Major parts of the bipartisan Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act signed by William Clinton in 1996--and touted by him as among his greatest achievements--expire September 30 unless they are reauthorized by Congress. A debate between the two big-business parties over what further inroads they can make against working people will take place over the next several months on Capitol Hill.

Speaking at the predominantly Black St. Luke's Catholic Church in Washington six years after Clinton ended "welfare as we know it," Bush called for tougher requirements for those applying for benefits.

He also added his voice to a reactionary campaign to federally finance programs encouraging single women who have children and receive some form of federal assistance to get married.

The new welfare requirements promoted by Bush would require 70 percent of welfare recipients in a state to have jobs by 2007. The current requirement is 50 percent. Bush also stipulated that people receiving welfare benefits must work 40 hours a week in place of the current requirement of a 30-hour workweek for single parents and 35 hours for people who are married.

The president's proposal would also maintain the five-year ban on welfare benefits for immigrants who entered the United States after 1996, imposed under the law signed by Clinton. That sweeping measure also eliminated the federally funded entitlement Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and placed a five-year lifetime limit on any individual's ability to collect welfare payments. The elimination of the AFDC program, which was part of the 1935 Social Security Act, was the biggest single blow to this entitlement since its enactment. Assessing the impact of the legislation, government officials say the number of people receiving welfare dropped from 12.2 million in 1996 to 5.3 million today.

Leading Democrats struck a bipartisan note in response to the Bush proposals. A spokeswoman for liberal Democrat Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that will vote on Bush's welfare proposal, said the senator was "committed to working with the administration to reauthorize the welfare program to ensure that we're doing everything we can to reduce poverty and make work pay for all Americans."

The New York Times reported that House Democrats "accepted the basic structure of the 1996 law" and pledged that they "would maintain the law's emphasis on work and would not try to restore the individual entitlement to cash assistance" that was abolished by the Clinton legislation.

Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, the chief sponsor of the Democrat's legislation in the House and a supporter of the 1996 bill, admitted that many families "are not leaving poverty when they leave welfare for work. Some families at the very bottom of the income scale may have lost ground over the last five years because of a reduction in various forms of public assistance."

As the jobless rate continues to climb--an estimated 1.4 million workers have lost their jobs since the recession began last March--cities and states are slashing budgets, deeply affecting those put into make-work programs.

For example, in New York City, thousands of workers who participated in workfare programs have been dismissed from their jobs as they have reached the time limits for receiving welfare benefits. In January, New York's welfare commissioner ordered the firing of 3,500 workers who had been employed cleaning up city parks.  
 
Chipping away at Social Security
In line with the proposed assault on welfare benefits, Bush revived his scheme for chipping away at Social Security as a universal entitlement. At the February 28 Summit on Retirement Savings sponsored by the Labor Department he said people should be allowed to invest part of their Social Security payroll deduction in the stock market. The administration has touted this proposal since the election campaign in 2000, but has kept quiet about it over the past six months as the stock market, in the grip of the recession, has suffered sharp drops and gyrations.

Casting Social Security as solely a government pension plan, Bush put forward claims that even the big-business press found hard to swallow. "Someone retiring today after 45 years of work would be entitled to a monthly benefit of $1,128 a month from Social Security," he stated. "If those same taxes had been invested in the stock market over the last 45 years, during the same period of time, that person would now have a nest egg of $590,000, or income of more than $3,700 a month."

A number of journalists were quick to point out that this example requires investments to have been made in the best period of stock market returns in history and for an average income-earner to have invested every cent of their retirement savings in the stock market for their entire working life.

Even a Wall Street sharpie like Harold Evensky, a principal partner in the financial planning firm Evensky, Brown & Katz, found the proposal a little over the top. Putting a person's entire saving into the stock market "is ill-advised at best and unconscionable at worst," he told the press.

Social Security, won through massive struggles of working people in the 1930s and expanded through the civil rights movement and women's struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, provides not only an old-age pension, but disability payments for those injured or otherwise unable to be gainfully employed during their working years, and dependent coverage for minors whose parents or main income-earner in the family are killed or disabled.

After his speech to the retirement saving conference Bush flew to Iowa where he spoke about retirement security and "pension plan abuse" to workers and others at a printing shop. He mentioned that his solution to preventing future Enron-type debacles would involve allowing workers to sell any stock their company contributes to their 401(k) retirement accounts or other retirement plans after three years--a proposal he made in January in response to the Enron Corporation's bankruptcy. In the wake of the company's collapse, workers were left with a worthless 401(k) retirement fund. The Enron bosses also fired some 4,300 Houston-area employees, leaving them without health insurance.  
 
Campaign against 'unwed mothers'
As the economy continues its downward slide, the Bush administration is spearheading an ideological campaign to place growing economic and social responsibilities onto working-class families. The president picked up where the Clinton administration left off in scapegoating "unmarried women" with children and "broken families" for social problems in capitalist society.

"Statistics tell us that children from two-parent families are less likely to end up in poverty, drop out of school, become addicted to drugs, have a child out of wedlock, suffer abuse or become a violent criminal and end up in prison," Bush told the church audience in the nation's capital. Single mothers' "lives and their children's lives would be better if their fathers had lived up to their responsibilities," he added.

Bush called for the government to allocate $100 million annually to promote marriage programs that include "state and local experiments for counseling, education and research to foster sound marriages," the Washington Post reported.

Bush also made a pitch for his $135 million abstinence education proposal. "Abstinence is the surest way and the only completely effective way to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases," he said.

In this ideological push, Bush is addressing from the point of view of the capitalist rulers and the social layers that look to them what they consider a giant problem: the historic changes in the family structure in the United States over the last half century. The number of children born to women who are not married is now at 31 percent, while the percentage of households headed by married couples dropped from 80 percent in 1900 to a little more than 50 percent today. The rate of divorce has jumped sharply since 1960. Between 1950 and 1998, the percentage of working-age women who hold jobs outside the home nearly doubled, rising from 33.9 percent to 59.8 percent.

This "pro-marriage" offensive aims to reinforce the family as a crucial economic institution under capitalism. Secretary of Health and Human Services Thomas Thompson said that in addition to federal financing of these programs, the administration will provide matching grants to the states to "strengthen families and reduce out-of-wedlock births."  
 
 
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