75-07-B4
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Welfare # 1[edit]
Transcript[edit]It's time to write your Congressman again. I'll be right back. Eight Democratic Congressmen and 54 Republicans have joined together in introducing a welfare reform program that could save the taxpayers almost two billion dollars. It will have passed probably save more. I learned in our own welfare reforms in California that our real savings were far greater than our estimates. Even more important, these reforms will also benefit the truly needy who must have our help. In California, in addition to saving the taxpayers a billion dollars we were able to increase the grants to the needy by an average of 43 percent. When we reformed welfare in California and halted an increase in caseload that was adding forty thousand people a month to the rolls, we did so by changes in state regulations and administrative rules. We could not however change the multitudinous federal regulations imposed on us by the department of health education and welfare in Washington. With reform, those regulations offer an even greater potential savings. The plan being offered to Congress is in effect an extension of the California plan but involving those federal regulations. One major change would require able-bodied mothers on the aid for dependent children program to work in return for their welfare grants at public or community work projects half-time-80 hours a month. As one Congressman put it, "They get something-they give something. Now there'll be terrific opposition to this. Charges of slave labor and that welfare mothers should be in the home with their children. Well let me answer that ladder charge first. Forty percent of the American mothers of children under eighteen years of age are working and one-third of these have children under the age of six. As for public work projects being slave labor, we were allowed to conduct an experiment in 35 California counties wherein able-bodied welfare recipients had to report for such work. In one year we funneled 57,000 people from welfare through these work projects into private enterprise jobs. In 1969 the house ways and means committee did a study in 11 cities and came to the conclusion that an increasing number of welfare recipients were people who had been induced by social workers to quit jobs and opt for welfare instead. It's time for welfare reform at the national level and reform is not a new idea. In 1935 Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act and announced we can now see the end of public assistance in America. Well in 1962 John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed a welfare reform bill which he said would cost more to start with but which would eventually reduce the roles by training people for useful work by stressing, quote, "self-support and simplifying welfare administration." Unquote. In 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, the poverty program and said, quote, "The days of the dole in our country are numbered." Unquote. In the meantime an executive in health education and welfare was telling the professionals in the department "To think big and to plan big." And they did. While three presidents were making statements they believed were true and our national population was increasing 11 percent, aid to dependent children increased 216 percent of the overall welfare caseload more than doubled and its cost quadrupled. Now is the time to write your Congressman in support of welfare reform. I'll tell you some more about welfare tomorrow. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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