It is a pleasure and a privilege to be with you here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
1-800-282-2882-1-800-282-2882.
Just before the break, I said something that President Clinton signed into law that worked out very well.
Something good that President Bill Clinton did.
People were tuning their radio.
Where am I?
No, you're right here, your favorite radio station, keeping you on top of what's happening every hour of every day, including these three hours every day of broadcast excellence with America's anchorman, Rush Limbaugh.
He will be back in the chair tomorrow, and I too look forward to that.
I'm Paul W. Smith, fellow student of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, where there's never a final exam, but we are tested every day, that's for sure.
And I am coming to you today, as Johnny Donovan mentioned, from the Midwest campus of the Limbaugh Institute in Detroit, Michigan, the Motor City, birthplace of Motown, the growing life sciences corridor.
And it's nice to be here and nice to be with these fine folks that I don't get to work with enough, but always enjoy it when I do.
H.R. Kit Carson, Russia's executive producer.
The engineer is Mike Maymone, but Mike is off.
He's maybe on vacation as well.
So this new assistant engineer, Ed Robinson, and I working together for the first time.
And back here in the Golden Tower of the Fisher Building, Rob Vlasic is in.
Rob is all excited because Aerosmith and Motley Crew are going to be touring together this fall.
Aerosmith and Motley Crew actually going to be touring together this fall.
They don't really want to, but that's the only way Medicare would pay for it.
Where's the drummer when I need the drummer anyway?
I thought that drummer followed me around wherever I went.
A couple of things going on here in the news that we're staying on top of, and that is, of course, hours after the UN ceasefire has taken hold, cars filled with Lebanese civilians began jamming roads to return to their bombed-out neighborhoods.
Now, that scene was quieter in northern Israel where few Israelis were seen returning.
Israel's government has warned residents to wait and see whether the truce holds.
Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's medical condition is getting worse.
Doctors aren't saying his life is in any worse danger than it was, but it's been pretty bad.
The former Israeli Prime Minister has been comatose since that stroke in January.
Hospital officials say his brain function is deteriorating and he has a new lung infection.
Air travel, by the way, from Britain, still a mess, but airport authorities expect improvements soon at Heathrow.
Of course, Europe's busiest airport, 68 flights were canceled today.
Officials predict fewer such delays by tomorrow.
The British government has slightly lowered its security threat level after foiling that alleged plot to bomb transatlantic flights.
And as you see, the terrorists win even when they're caught before they can do what it is they're trying to do.
Think of how many people have been affected again by these terrorists and they weren't even successful.
Man, oh man.
All right, something very important to talk about here on the Rush Limbaugh program, and we'll want you to weigh in as well.
You may have thoughts about this at 1-800-282-2882-1-800-282-2882 or RushLimbaugh.com.
That is, it was 10 years ago that President Bill Clinton signed legislation overhauling part of the nation's welfare system.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 replaced the failed social program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.
The reform legislation had three goals.
One, to reduce welfare dependence and increase employment.
Two, to reduce child poverty.
And three, to reduce illegitimacy and strengthen marriage.
You'll recall, of course, that at the time of this being talked about and at the time of this being enacted, liberal groups passionately denounced the welfare reform legislation, predicting that it would result in substantial increases in poverty, substantial increases in hunger and other social ills.
Well, I'm here to tell you that as much as they think that conservatives want to throw poor people under the bus, that's not at all what happened.
And happy to tell you that Senior Research Fellow, Welfare and Family Issues, Domestic Policy Studies for the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Robert Rector, is here to set the record straight, just as he has been doing for some time now in special testimony, including testimony right here, right now on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Robert, I'm Paul W. Smith.
It's a pleasure to have you on the program.
Well, thank you for having me as your guest.
It turns out that this welfare reform legislation is one of the most successful social policy reforms in U.S. history.
It is something that the government has done and done right, and it's working.
Tell us all about it.
Well, first of all, I wouldn't give Bill Clinton very much credit for.
I just did that as a tease.
Okay.
How many times have they heard that on the Rush Limbaugh program?
Coming up, something that Bill Clinton did right.
Well, Clinton's rhetoric was great, but typically for Clinton, there wasn't any substance.
And the real substance of this reform really goes back to Ronald Reagan, who wanted to make welfare mothers essentially work in exchange for their benefits in virtually every year of his presidency was always blocked by the Democratic Congress.
