Welfare

Nothing is done more to undermine our sense of common responsibility than our failed welfare system.  This is one of the problems we have to face here in Washington in our New Covenant.  It rewards welfare over work, it undermines family values, it lets millions of parents get away without paying their child support, it keeps a minority—­but a significant minority—­of the people on welfare trapped on it for a very long time.

I worked on this problem for a long time—­nearly 15 years now.  As a Governor I had the honor of working with the Reagan Administration to write the last welfare reform bill back in 1988.

In the last two years we made a good start in continuing the work of welfare reform.  Our Administration gave two dozen states the right to slash through Federal rules and regulations to reform their own welfare systems and to try to promote work and responsibility over welfare and dependency.

Last year, I introduced the most sweeping welfare reform plan ever presented by an Administration.  We have to make welfare what it was meant to be—­a second chance, not a way of life.

We have to help those on welfare move to work as quickly as possible, to provide child care and teach them skills, if that’s what they need, for up to two years.  But after that, there ought to be a simple, hard rule.  Anyone who can work must go to work.

If a parent isn’t paying child support, they should be forced to pay.

We should suspend driver’s licenses, track them across state lines, make them work off what they owe.  That is what we should do.  Governments do not raise children, people do.  And the parents must take responsibility for the children they bring into this world.

I want to work with you, with all of you, to pass welfare reform.  But our goal must be to liberate people and lift them from dependence to independence, from welfare to work, from mere childbearing to responsible parenting.  Our goal should not be to punish them because they happen to be poor.

We should—­we should require work and mutual responsibility.  But we shouldn’t cut people off just because they’re poor, they’re young or even because they’re unmarried.  We should promote responsibility by requiring young mothers to live at home with their parents or in other supervised settings, by requiring them to finish school.  But we shouldn’t put them and their children out on the street.

And I know all the arguments pro and con and I have read and thought about this for a long time:  I still don’t think we can, in good conscience, punish poor children for the mistakes of their parents.

My fellow Americans, every single survey shows that all the American people care about this, without regard to party or race or region.  So let this be the year we end welfare as we know it.

But also let this be the year that we are all able to stop using this issue to divide America.