Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, we have an informal arrangement alternating side by side, but no Democratic Member on this side is seeking recognition. I am happy to hear from the Senator from Colorado. Mr. BROWN addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. May I just express the appreciation of this Senator for the remarks that have been made by the Senator from West Virginia, the chairman of the Rockefeller Commission on Children, who spoke so carefully and thoughtfully, particularly to his point about dependency. The issue of welfare is the issue of dependency, and in a world where adults stand on their own two feet, as the phrase has it, we have a situation in which the condition of dependency is massive in our cities, pervasive in the land, and while we have not been able to solve the problem, we are making real steps in addressing it. And I want very much to share his sentiments and his concerns. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. May I respond to my friend and chairman after a very graphic, very powerful statement. I wonder if we have not wandered, perhaps without anticipating it, into a larger subject, which is that of bureaucracy in America and central government in America, federalism in America. The President in his 1992 campaign, starting with an address at Georgetown University in 1991, proposed to end welfare as we know it. He had in mind, I think he clearly had in mind the proposals set forth by David Ellwood in his book ``Poor Support,'' which was published in 1988, which the chairman knows, on poverty and the American family. And Dr. Ellwood is now the academic dean of the Kennedy School. He has left Washington, but he had an idea for the type of limited welfare which would involve very much larger expenditures than we now have. The bill that was proposed finally toward the end of the second year of the administration would have cost $11,762,000,000 over 5 years; $12 billion in additional outlays, which is a sense of what we have. But talking about ending welfare as we know it, it seems to me we have begun the debate about ending the Department of Health and Human Services as we know it. The pattern here is discouraging, but it is also predictable. When Government gives away money, there is only one way an administrator can get in [[Page S 11818]] trouble, only one way a caseworker can get in trouble. And I wonder if my friend would not agree with me, the only way to get in trouble is giving money to someone who is not entitled to it, giving money by mistake, giving money by modes that could be depicted as inappropriate, improper, felonious, for that matter. It is in the nature of a Government program to say that we have to be absolutely certain that you are eligible before you would be given money. And that will overwhelm any other enterprise. The most striking line on the Senator's chart there, Federal Barriers To Moving Welfare Recipients Into Work, State Of Oregon, is that only 10 percent of agency time is spent on JOBS activities. Now, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Program began with the 1988 Family Support Act. It was the first effort to redefine welfare to say this is not a widow's pension with an indefinite stay assumed. This is a program to help young persons who are in need of assistance to get out of a dependent mode into an independent life through job opportunities. And all the years since we passed that legislation--and I recall--I have said several times, it went out the Senate door 96-1 in 1988, 96- 1. We rarely have such a vote. But no one from the Department of Health and Human Services has ever come near this Senator--I do not think there would be any other one--to say, ``You know, we are not getting as much out of this legislation as we hoped for because we are bogged down in administrative procedure.'' I see my friend from Oregon is agreeing. We can get 10 percent of the time in Oregon; and Oregon is not a State overwhelmed with this problem. Oregon is not the city of Los Angeles with 62 percent of its children on welfare. It is not the city of New York with more than half a million children on welfare. There are about 11 States in the Union that have a total population that is smaller than the welfare population of New York State. This is not being evenly distributed. But it is clear that here in Washington a responsible bureaucracy has not sensed how irresponsible its procedures have come to be seen in the Nation. How almost conspiratorial they have come to be seen, as if you are trying to prevent us from doing what we would like to do. There is a hidden agenda in all these--``Did you get yellow rain benefits under this program? That is all right; that program, not all right.'' Clearly there is some hidden motive in such seemingly absurd distinctions. That is the condition of the Federal Government. We look up and we find park rangers--as a child I do not know that there was any more of a benevolent role that a person could have than to be a park ranger with a Smokey Bear hat, welcoming you to Yellowstone Park or the Statue of Liberty, as a matter of fact. Suddenly they are being threatened, seen as oppressors. They are seen as persons involved in illicit acts intended on depriving citizens of their liberties. Well, bureaucracies that do not get that message will hear what the Department of Health and Human Services is hearing on the Senate floor. I have not heard one statement on either side of the aisle which has not in particular taken up the issue of the bureaucracy here in Washington. It is not large, 327 persons, but, indeed, neither has it been sensitive to the way it is perceived. As I say, in 19 years in the Senate dealing with this subject, no one has ever come to us from that Department--it was HEW when it began, when I first arrived--saying, ``We do have a problem here. I think we have some ways to deal with it.'' It was the same thing, if I may say, until last year when we enacted legislation which came out of the Finance Committee to take the Social Security Administration out of the Department of Health and Human Services where it kind of ended up after floating around in the 1940's. A majority of nonretired adults do not think they will receive Social Security. Now, that is a statement of a lack of confidence in Government that is pretty striking. If people think that the Government is lying about that, which is pretty elemental, your retirement benefits, your retirement and disability insurance, what