But what this reform actually did was basically say that some of the 5 million families that were getting aid under this program at a record level in the mid-1990s would be required to do community service work or to search for jobs or to take training in exchange for the aid that they would get.
And lo and behold, as conservatives felt, once you had that requirement as a condition for getting aid, the number of people interested in getting aid miraculously dropped.
And the caseloads just went into a downward descent.
The new people entering this program went way down.
And as a result of that, the number of families in this program dropped from around 5 million within a few years down to 2 million.
And as the families got off of welfare and started taking jobs, their employment went up.
And as they took jobs, their poverty rate went down.
And for example, if we look at the black child poverty rate, for 25 years from 1970 at the very early parts of the war on poverty up to 1995, the black child poverty rate had remained absolutely frozen.
Under liberal programs, it had not gone down at all.
In fact, it had gone up a little bit after a quarter of a century and was hovering around 42, 43 percent of all black children living under the poverty level at the beginning of this reform.
Within a few years of this reform, that poverty rate just dropped like a stone and fell to a record low level of around 30 percent.
In the recession the last couple years, it's inched up a little bit, but still it was the largest decline in black child poverty ever in U.S. history.
Very, very successful.
And it was successful on the basis of conservative ideas, that you shouldn't give people one-way handouts.
Instead, you should assist them if they need aid, but you should require them at the same time to take positive steps to get their own life in order.
Robert Rector is with us.
You recall Rush has brought him on board in the past, featuring his groundbreaking work on poverty.
You no doubt remember when Rush brought his work to the EIB network on just how much wealth the poor really have in this country.
And as we go back to President Johnson's war on poverty that had failed to reduce welfare dependence, and people were concerned about what the Republicans were going to do, what Ronald Reagan was going to do, in fact.
But it was President Bill Clinton who signed this legislation 10 years ago, and it has worked.
It's become one of the most successful social policy reforms in U.S. history.
And I know that our listeners will want to weigh in with their thoughts, questions, and comments at 1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
Robert Rector with us from the Heritage Foundation.
And one of the questions that came up was when I think it was Governor Tommy Thompson did his Welfare to Work program, that Welfare to Work program in the state of Wisconsin that provided daycare and other services to recipients.
Was that thought to be very successful, Robert?
Yes, Tommy Thompson's reform in the early 90s was kind of the model for the federal reform.
I don't want to tout governors because generally they don't do a very good job on this, but Thompson was an exception.
And Thompson demonstrated the very simple fact that if you require, even if you require welfare recipients to look for jobs under supervision, that's not a lot of fun.
The number of people that will stay on the rolls will go way down when you do that.
You just have to stop the one-way handouts.
When you do put them in jobs, though, you have to pay for things like daycare because these will be low-wage working mothers.
But essentially, what you're able to do is take the money that was going to mail them a welfare check while they sat at home and watched television, and now you're paying for some of that with daycare, and the children and the family are better off.
What we really haven't gotten into, although there has been some progress, the real underlying issue here is still that one out of three children in the United States is born out of wedlock.
That number had been rising like a line drawn with a ruler ever since 1965 at the beginning of the war on poverty, rose from around 7% up to around 33% in the mid-90s.
When welfare reform came along, because we sent the message that you are no longer going to get a lifetime entitlement to welfare, that number stopped rising.
So we've been frozen now for about a decade with about one out of three children born out of wedlock.
The fact that it's no longer going up is a good thing.
On the other hand, we still have vastly too high a level, and all of those out-of-wedlock births are the main remaining cause for poverty and remaining welfare dependence and crime and a whole lot of other social problems.
But nobody can argue this.
And the fact is, and we'll come back in just a moment, but the fact is, since welfare reform, the once-explosive growth of unwed childbearing, has ended, that growth pattern that you explained, we've got lots more information I think you'll find fascinating and your chance to speak with Robert Rector as well at 1-800-282-2882.
I'm Paul W. Smith, In for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Oh, good job.
Ed Robinson, our new assistant engineer on the Rush Limbaugh program, part of H.R. Kid Carson's team now.
I mentioned Arrow Smith and Motley Crewe are going to tour together this fall.
And they don't really want to, but that's the only way Medicare would pay for it.
That's from inopinion.com.
So good job on that, guys, getting the music going there.
In the news, Hezbollah's leader, it didn't take long.
We expected this, but he's now claiming victory over Israel and promising his militants will help rebuild destroyed homes in southern Lebanon.
they should because they're the reason the homes are destroyed in Lebanon.
