Tom Harkin: “I always point with pride to the fact that in Iowa, we now have the distinction of having a higher percentage of people…”

“I always point with pride to the fact that in Iowa, we now have the distinction of having a higher percentage of people on welfare who work than any State in the Nation. Mr. President, before we started our welfare reform program, about 18 percent of the people on welfare worked. It is now up to about 35 percent, which is just about double. So what we have is more people on welfare who are also working. Again, that is one of the objectives of welfare reform. What has happened to our caseload? We knew at the beginning that, in changing the rules, the initial thing that would happen is that we would have more people on welfare. Everyone knew that. Sure enough, after we enacted the bill, we went from 36,000 to almost 40,000 in the space of just about a year. But look at what has happened since then. Our caseload has come down, and we now have fewer people by about 2,000 caseload 2 years after we started our program. The first year it went up, and then it came down dramatically. So in 2 years we have done two things. We have more people on welfare working--we doubled it--and we have cut the total caseload of people on welfare in Iowa.”