Transcripts

SPEAKER 1: Welfare was started to protect the family, where breadwinner disappeared with death or desertion or divorce. And suddenly, a stay-at-home spouse was struggling with the need to keep the family going and to support the children. And that part of welfare has worked OK and works OK today. That isn't the problem. The problem is this dramatic growth now and never married parents.

When I became mayor in 1980, 27% of the births in the city of Minneapolis were to a single woman. Right now, it's running around 50% And if we took the last five years as the trend, then by the end of the decade, two out of three of all births in the city would be to a single woman.

And the problem here is that this is a prescription for poverty. It creates very difficult circumstances for the nurturing of children. And from a statistical perspective, the likelihood that the children are going to experience trouble somewhere along the way is far higher, where there isn't the support at home which children need and deserve.

SPEAKER 2: How do you respond to charges that what this amounts to really is just bashing away at single mothers and/or just trying to impose your values on other people?

SPEAKER 1: Well, that's a fairly common reaction. And partly, it is that people, I think, have become so inured to the current system that they just assume it changes is aimed at the women, are at the children. The problem is that as welfare works now, it works badly for the single mom who starts a family and then applies for welfare. It entraps her. It's isolating. Unless she has outside support, she faces prolonged poverty. And it's just a bad deal.

Equally important and rarely talked about is what happens to the father. I mean, we now have the government stepping in and becoming the surrogate parent. The father's out of the picture because it's generally believed that, if a father is in the picture, then there's no access to public assistance. We need to get the father back into the family.

Now, these are personal choices. But right now, we have a government intervention which actively discourages it. So what I really think we should do is to provide support for children. And it should be provided, whether there's one parent or two parents.

And it should be based on their income. And health coverage ought to be provided. And I think access to child care needs to be provided. But if a woman has a child and we provide support for that child, it isn't clear why she should also go on the DOLE.

I mean, she lived before she had the child. Now, she has the child. We cover those expenses and the need for health care and child care. Why do we put her on the DOLE when we didn't have her on the DOLE before she had the child?

SPEAKER 2: Do you think that many people in society are so concerned about not offending anybody they're so worried about sensibilities that there's a refusal to discuss these issues much?

SPEAKER 1: Yes, this is a really tough issue to talk about because, for one thing, welfare has been kicked back and forth between a liberal and conservative perspective. And so there's real ideological fences that have been built around this issue. When I talk to people about it, it's like hitting a bunch of hot buttons. They react almost reflexively. And probably, I would have 10 years ago.

But when you live in a city and you struggle with family and children problems and you watch what's going on, you have to begin dealing with the reality as you see it. And as I've seen it as a mayor of the city, we need to do something in the direction. My problem right now is that the direction in which welfare is moving I don't think is going to help very much and may make it worse. And that's one message I need to try to convey to the folks in Washington who are working on this.