Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
Goals 2000 links world-class standards to grassroots reforms and I hope
Congress will pass it without delay. Our school to work initiative will for
the first time link school to the world of work, providing at least one
year of apprenticeship beyond high school. After all, most of the people
we're counting on to build our economic future won't graduate from college.
It's time to stop ignoring them and start empowering them. We must
literally transform our outdated unemployment system into a new
reemployment system. The old unemployment system just sort of kept you
going while you waited for your old job to come back. We've got to have a
new system to move people into new and better jobs because most of those
old jobs just don't come back. And we know that the only way to have real
job security in the future, to get a good job with a growing income, is to
have real skills and the ability to learn new ones. So we've got to
streamline today's patchwork of training programs and make them a source of
new skill for our people who lose their jobs. Reemployment, not
unemployment, must become the centerpiece of our economic renewal. I urge
you to pass it in this session of Congress.
Welfare
And just as we must transform our unemployment system, so must we also
revolutionize our welfare system. It doesn't work; it defies our values as
a nation. If we value work, we can't justify a system that makes welfare
more attractive than work if people are worried about losing their health
care.
If we value responsibility, we can't ignore the $34 billion in child
support absent parents out to be paying to millions of parents who are
taking care of their children--. If we value strong families, we can't
perpetuate a system that actually penalizes those who stay together. Can
you believe that a child who has a child gets more money from the
government for leaving home than for staying home with a parent or a
grandparent? That's not just bad policy, it's wrong and we ought to change
it.
I worked on this problem for years before I became president, with other
governors and with members of Congress in both parties and with the
previous administration of another party. I worked on it with people who
were on welfare, lots of them. And I want to say something to everybody
here who cares about this issue. The people who most want to change this
system are the people who are dependent on it. They want to get off
welfare; they want to go back to work; they want to do right by their
kids.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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