Work Over Welfare: Welfare Reform Ten Years Later

Transcript

RON HASKINS: I really wanted to write this book and the reason is that I knew that if we passed this bill it would be a historic bill. There was no question in my mind, we had already written the bill and because of the Contract with America, we had legislative language, we had complete -- virtually complete agreement among Republicans in the House -- this is Lesson No. 1 for the Democrats taking over, you've got to first make sure your troops are on the same side. They're not necessarily off to a great start. So we had complete agreement, and we were confident that our leadership would convince Dole; and Dole was running for president and he had to be more conservative and what better way than to support welfare reform. So it worked out. So the first thing, very important bill and established, maybe forever in American social policy the Republican principal: demand more, spend less.

The second reason is, frankly, defensive. The things that were said about this Bill on the floor of the House and were said about Republicans who supported it in the New York Times and Washington Post and so forth, were really beyond the pale. Republicans and the Bill itself were often compared to Nazis coming at night for children and so forth. So I felt it was important to establish that none of these ideas were new. That Republicans had worked on them carefully, had crafted these ideas, we had an A team, an absolutely magnificent team of members who knew how to support the bill and if you look back at the Florida debates or the debates in the committees, you will see the Republicans more than held their own in all the criticisms of the Bill.

And I also wanted to explain why the ideas that were embodied in that Bill, even though controversial, actually had good justification, both in research in many case, and in other cases in logic in American history.

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