Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate might stand in recess for 1 minute in order to welcome our colleague from Brazil, Senator Eduardo Suplicy. [Applause]

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, by a happy circumstance, we have a visitor on the floor today, Senator Eduardo Suplicy of the Brazilian Senate, who is the author of legislation in that Senate which will establish a guaranteed national income in Brazil and is now in debate in that assembly. It is a matter that has been discussed on this floor today. So it is very serendipitous indeed.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in recess for a period of 20 minutes.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Bravo. Mr. GRASSLEY addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. While the Senator from Louisiana is here, I want to say I very much appreciated this exchange. It made me feel like we are back in 1988. There are two things to say. One is that there is a participation requirement in existing law of 20 percent. It was put in the law in 1988--to be phased in to 20 percent--with the clear expectation that as the program took hold, the jobs program, it would move forward. In a bill before the Finance Committee--which the administration has abandoned, and I grant that--we moved that rate from 20 percent, as anticipated, on schedule just about, to 35 percent in 1998, to 40 percent in 1999, to 45 and then 50 percent in the year 2001. What we lose in so much of what is on the floor right now is the specific Federal funding to do this. Governors and mayors will look up in despair in 5 years. I say to my friend from Pennsylvania, there will be on the desk very shortly now the estimates for the proportion of children on AFDC, welfare, in 1993. These are estimated, but they are fairly accurate. In Philadelphia, at any point in time, 44 percent of the children are on AFDC. In the course of a year, 57 percent are. Now, those numbers overwhelm the system. Thirty years ago, when it would have been 10 percent at one time and 13 over a time, you could say, all right, Philadelphia, PA, you take care of this problem. I have watched it come that these numbers overwhelm the city. These problems are so much deeper. On last Saturday in Baltimore--the Senator from Connecticut will be interested in this--there was a kind of public celebration as they blew up the Lafayette Public Housing Complex in downtown Baltimore. It happened in Newark a year ago. It first appeared in St. Louis, where the Pruitt-Igoe Houses were blown up in 1972. In the city of Baltimore, it was announced, and the mayor had the plunger, and they had T-shirts, and they made the most of it. They described the housing as ``warehousing the poor.'' When it was built, it was a model complex. It got awards everywhere. What a nice way to live, right downtown, and I think they could see the harbor. They are going to replace them now with townhouses. Eighty-five percent of the persons in the townhouses will be on AFDC. Each will have a case manager from the Johns Hopkins School of Social Work. They will be very carefully attended to and all these things. There will be townhouse case managers. How many townhouses? There will be 317. Those are the realities. How many hundreds of thousands of children in Baltimore will be eligible? I plead to a Senate that does not hear me on this. These numbers of people receiving welfare benefits are beyond the capacity of the States and local government. Cutting off the Federal commitment that we have had for 60 years is an action bordering on mindlessness. And I make the case with no very great expectation of persuading anyone. Thank you, Mr. President. I thank my friend from Pennsylvania. This morning, the Senator from Oregon and I were going over these numbers. If Philadelphia is 57, Detroit is 67. New York, which is larger, is 39.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Which is 100 percent Federal money.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Will the Senator yield for just a question?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I know he would be aware, he is speaking so well, so feelingly and wisely, that in 1992 the number of children born to unmarried women was 1,224,876 souls, one and a quarter million children in 1 year.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank the Senator from Connecticut for his extraordinary, moving, judicious, serious comments. I know his capacity for sometimes biblical patience, and I also know his capacity for indignation when things have gone on for too long. We have been too long on the subject. In 1971, a Republican President, President Nixon, had proposed a guaranteed income as a substitute for this subject. It was H.R. 1 in the House of Representatives. And it happened that on February 8, 1971, all three of the then major news magazines--and still those--had the subject of welfare on their covers. News Week on its cover had welfare. ``WELFARE: There Must Be a Better Way,'' it said of the President's program, ``It will constitute a humanitarian achievement unrivaled since the New Deal.'' It was not humanitarian enough for Democrats; too humanitarian for some Republicans. The cover story of Time was devoted to ``The Welfare Maze.'' It began: ``The U.S. welfare system is a living nightmare that has reached the point of the involuntary scream and chill awakening.'' That is how Time began its issue. The cover story of US News & World Report: ``Welfare Out of Control-- Story of Financial Crisis Cities Face.'' Now, in that year, sir, the illegitimacy ratio for the nation was 11.2 percent. It is now three times that, the number of children born in that circumstance. Where we have 1,225,000 today, in 1971 it was 400,000. It is three times, almost, that ratio. The ratio has increased by a factor of three, the number of children by a factor of three. That is the central phenomenon. I think the Progressive Policy Institute has been very helpful in this regard. There is this phenomenon of statutory rape. As deviancy gets redefined, we do not think much of that anymore. But it is still law.