving in the direction we were. We are moving away. We are moving away amidst all manner of myth and misinformation. First of all there is the myth that there is, in fact, an individual entitlement to welfare benefits. There is not, sir. States are entitled to a Federal matching share of any outlays they make on their own State programs. The Federal share for various States ranges from 50 percent to about 78 percent. A State may have any program it wishes; it may have no program and provide $1 per year per child or $1,000 per year per child. The number of actual Federal requirements are relatively few. The Federal statute says you can have only $1,000 in assets. All these children are paupers. The bureaucracy has been too presciptive in detailing how States may implement their programs, and has often taken much too long to approve various State experiments. But the fact remains that under current law States have a good deal of flexibility, and through the waiver process they can do almost anything they please. There exists now flexibility for innovation, as there exists a Federal commitment to provide a share of provision to impoverished dependent children. If we abandon that, we abandon those children. The legislation offered in the Finance Committee--I see my distinguished friend from Illinois was there--and now here as an amendment in the nature of the substitute, would build on the Family Support Act of 1988. We would increase the funding for the Jobs Program from $1.2 billion in this coming fiscal year to $2.5 billion. The Federal matching rate for JOBS and child care would go from 60 to 70 percent. The participation rates would increase from 20 percent this year in stages to 50 percent in the year 2001. These are increases we anticipated would be made as we got the hang of this effort, got to learn more about it. We learned, for example, that immediate job search is the most important thing; that a focus solely on educational training delays the reality of getting a job. We are even learning to break one of the worst habits we ever acquired on this subject, which is disparaging entry-level jobs. My Lord, how I have spent 30 years listening to ``advocates'' talk about dead end jobs. Now the cliche is ``flipping hamburgers.'' The present chief executive officer of McDonald's, Ed Rensi, began flipping hamburgers. As I recall, he entered his entry wage at 83 cents an hour. Everybody starts. It is getting started that matters most. This was our program, Mr. President. We had great hopes for it. It was bipartisan--96 to 1. It has taken hold. If we look around, a great majority of the States have been coming in, proposing innovative measures of this kind, such as increasing income--disregards, moving people into the work force. We have a transition from Medicaid provision for a year after leaving the AFDC rolls. We have child care provisions. We thought this out. We have done it. We have done it well. That we should abandon it now would be a great loss to our children. The United States will end up looking to the rest of the world as a place that cannot handle its affairs. We will wonder what we did. We have an opportunity to avoid that. We will vote in a very short while now. Three years ago we would routinely have upgraded, updated, brought up to the expected higher standards the Family Support Act. If we are unwilling to do so today, at least in 10 years' time, when the horrors we shall have visited upon the children of the United States begin to be unmistakable, there will be those who can remember this day in this Chamber and say, ``I saw that coming and I voted to prevent it.'' Mr. President, I yield the floor. I see the distinguished Senator from Iowa is managing and would like to speak.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I understand the distinguished Senator from West Virginia would like to offer an amendment, and to do so with celerity. I yield 30 seconds for such purpose.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself 90 seconds, first to say in response to my friend from Iowa, my long associate on the Committee on Finance, he was this morning talking of the achievements of the State of Iowa in this area, and did so the other day, and he was talking about the achievements under the Family Support Act. There is yet a new proposal that came from Iowa, a request for a new set of disregards, and such like, received in April and approved in August for the Iowa Family Investment Program. The Senator is right to be proud, but why not associate what Iowa has done with the legislation that encouraged it. I do not ask a response. I do not expect a response. But I would like to put that new Iowa Family Investment Program in the Record at this point, Mr. President. It is one page.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, again, in response to my friend, it is the fact that in the 1992 campaign, then candidate, now President Clinton proposed to end welfare as we know it. [[Page S 12884]] In an address to Georgetown University opening his campaign in 1991, he proposed a 2-year limit and now we begin to see the consequences. I have nothing more to say than that except to concede, I hope graciously, the Senator is right. We are ending the Federal entitlement to States for the support of dependent children and it is ending what we have known as welfare. Sir, my able colleague and friend from Louisiana would like to speak to the experience of Louisiana under the Family Support Act. I am happy to yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Would my friend mind if we alternate at this point?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I am very happy to yield 5 minutes of our remaining time to my strong colleague on the Committee on Finance, the Senator from Illinois.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield 1 additional minute.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield 30 seconds to the distinguished Senator from Arkansas.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. And I yield 1 minute of the 2 minutes, generously provided by the Senator from Iowa, to the Senator from New Jersey.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield back such time as we may have remaining.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the Senator from Ohio wishes to be recognized.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I defer to the Senator from Minnesota.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I defer to the Senator from Illinois.