FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 3, 2001

Contact: Rob Sawicki
Phone: 202.224.4041

Lieberman Cosponsors Plan to Build on Success of Welfare Reform and "Make Work Really Work"

WASHINGTON – Senator Joe Lieberman today joined several members of the Senate New Democrat Coalition in introducing the Strengthening Working Families Act, a package of investments and incentives designed to help low-income parents make the transition from welfare to work.

The bill would provide additional tax relief for low-income parents with large families, expand access to affordable on-site child-care, encourage more fathers to be engaged in their children's lives, ensure more child support dollars go to the children they were meant for, put more resources into valuable local social service programs, and put fewer children at risk by strengthening standards in our child welfare and foster care system.

The lead sponsors of the bill are Senators Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME). Other original cosponsors include Senators John Breaux (D-LA), Tom Carper (D-DE), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Bob Graham (D-FL), Tim Johnson (D-SD) Herb Kohl (D-WI) Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Blanche Lincoln, (D-AR), and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).

What follows is the statement on the Strengthening Working Families Act that Senator Lieberman issued today at a press conference to unveil the bill.

I am proud to join Senators Bayh and Snowe and others in our New Democrat Coalition today in introducing legislation that will help sustain and ingrain the short-term successes of welfare reform and ultimately make self-sufficiency a reality for many more disadvantaged families.

The 1996 welfare reform law we passed has indeed produced remarkable results -- 5.2 million people have moved off the rolls and into the workforce. Some of that success is clearly attributable to the strength of our economy. But a lot of it has to do with the structural changes we made in a system that for too long discouraged work and personal responsibility, fostered dependency and illegitimacy, and thereby undermined our most fundamental values.

The progress we have made could be an invitation to be complacent. But we must recognize that serious challenges remain if we truly want to make work work for low-income Americans. We still have work to do ourselves to fully transform our welfare system into a work and family system, one that will help low-income parents find and keep good jobs, and at the same time help them raise and nurture healthy children. Welfare reform simply won't last if it pits one responsibility against another, and weakens families in the name of strengthening work.

The bill we are putting forward today aims to keep us moving forward, with a package of strategic investments and incentives designed to reward work and rebuild families.

There is one component of this package I want to highlight in particular, and that is the expansion and modernization of the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC is one of the most progressive and effective federal initiatives of our time, having helped to lift millions of Americans out of poverty and into the mainstream of self-sufficiency. But we believe it can do more to help the working poor, especially those families with several children and rising incomes, if we make a few modest but important improvements.

For example, we know from research that larger families have greater problems leaving welfare for work than smaller families, which helps explain why the poverty rate among families with three or more children is 24 percent – more than double that of smaller families. Yet the EITC provides no additional relief to those larger families. So we are proposing to create a third tier in the program for parents with three or more children, which would boost the maximum credit by $500 a year and thereby boost the stability of those families.

We also know that families with two or more children earning between $13,000 and $22,000 a year face extremely high marginal tax rates, which can eat away at their earning power and seriously threaten their self-sufficiency. So we are proposing to slow down the phase out of the EITC for those families in a way that will not leave them with less for earning more.

These provisions, along with the rest of our bill, reflect our belief that welfare reform is a work in progress. Our goal is work AND progress, to build both on the victories and values of the 1996 reforms to help bring us closer to delivering on the promise of equal opportunity for every American. We will not eradicate poverty with this proposal, but we can empower poor people, by giving them the tools to make the most of their own lives, and this bill will help do just that.