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. What would the Senator hypothesize? Would the Senator hypothesize that the households in which the children grow up no longer have anyone who will defend them? ``You can't come in here. And you will please go out there and close the door behind you.'' Lee Rainwater, a whole generation ago studying the public housing in Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, wrote an essay on the feeling within a household, ``Can you say no to someone who wants to come in?'' A thought that perhaps would not occur to many persons here. Close your door at night, and that is it. Close yours, and I close mine. The French sociologist, Henri Bergson spoke at the turn of the century of society becoming a dust of individuals--no ties. I think this new data on ages of the fathers suggests that. I think you are absolutely right; if anybody could mobilize the attorneys general, the Senator from Connecticut could. I will certainly support that amendment. I look forward to it. And I thank you for your comments. I know the Senator from Pennsylvania would agree we are trying to reach some understandings here. We have understandings. And where we have different assessments, well, that is why we have the Senate. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. LIEBERMAN addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I may be allowed to address the Senator from Pennsylvania directly.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I will check this out and have an answer for you directly, but I believe the actual surveys of household unemployment are done by the Bureau of the Census and the data is analyzed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And I think you are on to a point which should be resolved. I will do my best to do so. I thank the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. In making a thoughtful point and comment, he would be aware that the GAIN program in Riverside, CA, is a program developed under the Family Support Act?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. If I may put it in question form. He might know that in the summer of 1992, President Bush visited Riverside and was making a point that it seemed to be working and is catching on. I rushed to the floor with a photograph of President Reagan signing the Family Support Act and shaking hands with then-Governor Clinton, who was head of the Governors Association at that time. He and the Governor of Delaware, now our colleague in the House, worked together on a bipartisan basis. I just wish that we would be conscious of this. I do not ask the Senator to agree. But I am saying we have something working, and we may miss it.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. The WPA and PWA.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I would say I do not know. There is, of course, a 1- year transition in the current law of the Family Support Act. We will find that out.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, does the Senator wish to have these data at this point?

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, at a point in our history when we have successfully avoided the Armagedonnic catastrophe of nuclear confrontation and have began the sensible process of limiting nuclear warheads by treaty, the Senate proposes to adopt a bill that could resurrect the nuclear arms race, and, in the process, jeopardize 23 years of arms control treaties. The Armed Services Committee has presented the Senate with a bill that proposes a national ballistic missile defense system. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this is a $48 billion proposition. Can we in good conscience embark on a project to doubtful feasibility and enormous cost, which only addresses one of many nuclear threats? Potential adversaries will simply channel their resources into producing delivery vehicles that the system could not defend against; submarines, cruise missiles, stealth aircraft, terrorists car bombs. In 1977, Prof. Han Bethe of Cornell University, one of the most distinguished figures of sciences in the nuclear age, during a visit to my home in upstate New York, warned me that such a plans would 1 day be presented to the Senate. On March 23, 1983, with little attention given to the technical details, President Reagan proposed an initiative which became known as the strategic defense initiative [SDI]. We have yet to work out the technical details of a national missile defense system. Yet there are those in this body who appear to be bent on deploying some remnant of the SDI, without regard to the potential threats that exist, or the costs involved. In testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee in 1992, Dr. Bethe elaborated on his objections to deploying such a system. I ask unanimous consent that an excerpt from the transcript of that hearing be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, George P. Shultz recounts in his biography ``Turmoil and Triumph'' that SDI was President Reagan's own idea but that the plan was announced after a favorable endorsement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then Secretary of State Shultz reports that when Lawrence Eagleburger informed him that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told the President that a strategic defense