else do they think? But it has not troubled the Department of Health and Human Services that persons did not believe in this most elemental contract. I mean, a person is paying for their Social Security benefits. Seventy percent of the American people, adults, taxpayers, pay more in Social Security payroll taxes, combining the employer and employee, than they do in income tax. If a majority of the nonretired adults think that the Government is lying, well, that is a problem which the administrators could not see because they felt they were not lying. In time you will find out we were not. We have never been a day late or a dollar short. It did not trouble them. And I have made the point, if you do not think you are going to get Social Security, you will not miss it when they take it away. Despite efforts to get earnings statements and a decent card to replace that pasteboard from the 1930's, we had no success. We have earning statements now. We had to legislate them, Mr. President. They could have done it entirely on their own. But we had to tell people, ``Yes, we know your name. We know what you made last year. We recorded it as such. Keep on going about the way you are going and this is what you will expect when you are 65.'' I mean, a simple statement that banks put out once a month, insurance companies put out once a year, that kind of thing. I have heard things on the floor that disturb me. And there is a lack of response. If there is anybody in the Department of Health and Human Services listening, may I say, ``You may be listening to the case being made for abolishing your Department.'' It has been dismantled piece by piece. Education was taken out. Social Security was taken out. Pretty soon there will not be--the Surgeon General's office is not being funded. In time there may be nothing left except the Hubert H. Humphrey Building. I wish he were alive, but I would not wish him to be alive to see what is going on today. I see my very good friend, Senator Abraham, is on the floor. And in the manner we have of alternating statements, I will be happy to yield the floor for the remarks by my friend.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Ninety-six to one.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. The majority leader is present. I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the distinguished leader is on the floor. I know he wants to speak. I will not delay him but 90 seconds, perhaps, to thank the Senator from Iowa for his remarks about the energetic new program that has been developed in Iowa, [[Page S 11757]] which was done in the context and under the rules of the Family Support Act. It is exactly what we looked for. Federal money is involved. They had to get a waiver. It took a few months. They got it. What more, I do not know, could be asked of a level of government that is participating in the financing. I wish we did not have to have this rhetoric of liberal micromanaging. The AFDC Program has been in place for 55 years. During those 55 years, we have had a Democratic Presidency for 27; a Republican Presidency for 28. It is about even. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program--the programs are set by the States, not by the Federal Government. You can have a large and generous program, you can have no program. Wisconsin, at the end of 1997, will have no program. That is its right. Finally--I do not want to keep the majority leader waiting--a certain touch of reality here. We have heard all day long about this suffocating, all-embracing, ever-expanding Federal bureaucracy that runs the welfare programs. Mr. President, I have here a letter from Mary Jo Bane, the Assistant Secretary for Children and Families. It reports that in the 55 years of the AFDC Program, the monster Federal bureaucracy here in Washington running that program has reached 92 persons--92 persons--the JOBS Program, 26 persons. In the regions, AFDC is 144 persons; JOBS, 65 persons. In the entire Nation there are 327 Federal employees dealing with what we generically call welfare; 327. That is not a staggering number. There are 327 elevator operators in the U.S. Capitol and we have automatic elevators--or some such number. It is being said of the majority leader's bill that he only cuts this bloated bureaucracy back 30 percent. If you cut it back 30 percent, Heaven help us, that might mean 100 people. If we cut it in half, that could mean 150. I do not know what we need do, but we surely need not begin a serious debate like this with such little respect for data, which data is not difficult to obtain. I have also heard at some length this morning about how little we know about so much of this problem. The Senator from Washington made that point with great clarity, I thought. But we do know how many people are working on AFDC in Washington and the Department of Health and Human Services. The number is 92. They are dealing with 15 million people. I leave it there. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this letter from the Honorable Mary Jo Bane be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, if I may say, the Senator is correct. That was the article.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Fourteen.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Plus food stamps.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I ask unanimous consent to address the Senator directly.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Reasonable persons learned there would be no additional money when an additional child was born; they did not report it, and in time these numbers got resolved and there appeared no effect of any kind.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. The Senator is correct. The study done at Rutgers University showed that.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. The Senator yields the floor. May I say I understand we will alternate speakers. I hope Senator Wellstone might be the next speaker on our side.