President Clinton and aides went to St. Louis on Tuesday to celebrate the proven efficacy of the August 1996 welfare-reform law. According to the stats the White House waved, welfare rolls are shrinking by about 2 million people a year.
"I heard all the reasons that people said it wouldn't work, but a year later, I think it's fair to say the debate is over," Clinton told an audience in St. Louis. "We know now that welfare reform works."
Reporters found out, though, that it's hard to tell where all those on-the-dole people have gone. An excerpt of a St. Louis press briefing featuring Bruce Reed, assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Eli Segal, president of the Welfare to Work Partnership. The interrogating reporters were not identified in the White House transcript of the session.
Bruce Reed: ... Let me just say a word about why we're here in St. Louis. The new welfare law has shattered every record on the books in its rookie year. You should have the welfare caseload numbers - let me go through them for you to put them in some perspective.
In the first three and a half years of the Clinton presidency, we were able to reduce the welfare rolls by about 1.9 million recipients. The welfare caseload was 14.1 million when we took over in January of 1993; it had dropped by 1.9 million when the President signed the bill in August. The new figures that we're releasing today cover the nine months from August of '96 when he signed the bill to May of '97, which is the latest figures available. And they show that in the first nine months of the new welfare law, the welfare caseloads have dropped another 1.45 million, and at its current rate, the caseload is on course to drop nearly 2 million in the first full year of the welfare law, which is as much as it dropped in the first three and a half years of the Clinton presidency.
These numbers are a stunning success, totally unprecedented in the history of welfare. Welfare caseloads have risen almost uninterrupted in the first 60 years of the program. Before President Clinton took office there had only been two years where the caseload had dropped by more than 250,000. And we are about to have our third straight year in which the caseload has dropped by more than a million. The total is 3.4 million for the first four years and four months of the Clinton presidency. That's a 24-percent drop, which again is a record.
And Eli and I can talk a little bit about why that is happening. Certainly some of the success is due to a booming economy and very low unemployment. But there's also something else going on, which is for the first time most states are taking welfare reform seriously and putting in place impressive programs to move people from welfare to work.
It's no accident that some of the states that have shown the most dramatic drops - including Wisconsin, where the drop has been 54 percent; Indiana, where the drop has been 45 percent; Tennessee, 47 percent; Massachusetts, 40 percent - those are all states that received major waivers from the Clinton administration and that are real leaders in welfare-to-work efforts.
The two biggest states that are lagging behind the rest of the country - New York, which is 45th in caseload drop, and California, which is 48th - have only recently put in place statewide programs. In fact, Governor Wilson just signed California's program yesterday. And Governor Pataki is scheduled to sign his new law later this week. So if New York and California, which together represent about a third of the welfare caseload, had been dropping at the same rate as the rest of the country, we would have seen an additional 750,000 people moved off of welfare in the last four years.
I think one other point worth making is that a year ago, when the President signed the bill, he promised to fix it in some important ways, and the new budget law that he just signed last week does that. He made good on his promise to undo the harsh cuts in immigrant benefits. The new budget restores $11.5 billion in health and disability benefits to legal immigrants who were in the country at the time the welfare law was signed. And it also expands work opportunities for people who are on food stamps, childless adults who won't get cut off because they'll now have an opportunity to go to work.
We were also able to enact a $3 billion welfare-to-work program that will give money to the hardest-hit communities, the inner city communities where the hardest-to-place welfare recipients tend to be concentrated. And we expect that that $3 billion, along with a welfare-to-work tax credit that was included in the new budget, will go a long way towards meeting the President's goal of moving another million people from welfare to work. ...
Q: ... Do you have any actual breakdown of the number of people who really left welfare and are at work as opposed to other reasons why they're off the rolls?
Eli Segal: We know the following: The welfare system was designed as an income maintenance system, so there are no definitive statements of statistics kept at any level of government - federal, state or city - which track those moving from welfare to the private sector. On the other hand, we know that our own companies will be tracking - we can't say anything to it right now; we're just getting off the ground. We wanted to establish our bona fides as a place to turn for information. I think over time, we as a bare minimum will certainly be doing it, and we see some states are beginning to look into tracking welfare to work. We know it's important to do it, and we're going to figure out a way to do it. But at this time we cannot give you specific information.
We know what commitments of industries are, commitments of specific companies are. I'm quite comfortable that when these companies and industries give commitments, they will live up to them. But I can't tell you right this minute on our companies, or I can't even tell you how many specifically, but we will soon.
Q: You guys don't know - you know how many people are dropping from the welfare rolls - you don't have stats for how many have dropped or kept dropping?
Reed: No. That's one of the things that we'll be looking at. The welfare law calls for a work performance bonus which will reward states that are specially affected in moving people from welfare to work and keeping them in jobs. And we'll be tracking that.
I should say that for the national numbers, the vast majority of people who have moved from welfare to work over the last four years have likely done so on their own. The time limits have not taken effect in the overwhelming majority of the country. I think a few counties in Florida, and they may be coming into effect in a few counties in Wisconsin.
A number of states, both through their waivers and since the passage of the new law, have put into place tougher work requirements and greater expectations that eventually recipients will need to move into work. And, in fact, many states are reporting that the very expectation of work has had a significant impact in reducing their caseloads.
Source: The White House