system could be developed, the Secretary responded, ``The Chiefs are not equipped to make this kind of proposal. They are not scientists.'' Of course, when the scientists were consulted, it was concluded it could not be done. Finally, consideration must be given to the possible response of Russia to our actions. The original bill would have required us to abrogate the ABM Treaty. If we were to break the ABM Treaty unilaterally, it is clear that Russia would respond by rejecting START II. This amendment still proposes that if the Russians do not agree to modify the ABM Treaty to allow us to deploy a national missile defense system that consideration be given to United States withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Russian nationalists would certainly be pleased if we would do so. My point is simply that the national missile defense system envisioned in this bill will only be effective against limited ballistic missile attacks. Limited is not defined, but it is unlikely that it might be referring to a capability of defending against 1,400 ballistic missiles launched simultaneously? We can wipe out 1,400 ballistic missiles; not with a ballistic missile defense system, but with a treaty. The START II Treaty. Treaties can go a long way to protecting us against nuclear weapons. If we jeopardize ratification of START II, we risk a lot for this limited ballistic missile defense system. missile defense

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to correct a statement which I made on the floor in the course of our previous 2 days of debate, the beginning of debate, on this legislation. I rise to not only correct my statement but to offer an apology to the Senate if I have misled anyone, which I certainly did not intend, nor did anyone. On that occasion, I offered a chart, as you see here, indicating the proportion of children who received aid to families with dependent children in 1992. This data was prepared for us at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Wendell Primus is responsible there, and mistakes were made. He found those mistakes and called them to our attention. In the meantime, the Washington Times had written a very fine editorial pointing to this data, saying, ``My God, if there is ever evidence this system is failing, it will be found in these tables.'' These bar charts are easily translated into tables. Then we had to inform the Washington Times that the numbers were scrambled. At one point, it was no more than a simple typing error in a computer printout. But we now have the correct numbers, and I would like to introduce them to the Senate at this time, as against the data I presented on August 8. The new figures are the corrected numbers for 1993. The data are the estimated proportion of children receiving AFDC, that is aid to families with dependent children, title IV of the Social Security Act, in 1993, which is our last count. As you can see, Mr. President, if you were to recall the numbers originally, the city of Los Angeles was recorded as having almost two-thirds of its children on welfare at one point or over the course of a year. That involved a mistake between the city and the county, not something I am sure happens frequently. Los Angeles drops to a point where I can almost say, Mr. President, that in 1993 only 38 percent of the children in Los Angeles were on AFDC at some point or other in the year. Think what it means to say ``only'' 38 percent, which is to say quite literally, by Federal regulation--and my friend, the distinguished chairman, will be talking about some of those regulations. I see he has some stacked on his desk. I am reminded, those are historic desks. If they were to collapse under the load of Federal regulation, the historical society would have something to say about that. But the idea under AFDC regulations, there are not too many requirements of the AFDC Program. One is a limit on assets, and the limit on assets is $1,000; $1,000 for households, which is to say these are households that are paupers and have to stay paupers as a condition of staying alive. If you said only 38 percent of the children in our city were paupers during the course of the year, 20 years ago the public would say, ``What?'' In Detroit, it is 67 percent. Those figures were adjusted. We found that Los Angeles went down. New York went up; 39 percent of all children at one point of the year. New York is our largest city with about 7.5 million persons. We have at any given time rather more than a million persons on welfare, which is AFDC plus home relief, numbers not known in the depths of the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, in 1937, when you probably had about as much as 30 percent unemployment, there were half a million persons receiving home relief in New York City. Today, in the aftermath of 50 years of economic growth, we look up and there are more than a million. And 39 percent of our children are on AFDC at one point or another in the course of the year. In Philadelphia, it is 57 percent. In San Diego, it is 30 percent. The San Diego figures and the Los Angeles figures are close in that range. Texas has, generally speaking, a low rate--San Antonio, 20 percent, and Houston, 22 percent. There is a certain uniformity there. The city of Phoenix, AZ, has as prosperous an appearance as any city on Earth. It grows, I have been told, by a square mile a day. The southern Arizona project brings in water. Barry Goldwater provides a welcome and people cannot wait to move out there. There are green lawns where I think there should not be green lawns. That is desert. But that is another matter. In Phoenix, 18 percent of the children are paupers at one point during the year. These numbers can be elaborated. To