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Sir, I will ask you to let me evade that question because I simply do not know. You can see the ratio of nonmarital births as being much higher in those Nordic countries which have high benefits, but I make this point, that in 1960--the Senator is very generous with his time, but I ask him to hear me--in 1960, in the United Kingdom, the illegitimacy ratio was 5 percent; by 1992, it was 31 percent. In Canada, in 1960, it was 4 percent; in 1992, it was 27 percent. In France, in 1960, it was 6 percent; in 1992 it was 33 percent. So you go from 6, 5, 5, 4, to 33, 31, 30, 27. You see the same change. If I were to speculate, I would say in France, which began big programs of child support in the late 19th century--they thought they were dying out and they would have no soldiers to fight Germans, Prussians, literally--there was a pronatalist policy. It made it very suspect in Protestant circles in the United States, but the payments to familles nombreuses, the ordinary child allowance--the more children you have, the more you get--they had that in place in 1960 enhanced from 1930. But they, even so, went from 6 percent to 33 percent. I do not know how much of this is simply the absence of marriage, formal marriage, in what are nonetheless stable relationships. I do not know. I wish you could go and write a book and tell me. I can say the Netherlands went from 1 percent to 12--that is 12 times. And the Netherlands had very generous benefits in 1960. Italy, however went from 2 to 7--not high. Switzerland, 4 to 6. We were entertaining the hypothesis that the critical variable might be distance from the Vatican. But then we [[Page S 11745]] noticed Japan. Japan was 1 percent in 1960 and 1 percent today. That was a joke.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Sir, I do not. I wish I did. I prepared for this debate by canvassing acquaintances around the Nation. Did they know? No, they did not.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. The Senator is correct.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. We certainly have never demonstrated that in any serious way. Sandy Jencks, at Northwestern University, has done some case histories which argue that welfare is a mode of optimizing income when you both work and get welfare. I give you my view, which is that this is all falling from nonmarital births to young people. As we say, about half the people coming on welfare are on for less than 2 years. They are mature people whose marriages are in trouble one way or another. They do not need your advice or help. What a steelworker needs is a monthly check. And then they go away. It is income insurance. The other group is more problematic. I said three-quarters of the children will be on for more than 5 years--not consecutively but intermittently. The median now, the mean duration is 13 years. Imagine that. We cannot demonstrate--and one of the reasons we cannot demonstrate, surely, we have not tried to find out. Most of the data I have been presenting here will be found from Manpower, from the Urban Institute, or places like that. I would not in any way dispute what I believe to be what you imply, that there is no evidence that people are on welfare because they do not wish to work, no.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Yes, sir, I believe the number of children--Mr. President, you have to forgive statistics--it is unlikely, but the number of children is 1.9 children. Actually one, two, or three children averaging out to 1.9. These are not large families.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Please.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. As a youth in New York City, I had more than one occasion to study the Soviet Constitution and see that this, obviously, had to be the finest society on Earth because it had the best Constitution. I will try to argue that the outcomes of our efforts with dependent children and families will, in fact, depend less on statute and more upon the local energies and enterprise which either rise to the effort or do not. I will argue that in some cases we see there are dimensions of size that overwhelm individual effort. And I will argue that we did very well in 1988. We are beginning to see results with exactly this theory in mind. With those facts in mind, on May 18 I introduced the Family Support Act of 1995, a bill ``to enable each State to assist applicants and recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in providing for the economic well-being of their children, to allow States to test new ways to improve the welfare system, and for other purposes.'' The measure was referred to the Finance Committee. It was taken up on May 26, and failed on a 12 to 8 vote, whereupon the committee, by a similar 12 to 8 vote, adopted the predecessor of the Work Opportunity Act of 1995, the bill which Senator Dole has introduced as a substitute. But, first, let me describe the thinking behind an earlier, quite significant revision of welfare law, the Family Support Act of 1988, basic legislation which I propose now we build on. In his State of the Union Address in February 1987, President Reagan pledged his support for what he called ``a new national welfare strategy.'' Democrats and Republicans in Congress saw a window of opportunity to redefine our welfare system, to replace the half- century-old AFDC Program with a program designed for the social realities of the last part of the 20th century. The Governors led the way. Governor Clinton, chairman of the National Governors Association, and then Gov. Michael Castle, of Delaware--now Representative Castle--was chairman of the Welfare Prevention Task Force, a bipartisan effort, and they presented the Governors' concerns: improve enforcement of parental child support obligations; permit flexible State-designed employment programs--include remedial education, training and work experience; mandate participation in such programs for parents with children over age 3, and create a ``social contract''--I say once again a social contract--to obligate State agencies to provide opportunities to become self-sufficient while also obligating recipients to take advantage of these opportunities. The Family Support Act of 1988 sought to turn the existing welfare system on its head. And we used that term conscious of the historical reference. Rather than beginning with a public assistance payment that is supplemented with sporadic child support payments and occasional earned income, it placed the responsibility for supporting children where it belonged: With parents--both parents. And the focus was to be on the long-term dependents--not the divorced woman who needs some help while she puts her life back in order, but the teenage mother who has a child and is at risk of spending most of her life on the dole. On September 29, 1988, just this side of 7 years ago, the Family Support Act passed the Senate. We had 63 cosponsors and the vote was 96 to 1. It went out the door 96 to 1, a bipartisan judgment