Opposes allowing churches to provide welfare services
Delaware's "A Better Chance" welfare reform initiative received $1.6 million from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS) for successfully moving people from welfare dependence to the workforce. Gov. Carper said, "This
award truly epitomizes Delaware's efforts of helping move thousands of our residents on public assistance from welfare to work. Delaware's A Better chance works for all of us -- it helps Delaware's economy; it moves people toward financial independence.
The Carper Administration has committed to strengthening families, their homes, and their communities across the state. To help people from becoming victims of crime and despair in certain neighborhoods, Carper proposes to increase the ability
of the communities’ neediest members to take full advantage of the Neighborhood Revitalization Fund, a $15 million fund. With this proposal, the program will be more flexible by allowing a blend of grants and loans so that more communities can be served.
Source: 2000 Legislative Agenda
Jan 1, 2000
Finish welfare reform by moving able recipients into jobs.
Carper adopted the manifesto, "A New Agenda for the New Decade":
Help Working Families Lift Themselves from Poverty In the 1990s, Americans resolved to end welfare dependency and forge a new social compact on the basis of work and reciprocal responsibility. The results so far are encouraging: The welfare rolls have been cut by more than half since 1992 without the social calamities predicted by defenders of the old welfare entitlement. People are more likely than ever to leave welfare for work, and even those still on welfare are four times more likely to be working. But the job of welfare reform will not be done until we help all who can
work to find and keep jobs -- including absent fathers who must be held responsible for supporting their children.
In the next decade, progressives should embrace an even more ambitious social goal -- helping every working family lift itself from poverty. Our new social compact must reinforce work, responsibility, and family.
By expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, increasing the supply of affordable child care, reforming tax policies that hurt working families, making sure absent parents live up to their financial obligations, promoting access to home ownership and other wealth-building assets, and refocusing other social policies on the new goal of rewarding work, we can create a new progressive guarantee: No American family with a full-time worker will live in poverty.
Goals for 2010 Finish the job of welfare reform by moving all recipients who can work into jobs.
Cut the poverty rate in half.
Double child support collections and require every father who owes child support to go to work to pay it off.
Source: The Hyde Park Declaration 00-DLC3 on Aug 1, 2000