what exact purpose, I would be hesitant to say. But we do know that Senator Daschle's legislation, as well as Senator Dole's and Senator Packwood's, does address this question of putting children on supplemental security income as a mode of welfare benefits. If you combine AFDC with SSI in 1993, you get yet higher rates. You get 67 percent for Detroit. You see that it goes from 54 percent AFDC when you add SSI. It is a large number. I think it is the case that the number of children receiving SSI has grown by about 400 percent in the last decade. This is not because there are 400 percent more children disabled. We have had administrative interpretations of statutes which increase the number of children in this category. Philadelphia gets 59 percent; San Diego, 30 percent; Los Angeles, 38 percent; Baltimore, 56 percent; New York, 40 percent. And so it goes. These are horrendous numbers, and they ask for--they demand--some level of interpretation. The Washington Times, in a perfectly fair- minded editorial--to my mind, a fair-minded editorial--had commented on these numbers that are overstated in the case of Los Angeles and understated in the case of New York. It had this in its editorial, ``Welfare Shock.'' I ask unanimous consent, Mr. President, that this be printed in the Record at this point, without the table.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the point of the editorial is, good God, what happened to our children? Can the present system be as bad as the data depict? If so, let us be rid of that system directly. I wrote to them informing them that we had new data, and it was not significantly different. Well, in the case of Los Angeles, it was; that should be made clear. Otherwise, it was in this range. I wrote a letter in which I simply made the point that--well, first of all, I submitted the correct new data, which took a slightly different view from the editorial. It was a very different view from the editorial in the Washington Times. I ask unanimous consent that my letter and the subsequent editorial with the corrected data be printed in the Record at this point.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, here is the point I made, and some will not agree--probably most will not agree. Yet, I have been at this long enough to recognize this. The Times takes the view that any system which has produced this result is so bad it must be profoundly changed, dismantled, and done away with. Indeed, the legislation before us on this side of the aisle--the majority leader's legislation--would in fact put an end to this system. It abolishes title 4(a) of the Social Security Act of 1935. It makes a block grant which is sent down to the States, based on their present Federal benefit, and leaves it that the States are free to do what they will. I will not get into it at this moment. But the States are not free to do what they will, anyway. No State has to have a welfare program. No, you do not have to have a welfare program. You do not have to provide more than--you can provide $1 a month per child or $1,000 a month per child. The idea that there are big Federal regulations is mistaken. It is not that the Federal Government has not sought to do a lot of regulating, but the statutes are relatively spare. With a waiver, you can do virtually anything you want. And to say it is your job, now that this system has failed, to take it over, what that does is disengage the Federal Government. No child is entitled to welfare benefits. The State can provide that a child receives benefits, or it can do otherwise. But under the Social Security Act, if a State provides welfare benefits, the Federal Government provides a matching grant. It will match 50 percent, up to about 79 percent, at this point. It used to be as high as 82 percent in the Southern States. My point is that 30 years ago, when we first picked up the onset of this extraordinary demographic social change, you could have made the case: Let the States do it; let the cities do it. You could have made that case. You [[Page S 12682]] cannot make it today, in my view. This is too much. This is beyond the capacity of State governments and city governments. They will be overwhelmed, and soon we will be wondering, what did we do? Mr. Hugh Price, the relatively new, recently appointed, director of the National Urban League, made an important comment on the ``Charlie Rose Show''--not a pronouncement, just a comment. He said if we do what is proposed and put time limits--the President, at Georgetown University in 1991, when he began his Presidential campaign, put out a 2-year time limit--he said that we will have an effect similar to the deinstitutionalization of our mental institutions that began in the 1950's and culminated in Federal legislation in 1963. I am going to take a moment, if I can, just to talk about that, because I think Mr. Price hit upon a brilliant analogy--the appearance on our streets of homeless persons sleeping in doorways, sleeping in bus stations. You do not have to do more than walk down Constitution Avenue from the Capitol, not four blocks from here, and you will find, in the dead of winter, people sleeping on grates. It has happened everywhere. It has happened, I dare to say, in Portland, OR. I say to my friend, the chairman of our committee, that Portland, OR, will not appear on this list. It is a very interesting story, and it is a very powerful cautionary tale. I was present at the creation, 1955, in the spring, in the State capitol in Albany, N.Y. Averell Harriman was being introduced to the person who was to be nominated as the commissioner of mental hygiene, a wonderful doctor named Paul Hoch. He had been head of the New York Psychiatric Institute, a great research