the like of which is rarely seen in this body and which, unhappily, evidently has now disappeared. I was the manager on our side, and I recall the atmosphere, the emotion. At a Rose Garden ceremony that followed were Senators Dole, Bentsen, and Brown, Speaker Foley, Mr. Michel, and Governors Clinton and Castle. President Reagan, on signing the bill, told the assembled company that: They and the members of the administration who worked so diligently on this bill will be remembered for accomplishing what many have attempted but no one has achieved in several decades, a meaningful redirection of our welfare system. It may seem unimaginable to us today. But the Family Support Act of 1988 was not a partisan political measure. Democrats and Republicans alike joined in near unanimity to do what needed doing, a good half a century into the experience of what we have called welfare under the Social Security Act of 1935, a history the chairman has set forth very ably and very accurately. The Governors had asked for flexibility in designing State programs to help poor parents overcome their dependence on public assistance, and they got it. With the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Program, JOBS, States were free to offer a variety of education, training and work activities. States were directed to involve the private sector in designing their JOBS Programs and to coordinate with other work-related programs, such as the Job Training Partnership Act. The Family Support Act brought the statute in line with a new reality. Again, as the chairman has said, the original Social Security Act of 1935, adopted in the midst of the Depression, provided aid to dependent children wherein the Federal Government took over the widows pensions that had been adopted in almost half the States by this point. Those States were under severe economic stress in the Great Depression. The Federal Government assumed the responsibility for children. In 1939, the mother of the children was included as well. So it became Aid to Families With Dependent Children, and it was expected to be a bridge until widows with their children were entitled to old age and survivors insurance, and, indeed, it was a bridge in the time that survivors insurance matured. Then something new happened. In 1960's, Samuel H. Preston, in his address to the American Demographic Association in 1964, put it that ``an earthquake shuddered through the American family--an earthquake shuddered through the American family.'' Family structure began to change. Out-of-wedlock births surged. We now have a ratio of births of children in single-parent families that has reached an estimated 33 percent. By 1992--I have a table here. Can I bring that over? Mr. President, this will give you some sense of what we are dealing with. These are the ratios in the 20 largest cities in the country: Baltimore, 61 percent; Boston, 48; Chicago, 56; Columbus, 41; the District of Columbia, 70; Indianapolis, 40; Milwaukee, 58; New York, 46; Phoenix, 42; San Antonio, 20. These are numbers unknown to social conditions of the north, west, east, or southern man or woman. So far as I know it is without precedent in human experience. I have said this before and have been saying it for 15 or 20 years. And no one has ever contradicted this. Early in the century, an anthropologist named Malinowski, who practiced and worked and lived in London, set forth the universal law of human society, which is that in any society, every society that has ever been known, ever examined, ever studied, ever recorded, all children knew who their male parent was. That was the first law of anthropology. And everyone agreed. Once it was said, it was obvious. It no longer is, Mr. President. The ratios, Baltimore is 61 percent, Detroit 72 [[Page S 11741]] percent. They are without precedent. And the thing to know is that we are not alone in this. Something like the same phenomenon has overtaken the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. We find it difficult to explain what has happened here. But they find it difficult to explain what has happened there. What we cannot do is deny the reality. We think this increase is largely a matter of demography. In the 1950's, the child-bearing population was flat or even declined a bit. Then starting in 1989, the caseload began to rise. What I am trying to say, Mr. President, is that this obviously has led to increases in the Aid to Families Dependent Children Program of late. In the aftermath of our 1988 legislation, the number of children on the AFDC rolls has gone up again. It went from 3.5 million cases to almost 5 million in 4 years. You can see this right here. Here is where we passed the bill. Then, seemingly, after we passed the bill, things get out of control again. You have to start this discussion, if it is going to be in any way honest and open, with acknowledging the fact that if anyone had supposed in 1988 the number of AFDC cases would go down--and we never said that, but if anyone thought that might happen--they would have been wrong. Indeed, they went up. We think we know why they went up. The Congressional Budget Office has established that about 60 percent of the increase is simply the increase in the number of single-parent families. The demography of persons in that population, the number of people coming into the reproduction ages, suddenly bumped up. It will happen. It happens all the time--up, flat, up, and sometimes indeed declining, as was the case in late 1930's or late 1940's. The thing is, we know very little about this. We know a certain amount about the duration of benefits. More than a quarter of new entrants onto the AFDC rolls remain there less than a year. Almost half are gone in 2 years. Data are elusive. The Federal Government has never collected systematic time series data on this information. And we would do well to remind ourselves of the maxim that you should never really do anything about a problem until you first learn to understand it. Annual unemployment rates did not appear in the United States until 1948. We used to take the unemployment rate from the census. We took it in April 1930 and April 1940, and there was no Great Depression. We learned sampling and we did it by counting everybody. We learned to sample and get numbers. It was a development in the late 1930's and matured in the early or mid-forties. We have not done this at all with respect to welfare dependency because we have not seen it, in part, as the problem it has become. By 