I hope the Lebanese understand.
See, it's tough because the Hezbollah has given them food and shelter and hospitals and medicine and all this.
But it's very much like when the pervert uses candy to bring the child into the house and then molests the child, you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who says, well, yeah, he's a pervert.
He molested the child, but he did give the child candy.
And that's pretty much the way it seems to the rest of us as to what's happened with Hezbollah dragging the Lebanese people into this insanity and bringing this terror to those people.
And now they're going to help rebuild the houses.
What a surprise.
The president, calling these troubled times, President Bush, sounding confident about being able to protect Americans from harm.
President Bush is back from his Texas ranch, spending the day meeting with top officials, including the Defense Chief, the Secretary of State, and the Vice President.
All right.
Back to what our topic is at hand.
The 1996 welfare reform legislation, one of the most successful social policy reforms in the history of the United States.
And in contrast to the prior system, which rewarded idleness and dependency, reform policy made remarkable headway in helping welfare dependents move towards self-sufficiency and dramatically reduced state welfare caseloads.
While the old system resulted in unwed pregnancy and a host of related social problems, welfare reforms reduced child poverty and increased employment.
It's all very good 10 years later, Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow, Welfare and Family Issues, Domestic Policy Studies for the Heritage Foundation.
It all seems very good, just as last month when you presented all of this to the Committee on Ways and Means at the United States House of Representatives.
Yes, you know, but you should have seen the Democrats react, you know, the old adage, they'll forgive you for being wrong, but they'll never forgive you for being right.
The Democrats predicted that this was, even in good economic times.
Well, didn't they want to say that it was because these positive changes happened because of a good economy?
Isn't that what they wanted to say?
Well, they actually ignored all of the positive changes, these dramatic reductions in poverty.
They only wanted to look at the last two or three years where in a recession, there had been a slight increase in poverty, as there always is in a recession.
So they basically just wanted to ignore all of the data.
They also, sometimes in a more sophisticated, say, oh, yeah, it was the Clinton economy that did this.
Well, the data I present, you can go all the way back to 1950.
We had something like 11 periods of economic boom.
In none of those periods of economic boom did this welfare caseload ever go down.
It usually went up.
And all of a sudden, in the mid-1990s, it drops like a stone.
What's the difference?
The difference is that we were no longer giving money away for free.
We required at least a portion of the caseload to do some constructive behavior in order to earn their welfare.
A lot of them were actually cheating and had jobs on the side.
So if you require them to come into the office every day and look for a job or do something like that under supervision, well, they can't be two places at once.
So they get off the caseload.
A lot of others were just being idle.
Once you require them to come down to the office and do something, taking a job looks a lot more attractive.
It was just basic common sense that almost anybody with common sense would have understood what was going to happen, that it was going to be positive.
But the liberal intellectuals were all united in saying without any doubt that this was going to be an absolute disaster, that there were no jobs for these people to take, that the work requirements wouldn't have any effect and so forth.
Completely proven wrong in every possible respect.
I would say, though, that let's not get totally carried away.
There's some limitations to this.
First of all, is to recognize that the federal government runs over 50 different means-tested welfare programs for poor people.
We only reformed one of them.
Food stamps and public housing, which are tandem programs, deal with basically the same population.
No reforms at all, even after 10 years, no work requirements in those programs, no reforms in the Medicaid program.
So it's only a small part of the welfare, although the most prominent part of welfare that got partially fixed.
Even in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, the work requirements were in the 90s and are today still too weak.
They should be stronger.
And then finally, the Act asked, when it was passed 10 years ago, it instructed the states.
It said, we want you to go out and develop innovative programs to increase marriage, reduce illegitimacy.
The overall work requirements did reduce illegitimacy by sending the message you don't have a right to a lifetime on welfare anymore.
But those innovative programs to increase marriage, the state welfare bureaucracies are PC, they just wouldn't do it.
And so that way we've lost 10 years on that.
Finally, this year, we passed a new pilot program to take some of this money and put it into programs specifically to help low-income mothers and fathers get and remain married.
That's a very, very important first step.
And it's too bad that it took 10 years after the passage of this act to really begin to do that.
Well, we have so many people who want to speak with you.
I want you to stick around.
We don't have enough time to be fair to our callers, but we will get to our callers first up out of this next break.
