Bill Clinton: “First of all, I'm glad you want to do that. And secondly, I'm glad you're here so that other people who may never have…”

“First of all, I'm glad you want to do that. And secondly, I'm glad you're here so that other people who may never have met anybody drawing a welfare check understand that most people on welfare would like to get off. I've spent an enormous amount of time in the last 6 or 7 years working on this, and I'll bet I have had more personal conversations with people on welfare than any other public official in America. Here's what I think should be done. And you may not agree with all of it, but let me say to you and to everyone here, you just said something that's very important. Most people on welfare do not stay because of the welfare check. They stay because the cost of child care or the cost of medical coverage for their children makes taking a job prohibitive. Because if you don't have a lot of education and you take a low-wage job and no benefits, what you give up is not the check, you give up the child care, because you've got to pay for that, and you give up the health insurance you get out of the Medicaid program. So what I propose to do is the following: I want to change the welfare system so that in any State in America, anybody who is on welfare has to go through an education and training program, then has to take a job, if offered, but gets child care and medical coverage when they do it. And furthermore, I want to make sure work always pays. So to go back to your question, one of the things we propose to do in this tax bill is to say, for everybody, families with an income of under $30,000, that you get an increase in what's called the earned- income tax credit. And if you're a working poor person, if you work 40 hours a week and you've got children in your house, you would be lifted above the poverty line, so there would never be an incentive not to work. Now, the flipside of that is if after 2 years on welfare and going through the education program you don't have a job, then everybody under my plan would be required to go to work, either in a private sector job or a public sector job, in order to continue to draw the check. So we would end it, welfare as we know it, but we would give you the tools to succeed in the private sector. The tax system would support it, the child care system would support it, the health care system would support it. If we did that, you'd see a dramatic drop in the number of people on welfare and on food stamps. One in 10 Americans is on food stamps today. That is awful. And a lot of them are working people. So what we need to do is stop penalizing work. We need to reward work, and we need to reward responsible parenting. And I think that these changes will do that. That bill will be coming up. I'll be introducing that into the Congress sometime in the next few months as we try to work through all the details. But changing the welfare system could do more to strengthen family and work values in this country than just about anything else we could do. Defense Cutbacks Moderator. This is a retired Marine Corps general.”