1948, we knew unemployment was a problem. I might say last year, in 1994, Congress enacted the Welfare Indicators Act. It is a measure I had been seeking for many years, an annual report comparable to the Economic Report of the President which deals with unemployment or employment and which has begun long-term analyses of trends, disaggregating large numbers and finding significant subsectors. The act specifies that with respect to welfare indicators, the following subjects be addressed: indicators of the rate and degree to which families depend on welfare income; predictors of welfare receipt; an assessment of the adequacy of existing data resources; and an annual report of welfare indicators. For the moment, Donna Pavetti at the Urban Institute has compiled this distribution, one of the few things we seem to have. Note we get it from the Urban Institute, not from the Department of Health and Human Services. This chart depicts ``Distribution of Total Time on Welfare.'' This is important, Mr. President, because both the bills that the distinguished Republican leader and the chairman of the Committee on Finance have introduced, the bill that our able and distinguished Democratic leader has introduced, have 5-year time limits. I am sorry to turn this into a statistics expose, but we are talking about numbers here, and we never learned to do anything about unemployment until we got hold of those numbers. And the numbers are simply that half the AFDC population who enter the system leave it within 24 months. We do not know who they are. There is no account kept. There are no samples taken. But we have a pretty good idea. These are mature women whose marriages have come apart, have been dissolved in some way or other. For them, AFDC is a form of income insurance just as unemployment insurance protects those persons working. They need it for a while, then they need it no longer and they leave. We knew this much in 1988. We said not to worry about this group. It takes care of itself. You simply have a simple income insurance--as Social Security is income insurance--and let them be. The Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. had established with great clarity that you can train such folk, you can educate such folk. They do not need the training or the education. They just need to get their affairs together, and they do. On the other hand, sir, three-quarters of the recipients, adults and children, who at a given point in time are on welfare are on for more than 5 years. The mean duration is 13 years. That means half below 13, half above 13. The mean is 13--12.9 it says here. So let it be clear. You are putting at risk an enormous population, about which we know very little in terms of what works and which we have only begun to attempt to know. Three-quarters of those who are on the welfare rolls at any one time are going to be there for more than 5 years, and half will be there more than 13 years. That is why this is a social crisis which we had best get hold of or who would want to be sure of the future of this society. And that is why, sir, in this Senator's view, and in the view of the whole Senate, not 7 years ago there was a national response. The fact is that, as I said, divorce is one source of dependency and separation another. These are the people up here in the first two lines. But there is a much greater cause, and that is nonmarital births. In the State of the Union Message of January 25, 1994, President Clinton included this passage: We cannot renew our country when within a decade more than half of our children will be born into families where there is no marriage. I repeat: We cannot renew our country when within a decade more than half of our children will be born into families where there is no marriage. To my knowledge, no President in our history has raised this issue in a State of the Union Address, nor very possibly in any address. On the following June 14 in Kansas City, the President unveiled a new welfare reform proposal and his address contained this passage. We also have to face the fact that we have a big welfare problem because the rate of children born out of wedlock where there was not a marriage is going up dramatically. The rate of illegitimacy has literally tripled since this Senator first called it to our attention 30 years ago. At the rate we are going, unless we reverse it, within 10 years more than half our children will be born in homes where there never has been a marriage. Unless we reverse it, within 10 years more than half our children will be born in homes where there has never been a marriage. These things happen, Mr. President, in a sometimes sort of random way. In 1993, I happened to see the nonmarital birth ratio for 1991 and said, ``You know, that looks like a straight line going back to 1970 or so.'' And we took it and we plotted the actual ratio. And then we saw what would be the correlation with a straight line, and as I said on ``Face the Nation'' yesterday morning, anyone watching this, if you have a daughter or a son in high school, they will explain correlations to you. Otherwise, you have to take it on faith. Senator Wellstone can handle it, I am sure. The correlation is 0.99. That means it is almost a straight line. The perfect correlation is 1.00. Well 0.99 does not happen in statistics. You reel back. And then you say, ``Do it again; that cannot be.'' But there it is. And the slope is 0.86, which is almost 1 percent a year. We figure now we are almost at [[Page S 11742]] one-third. But we figure--I say we figure because no one else figures, Mr. President, not the Census Bureau or the National Center for Health Statistics. None of them does this. They have avoided this. And this is where we have gone. That is what avoidance will do for you. The President was citing that 50 percent ratio in a State of the Union Message. He got it in a conversation from me. In the main, Presidents have better sources of data. But that is how we have avoided this issue. Let me show you something that ought to chill us all. What you are seeing here, sir, is that part of an exponential curve, when it begins to take off, is like a jet plane. Here we go back to 1940. In 1940, we had a ratio--here again we fit a curve, and we have come up with something almost as remarkable as our straight line. I said that correlation was 0.99. This correlation is 0.98. Again, things like that do not happen in statistics. But with this correlation, a slope of just about 0.5 percent per year. You start out a ratio