So let me just sum up what Robert Rector is saying, Senior Research Fellow, Welfare and Family Issues Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
And this is now 10 years later, welfare reform.
These are the facts.
Child poverty has fallen.
Decreases in poverty have been greatest among black children.
Unprecedented declines in poverty also occurred among children of single mothers.
Welfare caseloads were cut in half.
The AFDC TANF caseload dropped from 4.3 million families at the time to 1.89 million today.
Employment of single mothers has surged.
And the explosive growth of out-of-wedlock childbearing has come to a near standstill.
And furthermore, whether it was a part of this or not, we've now allowed families to be families.
We didn't make it so dads couldn't be on the scene.
So there are many very good things that have happened from welfare reform.
But as our guest said, that still didn't touch food stamps, public housing, Medicaid.
There's much more work to do.
Your chance to speak with Robert up next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thanks, Johnny Donovan.
1-800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882 or rushlimbaugh.com.
And from the Heritage Foundation, Robert E. Rector is with us, Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies.
We're talking about welfare reform 10 years later.
And Phil's first up.
Phil, I keep looking over here and seeing you're on a cell phone there in Pennsylvania.
I want to get you on the air so you can be heard.
Say hi to Robert Rector.
Hi, thank you.
Yeah, just a quick question.
The numbers you put out were fairly astonishing in terms of the numbers of families and cases that have been dropped off the rolls as a result of this program, something like $5 million down to $2 million or cut in half at least.
I was just wondering, has the budget been cut proportionately?
And have we been saving all that money?
The budget was.
What a wonderful, wonderful question, Phil.
Well done.
It wasn't cut, but it stopped rising, which in Washington terms is a pretty good victory.
I think that in the first five years or so of the reform, it did save a considerable amount of money on the margin.
And the best thing you could say about it is the money is now spent much more wisely.
It now reduces poverty rather than increasing it.
And I think that's a good step forward.
I think in the last couple years, a lot of the steam has gone out of conservatism in Washington.
There's been a big expansion in the food stamp program and so forth.
But this program has really been flatlined now for 10 years without any increase for inflation.
So, yes, in Washington terms, it did save a considerable amount of money, although we didn't actually cut the spending.
We just stopped the growth in it.
I would refer Phil in Pennsylvania back to our last-hour conversation with Steven Slavinsky and his book, Buck Wild, How the Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government.
You can find that at rushlimbaugh.com, and it's very important.
I won't check my mailbox for the rebate check then.
All right.
Take care, Phil.
Let's go to Jeannie in Milford, Ohio.
Jeannie, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. In for Rush.
Rush is back tomorrow, and Robert E. Rector is back right now.
Great.
Hi, Mr. Smith.
How are you doing?
I'm well, Jeannie.
Paul.
Now, Mr. Rector, my question relates to what I call, and some of my friends have been calling, the welfare invasion from the Mexican or the general illegal and greet immigrants.
And so my question was, does your program reflect any new welfare system that seems to be growing?
Yes.
It's very clear that immigration was kind of pushing us in the opposite direction while this reform was going on.
Immigration, which is primarily low-skilled high school dropouts and so forth, has raised the child poverty rate.
So it essentially has partially offset the success of these reforms.
Moreover, if you had any of the amnesties or these massive new so-called guest worker programs that the Senate wants to enact, those would wipe out all of the gains from welfare reform and would, in fact, be the largest single expansions of the welfare system in the last 30 or 40 years.
I think the amnesty alone would cost us about an additional $50 billion a year in welfare costs.
So, yeah, if we do as the Senate wants and as the President apparently wants, which is to bring in an unlimited number of high school dropouts from the Third World, they will be on welfare and they will overwhelm this reform totally, and they will cost the taxpayer an arm and a leg.
Excellent point, Jeannie.
Thanks very much.
And by the way, before I forget this, there's a lot of information at heritage.org that I would suggest if you have an interest in this.
And again, there are links always at rushlimbaugh.com.
But if you go to heritage.org, you're going to see Robert's presentation to the House of Representatives called The Impact of Welfare Reform and some other web memos and such published by the Heritage Foundation.
Let's go back to you on the phone at 1-800-282-2882-1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Joanna, is it Joanna?
Johanna.
Johanna in Lindenhurst, New York.
I'm Paul, and Robert's here, too.
Thank you.
I'd like to ask Mr. Rector if he has any information specifically about the state of New York.
I do know some people who work in the social services area.
And from what they say, it's just a matter of semantics.