analyst. He had been chosen by the late Jonathan Bingham, then secretary to the Governor, later Member of the House of Representatives. As has happened before in history, the Governor was playing a role in a little drama that had been preconceived. Present also was the director of the budget, Paul H. Appleby, the eminent public servant of the New Deal era, deputy director of the budget under President Truman. Also present, notetaker, if you will, was the Senator from New York. I was an assistant to Mr. Bingham. The Governor greeted Dr. Hoch and said how pleased he was to learn that he was willing to come and do this job, and Jonathan Bingham has recommended him most particularly, as indeed Jack Bingham had done. The Governor asked how were things going in that field. Doctor Hoch said, well, down at Rockland State Hospital, which is in Rockland County in the lower Hudson Valley, Dr. Nathan Kline had been working with a chemical substance that had been derived from the root rauwolfia serpentina, used in medicine for 5 millennium. It calmed people down in the Hindus Valley. German organic chemists had succeeded in reproducing it, and it was used on patients in Rockland State, and it had real effects. It was our first tranquilizer. It would come to be known as reserpine. The doctor said he thought it should be used systemwide. At that time in the 1950's, mental health was one of our most visible public issues. Every State legislature proposed every year, appropriated another bond issue to build another hospital. We projected the time when half the population of New York State would be in a mental institution and the other half would be working in a mental institution--97,000 persons. Today, Mr. President, there are about 6,000. We wanted them out, but we did not care for them after they left. I came to Washington in 1961 in the administration of President Kennedy, who was much interested in this subject. A report of a joint commission established by the Congress was waiting for us. In effect, it said, go with medication and deinstitutionalization. The last public bill signing ceremony that John F. Kennedy conducted was on October 23, 1963. He signed the Community Mental Health Center Construction Act of 1963. He gave me a pen. I was present. I had worked on the legislation, having had something in the background from Albany. We were going to build 2,000 community mental health centers by the year 1980, and one per 100,000 population, as the population grew. We wanted our mental institutions, but we did not build the community centers. We built about 400, the program got folded into another program, shifted around, and pretty soon people were thinking about something else and it quite disappeared from our minds. Then the problem of homelessness appeared. With the unfailing capacity for getting things wrong in my city of New York, an advocacy group grew up saying we have a problem here of a lack of affordable housing. That is not what it was at all. Schizophrenia--we knew in the 1960's there would be a constant incidence of that particular disorder in large populations. We did not have quite the genetic information we have now. I do not speak beyond my knowledge, but the statistical data was sufficient to say this is something that happens in Patagonia, it happens in Alaska, it happens in Bucharest, it happens in Los Angeles, all at about the same rate. There it is. A puzzle, a great public failure. My friend from Oregon will remember that during the brief interlude in which I was chairman of the Committee on Finance, the last New Yorker was in 1849, and it may be another century and a half until the next New Yorker was, but there were 2 years, not necessarily a shining moment, but there it was. We were dealing with health care matters, as the chairman will not soon forget. I had two things on our wall. One was a small portrait of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, that great New Yorker. The other was the pen certificate which had the pen that President Kennedy gave me on that day in October 1963, when we signed the Communities Mental Health Center Construction Act of 1963. As I just said, ``Be very careful what you do.'' To cite Hippocrates, primum non nocere. It is my contention, Mr. President, it would be my argument, I cannot demonstrate, I can simply make the case with numbers this large, proportions this large, we dare not disconnect the Federal Government from this problem of our children. The connection we made in 1935 when our resources were vastly fewer than they are today, they will be overwhelmed. In a very little while as the time limits comes into effect, I estimate a 5-year time might put half a million children on the streets of New York City in 10 years' time, and we will wonder where they came from. We will say, ``Why are these children sleeping on grates? Why are they being picked up in the morning frozen? Why are they scrambling? Why are they horrible to each other, a menace to all, most importantly to themselves?'' Well, this is what will have happened, in my view. I can say that 30 years and more of association with this subject makes me feel it would happen. Mr. President, once again, with apologies to the Senate for having provided somewhat misleading data on August 8, without intention, it was received from the Department of Health and Human Services without any purpose to mislead, and was corrected by the Department. Having placed the incorrect data in the Record, I ask that the correct table be printed in the Record at this point.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. With great thanks for the courtesy and attention of the Chair, I yield the floor. I see my distinguished friend has risen, and I am happy to turn to him.