of 4 percent, and like any of these curves you get very slow impact, but then it accumulates. Keynes referred to ``the magic of compound interest.'' You did not have much. Nothing seemed to happen. Then suddenly you are soaring. This curve right in here, if I showed you a straight line, that is when you start going steadily upward. If you followed this curve you would, in fact, be at 50 percent in the year 2003. Now, that makes me uneasy. It probably would make you, Mr. President, uneasy. But, sir, we are going to be at 40 percent within a decade. We are at 33 percent now. I will put it this way. If, in 1970, when we had a ratio of 10 percent, someone had come along and said that by 1990, they thought it would be 30 percent, people would have said, ``You are loony. Are you crazy?'' No. Well, we did. And the thought that we will go further and reach 50 percent--I do not want to say 50 percent. I just do not think that is possible. I think something awful will happen in the country before we do. But we will get to 40 percent. We are not that far now. If we go on at the rate we have gone the last 10 years, we will be at 44 percent by the year 2000. It is as simple as that. I want to acknowledge this work was done by Jack Fowle, a scientist who was on leave from the Environmental Protection Agency. He did this with a great deal of clarity and consistency, as you can see. Mr. President, we have had this recent increase in the caseloads. In July 1993, the Congressional Budget Office issued a staff memorandum entitled ``Forecasting AFDC Caseloads With an Emphasis on Economic Factors.'' What they found in brief is that the increase that followed from 1989 to the third quarter of 1992 is basically due to the increase in single-parent families. About two-thirds is that, and the remainder is economic. And the economy has an effect. We begin to see that. It particularly has an effect where you would expect, with AFDC-UP, which is aid for two-parent families which began in the 1960's. CBO found that 70 percent of the increase in the two-parent family caseload during the period is explained by the economic downturn. That is exactly what you would predict. And it is somewhat reassuring. But the caseload of regular AFDC families responds to the change in family structure, and little else. Now, sir, what did happen even as the caseload was going up? I want to say that in this Senator's view, what happened was exactly what we hoped would happen. The States were told to experiment. The States were told to innovate. The States were encouraged to think up things on their own. And they did. There is a basic fact which is that Aid to Families With Dependent Children, welfare, is not an entitlement to individuals. We have allowed it to be seen as such. A lot of waivers and regulations accumulated at the Federal level, and people thought it could be such. But it is not. AFDC is an entitlement of States to have the Federal Government match funds States spend on this population. The matching rate varies, but if Wisconsin spends $1, the Federal Government will give $1, and $2 will be spent on the program. But States do not have to have AFDC. As a matter of fact, Wisconsin, at the end of 1997, will not have AFDC at all. Or a State may have AFDC, and what you pay individuals is $1 a month, $1 a day, $100 a month. It is a State option entirely. The notion that it is an entitlement of individuals gets us off into discussions which I do not think are very helpful. Let me see if I cannot just talk a little bit about the kinds of waivers that the States have requested and have been granted by the Federal Government. The President, I think very properly, makes the point that he has been saying yes. President Bush said yes. There are various Secretaries that are very encouraging. Look at this. Thirty- three States have asked for waivers that increase the earnings disregard. That means you say to a mother, ``The first $30 a month you earn, you do not lose any welfare benefits,'' or the first $50. This is encouraging people to get to work. For if you earn $1 and you lose 50 cents, that does not encourage work, obviously. To me, a very important thing is that 31 States have asked for an increase in asset accumulation. This is a subject which is painful but necessary. One of the conditions we placed--and it is a Federal condition--one of the conditions we placed upon receipt of AFDC benefits, Federal moneys, in 1935 was that the child be a pauper--not a pleasant word, very much not a pleasant reality. The families can have $1,000 in assets, plus a car worth not more than $1,500. And there are places in the country where you cannot work without a car. A worker who was laid off when a plant closes is not suddenly a pauper. I mean, there is a good car around. The house is around. There are some savings, some pension--not always, but normally. The welfare department is under these rules. I have a mother in one State that will come to mind--I think she was found to have secreted some $9,000 away in a bank account to help her daughter go to college in Connecticut. They discovered it. They confiscated the money, and I do not suppose they sent the mother to jail. You cannot save. If you save, you are breaking the rules. Another 29 States have asked to ease up on eligibility for unemployed parents [UP]. Time requirement. JOBS participation. Deny aid for failure to attend school--some 24 States have been allowed to say, ``If your kid is not in school, you lose something.'' Family cap: 16 States have applied, 11 States have been given the waiver, so that if you have an additional child while on welfare, you receive no additional benefit. Further down the list we have: Deny aid for child support noncooperation, and teen parent residency requirement. Seven States have applied to do what I think we are going to do this week, which is to say that teenage children must stay with their parents. Senator Conrad has a proposal for maternity homes. Senator Packwood has a provision which provides second-chance homes, if you like, for very young women with children who do not themselves have a home that is a promising place to raise a child. I think this is a point we have reached agreement on. There was disagreement for a while, but now we are reaching agreement. All this innovation and experimentation at the State level which is being carried out under current law is finally starting to show results. Six weeks ago, we received the first numbers from the national evaluation of the Family Support