Interpretation 20 years later . Republicans call this number 2027488000 democrats, 2027488001. Int, your number, 2027488002. If you have experience with Welfare Programs, call this number. E would love to hear from you. We thought we would start this morning with a piece of tape from bill clinton. What we are trying to do today is to overcome the flaws of the welfare system for the people who are trapped on it. We all know that its a typical family owned welfare today is different than the ones 60 years ago. We all know that there are a lot of good people on welfare who just get off of it in the ordinary course of business but that a significant number of people are trapped on welfare or a very long time. Exiling them from the community of work that give structure to our lives. Nearly 30 years ago, Robert Kennedy said work is the meaning of what this country is all about. We needed as individuals, we need to sense it as our fellow citizens and we need it as a society and as a people. H
I think people are curious about it and that is why i wanted to write the book. I think people throw around that word without really knowing where it comes from. When i began to do more and more research, and as you know, i talk a lot about british colonization, which is not what people have never really paid attention to in talking about white trash. Most people start in the antebellum south. I found an older history and i thought it was important to Pay Attention to language. I talk about all of the vocabulary because i think we miss something about how people think about poverty if we do not understand the language and what those words mean. Brian we have all of those words available to put on the screen, which we will do now, and there are lots of them, white trash, offscourings, lubbers, crackers, clay eaters. Where did those terms come from . Nancy this is what is so curious. You will find each generation changing the vocabulary. The term i paid a lot of attention to is waste peo
It is a tax credit that people with low incomes receive as a kind of bonus for working, the more they earn, the larger the tax credit up to a certain point. Then that, clinton and first Lady Hillary Clinton were engaged in a deeply divisive with congress and the American People in general that the future of the health care system. Clintons efforts to Reform Health care at the time failed, so the white house was occupied with health care at the time. And then in 1995, a new congress was inaugurated. This congress was controlled by republicans. That led to a year and a half of haggling between republicans and congress and the white house over what kind of welfare reform would ultimately be enacted. Eventually in the summer of 1996, almost 20 years ago to the day, clinton signed the welfare reform bill. That bill was signed in 1996. What were some of the key changes it made in the welfare system . Max i think the most important change is that welfare can no longer be taken for granted. Pe
Groups. You will get the people that are looking for the handout coming into the office with far less frequency. That enables you to focus your energies on those in need of aid. It also means there is less abuse of the taxpayer. There we go. In welfare reform, we basically had two goals. The first was to establish work requirements, not just to a game aid to families with dependent children, but also work requirements for food stamps. Secondly, and most importantly, to deal with the problem of out of wedlock childbearing and increase the number of children born inside marriage. Those were important. I think we made some modest progress on both of those fronts. Certainly not everything we could have done. This is going to be a very familiar chart. You saw one version of this. This is the temporary assistance with needy family caseload. This goes back to the time of the korean war. This is essentially the same data he was presenting. What we can see is that for a 55 year period, that red
We had a well oiled machine by the time we took over the house in 1994. And the third on the substantive issues, writing the legislation, learning about the statutes that were in place, what we want to do, and finally, i think the most important thing was we found out where we disagreed. And we knew going in we were going to have a big problem with heritage and that robert was going to be breathing down our next the whole time, and it turned out bill bennett was like that, too. There were definitely cracks in the Republican Party. Its not like we all were singing comekumbaya. We had real differences in the Republican Party and started developing solutions before we were in the limelight. Mr. Kaus i remember it was stunning to me when you and heritage came in with the illegitimacy agenda. I thought everybody was happy and wanted a nice workfare bill. Mr. Rector right, the history of how this welfare reform came about, it started with Ronald Reagan. When Ronald Reagan was governor of cal