You move these people from one program to another.
They don't go away.
And specifically, they were talking about a town in New York State called Port Jervis, where it's right across the border from TA and from New Jersey.
And people know they're not going to get their benefits in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.
And they just cross the bridge.
And New York State opens their arms to them and gives them whatever they want, including having additional children when you're not married and you're on welfare.
Yes.
I think that the New York reform has been modestly successful.
The caseload has gone down in New York State.
It went down quite substantially when Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York.
He had one of the more aggressive programs in the country in trying to make sure that all the people getting this welfare assistance in New York City were required to do some constructive activity.
One of the problems in New York, though, is that if people refuse to do what the government is asking them, they refuse to do their job search or their training or their community service, they continue to get a large chunk of money.
That's a problem in Albany and with your state legislature.
Giuliani wanted to change that the whole time he was in as mayor of New York and never was able to do it.
That has significantly reduced the impact of the reform in New York because it's not really a work requirement if you get most of your check even when you refuse to work.
So they did a good job within their limits.
But one of the next stages of reform I would like to do at the federal level is to say to New York and also to California, no, a work requirement means that if you don't do what you've been asked to do, you don't get any money out of the government.
We haven't quite gotten to that level yet.
Let's hope it happens.
As we like to say, Johanna, from your lips to God's ears.
Thanks for the call from Lyndonhurst, New York.
And I'm glad you mentioned that, Robert, because we did want to know what the future policies should be per your suggestion.
And we'll reiterate that before we let you go as we go to more callers here at 1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh program.
It's Jim's turn in Lakewood, Ohio.
Hello, Jim.
Hello.
Hi, Paul, Robert.
Robert, during your research, in Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up, there was a concept in the mid-1950s called urban development.
And what they wanted to do was actually develop the poorer neighborhoods.
But they told the people that were on welfare, they told the people that were poor on the east side of Cleveland, don't fix up your house.
The federal government and the city government told them that.
Don't fix up your house.
So there was a stigma.
It looked like the people on the east side of Cleveland, predominantly Afro-American, they were like, would you fix up your house?
Well, anyway, they told them that help was on the way.
We're going to demolish your house, and your dwellings were, new dwellings were going to be put up.
And I would not paint my house.
I wouldn't do anything to my house if somebody told me, well, what happened was there was a political drag.
Well, I don't know where the plugs came, but it didn't work out.
So to me, it always seemed like as I was growing up, something like urban development in the Cleveland area, be it whether or not conservative or liberal, it didn't work.
It actually had a reverse effect.
Most of the data on urban renewal and so forth shows that you ended up with less housing for low-income people, not more, as a result of it.
But even worse, all of those programs essentially, in the pre-reform era, what we did, we gave to the typical single mother a welfare check of different programs worth around $15,000.
And because we're not just wastrels here in the United States, in the pre-reform era, we didn't just give that away.
We said you have to meet two conditions.
We don't want you to work, and we don't want you to marry an employed man.
I called it the incentive system from hell.
And low-income people responded to these insane incentives, and we basically built a huge national underclass, white, black, and Hispanic.
This reform started to chip away at that at the margins.
It started to say that at least some of these recipients not only won't be paid anymore not to work, but you're going to require them to work in exchange for getting the aid.
But even so, half the caseload was exempt from that.
And as I said, public housing food stamps, which are parallel programs, have never been reformed.
So we're still sort of in the first stages of reform.
We're still very much as a government in the business of paying people to do things to destroy their own lives.
So we don't want to get too carried away.
But we can see from this reform the direction we need to go and what would be really successful if we could apply these rules about no one-way handout, you have to work or look for work as a condition for getting aid.
The poor can really respond positively to that if we give them a chance.
Welfare reform, 10 years later, you and Robert E. Rector of the Heritage Foundation with me, Paul W. Smith, right here next on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
This past weekend, Reaganomics turned to 25, 25th anniversary of Reaganomics.
Now it's the 10th anniversary of welfare reform.
Robert E. Rector is here.
You're talking with him on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith at 1-800-282-2882.
And Mike in Niagara Falls, your turn.
Mike?
Yes, I was listening to the program, and a few callers ago, they mentioned that there would possibly be an excessive burden imposed upon the welfare system by the illegal aliens.
And I had a question that why does the U.S. government pay for illegal aliens benefits when there's some Americans that deserve welfare and they can't get it?