Act being conducted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. Of those placed in a program emphasizing rapid job entry, the number of cases dropped by 11 percentage points, employment rose 8 percentage points and expenditures dropped 22 percentage points. If you recall, Mr. President, in 1988--1987 when we introduced the bill--we based our bill on the findings of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. based in New York, a very professional group trying to estimate what worked, what did not. Mostly nothing worked. Hence, this statement. They said the results they are finding from the Family Support Act programs ``exceeds the savings achieved by experimentally evaluated programs of the last 15 years.'' They have never before seen such results. Spectacular results? No. We did not tell anybody to expect anything [[Page S 11743]] spectacular in the face of this demographic change. But real? Yes. Moreover, of the two large States whose programs have been evaluated rigorously, California and Florida, earnings are up and caseloads down. In Riverside, CA, there was a 26-percent increase in the share of AFDC recipients working, a 49-percent increase in average earnings, a 15- percent decline in welfare outlays, all of which helped the program return to taxpayers almost $3 for every $1 spent. Recently, Prof. Lawrence Mead of New York University, now visiting professor at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Center, who has been a conservative critic of the welfare system, certainly, looked at the growth in the AFDC caseload between 1989 and 1993, the period during which the JOBS Program began to come into play. He concluded that for every 1 percent of the caseload enrolled in JOBS, caseload growth was 1 percent lower, even when total caseloads were going up. For every percentage point that JOBS participation grew during this period, caseload growth was three-quarters of a point less. Not spectacular, but real and in the right direction, in the directions you had hoped for. Again to say, States can do what they want in the system. They ask for a waiver, they get it. Just 2 months ago, George Allen, Republican Governor of Virginia, announced such an effort. He called it ``the most sweeping and I think the most compassionate welfare plan anywhere in the Nation.'' It is 2 years and you are out, and President Clinton approved the waiver and said he approved of the program. In any event, AFDC rolls are now coming down. Over the last year, caseloads have declined by 240,000 cases or 4.7 percent. It breaks out to 4.4 percent for the single-parent families and 9.4 percent in the two-parent families. You see that drop, Mr. President. I will say the old adage, if you turn the rudder on the battleship, it is a long while before you see the bow turn. I cannot prove it, but I do think we have seen this program taking hold. Now, something we did not know, and we may have stumbled on new information--when we look at the numbers by State, where have these declines taken place? It is very important. It is a pretty rash person who suggests he has learned anything about welfare, but we may have done it. In this period of decline, May 1994 to 1995, the decline for AFDC-R-- which is what we call regular--in California and New York was zero. AFDC-UP was up a little bit. Not important. The two big States with a quarter of the caseload had no effect. There were good programs in Riverside, things like that, but nothing changed. You go to a group of middle-sized States--Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio--AFDC down 6 percent; AFDC-UP, down 20 percent. We are not used to numbers like that. Mr. President, I have been with this 30 years, you do not see numbers like this. Then you go further down to the many States that have small caseloads--anyway, small numbers. They are down 9 percent for AFDC and 19 percent for the AFDC-UP Program. The real problem here is the regular caseload, as AFDC-UP is, again, a form of unemployment insurance. This is what matters: Zero in the big States, 6 percent in the mid- sized, 9 percent in the small States. My friend, Dr. Paul Offner, who is with me on the floor today, was head commissioner of welfare in Ohio and who will shortly be the head of the health care financing agency for the District of Columbia, would say you go out to the small towns or cities in Ohio and you would go to the welfare offices and a kind of culture had developed. Yes, they knew who their clients were, the recipients and they knew what you might be able to do and they were doing it and feeling pretty good about themselves. In New York City, about 23 years ago, the very able and distinguished head of the human resources administration with a million persons on welfare and a quarter million in her employ, put on a wig and an old coat, went around to four welfare offices and said she was applying for welfare and they handed her papers to fill out. She was their commissioner. They never once suggested that she might be interested in taking a job. The contrast between welfare programs in big cities and elsewhere is something worth keeping a hold of. Last spring, as my friend, the distinguished chairman recalls, the Committee on Finance had a retreat down in Maryland in which we talked about welfare, among other things, and we discussed this question of whether teenage mothers with children should be required to live at home, or should receive welfare benefits at all. There is a movement to stop their benefits, and groups like Catholic Charities say do not do that, that is God's child, too. One of our Members, a Senator from a Midwestern State, was back home and he was interested in this, so he called the State officials involved and he said, how many such cases do we have in our State? Let him identify it if he chooses. Cases of teenage mothers with children, living on their own? He said, yes, that is what I mean. Well, there is Mary Ann, she lives down there. And there is Sue Mary, and there is Alice, and then there is Florence. The last two just moved in from, like I say, West Virginia. They had four, and they knew them by name. In that State they have four. The population on welfare in New York City is almost as large as the entire population of one of those States. So you have a problem of scale which I do think we begin to see. I make the point, Mr. President, that we know so little. There has been so little inquiry. Here I would like to make a final point on nonmarital births. Senator Gramm, my friend with whom I was debating this matter yesterday, along with a number of other Senators, notably Senator Faircloth of North Carolina, has raised the issue of the connection between the present welfare system and the extraordinary rise of nonmarital births over the last generation. I said to him yesterday privately that this certainly was an issue. I said it then and I will say it again--the most important thing to know about this subject is how little we know about it. Candid officials within the administration will grant that for much of the 1960's and 1970's and into the 1980's, the subject was taboo. Forces from the traditional left and traditional right, if such terms are meaningful in this context, simply did not want the matter raised. A mode of denial was obviously in place. In this regard, Mr. President, may I say that the one honorable exception is the annual report entitled ``Kids Count Data Book,'' published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. It puts the annual laments of the other advocacy groups to shame. The Annie E. Casey Foundation comes out and tells you what they found about this central fact of being a child in the United States. The work is called ``The Kids Count Data Book.'' It is the first time we have had an advocacy group that could speak up and deal with the reality of the problem of single parenthood. However, if the argument that higher levels in welfare produce higher levels of illegitimacy cannot be proved, neither can it be disproved. Thus, the State of Texas ranks 50 in combined AFDC food stamp payments to welfare families, as of July of last year. At the same time, it has an overall illegitimacy ratio of 17.5 percent, which is half the national average. States with high benefit levels have twice that ratio. For example, California had 34.3 percent, and New York had 34.8 percent. It would not be fair to say that the burden of proof is on California and New York to demonstrate that higher levels of welfare produce higher levels of illegitimacy. You cannot prove it but you cannot dismiss it. On the other hand, if Texas, with its low level of welfare support has a low illegitimacy ratio, Mississippi, with equally low payment levels, has the highest illegitimacy ratio. I will read some more. The lowest ratio, as you might suppose, is Utah, at 15 percent, which is four times the 1940 ratio, but 15 percent. Texas was 17.5; Idaho, 18.3. But now we get to South Carolina, 35.5; Arizona, 36.2; New Mexico, 39.5; Louisiana, 40.2; Mississippi, 42.9. Mr. President, we have not got a purchase on this issue yet. We know that there is great variation and when there is variation, there are explanations. Some would say it is the weather. Well, [[Page S 11744]] we can check that out. Longitude, altitude, Mormons. But you can begin to find out about these things. Unemployment was a mystery, a baffling mystery until we began to break it down to aggregate, correlate and learn. I hope that we do that. I make the point, Mr. President, that we are beginning to see the effects of the Family Support Act of 1988. That is why I have sponsored the Family Support Act of 1995. The matter that I have proposed is a serious effort to continue and build on the base that we have now established. I hope that the Senate might understand the enormous value of continuing a bipartisan program, involving various levels of government, national and State, which is in place and appears to be working. Remember, we did not promise a rose garden. We did not say it would be easy. I think we can find in our descriptions in the debate warnings that it will be worse before it is better. But it begins to seem like it may be taking hold. That is by far the most promising thing I have seen with this subject in 30 years. I repeat one point. Examining the specific programs, Riverside, CA, and others, 6 weeks ago, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. said they are seeing the strongest results they have seen in 15 years. We seem to be getting the hang of working with the problem. We seem to have defined it reasonably well. I hope we do not give this up, Mr. President. It would be a prelude to bitter political division and, far more importantly in my view, to a bitter experience for millions of dependent children throughout our country. Mr. President, I am not through with the remarks I had intended to make this morning, but the morning has come and gone. I see the Senator from Texas is on the floor. He has been very patient. He is even smiling. Senator Wellstone was up earlier regarding questions on the opening statement. Given this attractive choice on either side of the aisle, it might be prudent for me to yield the floor, unless the Senator wished to address a question.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to continue the debate from this side of the aisle, but first to congratulate and, as always, to express appreciation to my colleague and friend, the chairman of the committee, for his thoughtful, persuasive arguments--not all of which have persuaded me; I am sure there are those who will feel the same way--and in particular to thank him for citing this, I will call it a booklet, ``To Empower People, The Role Of Mediating Structures In Public Policy.'' This was the work of Peter L. Berger, who is a professor of sociology at Rutgers, and Richard John Neuhaus, who is the senior editor of World Review. He is a theologian, and a much-respected one. This is a product of a research group the American Enterprise Institute had started. Nathan Glazer, my colleague [[Page S 11740]] and friend, headed the section on welfare and social services. Mr. President, once again I am proud and happy to report that this important social analysis was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I cannot think of a more trenchant argument for securing its future and that of other such matters. I thank my friend for having brought it to our attention. It is, curious--what they argue is the extension of the analysis by Professor Putnam of those communities in Italy over the last 700 years that have been successful and those that have not, and the degree to which empowering activities locally, a choral society in Tuscany or a volunteer fire department, characterized----

Mr. MOYNIHAN. That makes sense.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. There is no order, but that has been our agreeable practice throughout the day. There was an informal agreement, and the chairman of the Finance Committee would so attest.