And if I would immigrate to France or Mexico or any other country illegally, they would not pay for any benefits.
Why is America the only country that does that?
And if that's the law, what do we have to do to change those laws?
Robert?
Okay, it's a little more complicated than that.
In theory, illegal aliens don't get welfare.
However, there are about 10 million illegal aliens, 12 million illegal aliens in the U.S.
They have about 5 million kids.
Most of those kids were born here, usually out of wedlock, and they're all American citizens.
So they all get welfare, and that is about two-thirds of the welfare cost.
So that's how you get welfare from illegal immigration.
Moreover, when you look at the bill that was passed in the Senate and the bill that was supported by the President, that takes all these illegals and makes them legal.
So when they're legal, they are going to get all of these welfare benefits.
And it also brings in up to currently now up to 60 million new immigrants, all of which would be legal and on a pathway to citizenship, and they would receive welfare in enormous numbers.
Essentially, what we've done as a nation is bring in about 10 million high school dropouts from Mexico and South America in the last 10 or 15 years.
These people pay virtually nothing in taxes, even if they're here legally.
But because they're very low income, they get treated pretty lavishly under our welfare system.
The kids are all eligible for free education right up through college for the most part, and they're not paying any taxes.
Guess who's paying for it, the audience of this program?
Marie, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Go ahead, Marie.
Good morning or good afternoon in this case.
My question is, first off, I want to say that I agree with welfare reform, absolutely 100%.
I'm a 49-year-old who never was on welfare until five years ago when I from abuse anyways.
What I want to know is, does your system allow for things to be taken care of from women, okay, without children?
Because let me explain shortly.
When I was on welfare without my children at home, I was denied any help whatsoever.
The minute my child came home to me, I was allowed all the kind of help that I could get.
I was not well at the time, and that shouldn't have transpired.
But I find in our system that it really lacks that part.
I just want to know if you or if your system encourages that.
The focal point of welfare in the United States since the beginning of the War on Poverty under Lyndon Johnson was a pretty generous system of benefits from a variety of programs focused on single mothers.
Single people alone, if they're not elderly and not disabled, don't get that much in welfare.
Married couples usually haven't done that well under welfare.
But if you're a single mother, the welfare system is really focused on giving you a lot of aid.
What this reform really did was not change that so much as to say the people getting welfare, and in particular the single mothers, will continue to get aid, but they cannot just sit at home and collect a welfare check.
They have to be going out and taking a job or at least looking and preparing for a job.
And when we did that, most of them, or a lot of them, were very successful in moving off of welfare.
Since a mother at home alone with a welfare check is sort of the worst way to raise a child, children raised like that will do very poorly.
Both the mother, the taxpayer, and the child all benefit from this change.
Appreciate that call, Marie.
In Texas, welfare reform has been successful, as we've learned in this past hour.
The success has been limited by a number of factors.
First, although the federal government operates over 50 means-tested welfare programs, reform was largely restricted to one, aid to families with dependent children, as you point out.
Second, the federal work requirements, which pushed state welfare bureaucracies to promote work and reduce dependence, were always too lenient.
And then there are others.
Third, while the law sets clear goals to reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing and increase marriage, nearly all state bureaucracies simply ignore the goals.
In the future, Robert, in a few seconds we have left, what additional steps should be taken to advance the goals of welfare reform?
Well, we have to toughen up these work requirements, put them on public housing and food stamps as well.
And then we have to deal with out-of-wedlock childbearing.
We have about one child born out of wedlock every 20 seconds.
In the United States, this is where we get crime, welfare dependence, and poverty from.
The problem with lower-income young couples is that if you're middle class, what you do is you find somebody you like, you form a commitment, you get married, you have a child.
For the poor and the near-poor, that sequence is actually reversed.
The woman chooses to have a child first, then she looks around for someone that's a suitable partner.
She tries to find that person.
It's usually not the father of the child.
And then ultimately, she may think about getting married.
It's a really bad set of ideas.
It's a bad life plan.
And one thing we really can do is go into these young women and say, you know, there may be a better way of living your life that, in fact, being married before you bring children into the world is the very best and most positive thing you can do for those children.
I think that we have a ripe audience for that.
These mothers to be want to hear that.
Young women want to hear that.
You've made the point, and we appreciate it.
Robert, very much.
Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow, Domestic Policy Studies.
You can go to Heritage.org for more information at the Heritage Foundation or RushLimbaugh.com.
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