Supports the following principles regarding the US welfare system:
Strengthen child support collection procedures and increase penalties for parents who do not pay child support.
Impose a two-year limit on welfare benefits for recipients who
are able to work.
Require welfare recipients to accept some form of government-sponsored job after two years if unemployed in the private sector.
Require that unwed teenage mothers live with a parent or guardian (if possible) and attend school to
receive benefits.
Limit the benefits given to single women if they have additional children while receiving welfare benefits.
Provide child care services to welfare recipients who work or attend school.
Provide rent or housing supplement
vouchers for low-income families.
Increase funding of programs that prevent teen pregnancy and family break-up.
Support programs that give incentives for employers to hire and train welfare recipients.
Source: Vote-smart.org, 1996 NPAT
Jan 1, 1996
Finish welfare reform by moving able recipients into jobs.
Johnson 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
Establish a National Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
Johnson co-sponsored the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund Act
Establishes the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund in the Treasury to promote the development of affordable low-income housing through grants to States and local jurisdictions.
Source: Bill sponsored by 22 Senators 03-S1411 on Jul 15, 2003
Tax credits to promite home ownership in distressed areas.
Johnson co-sponsored the Community Development Homeownership Tax Credit Act
Amends the Internal Revenue Code to permit a community homeownership tax credit based upon an applicable percentage of each qualified residence's eligible basis. Makes such credit available to residences (including factory built homes) located:
in a census tract with a median gross income not exceeding 80 percent of the greater area or statewide median gross income;
in a rural area;
on an Indian reservation; or
in an area of chronic economic distress.
Prohibits a buyer's income from exceeding 80 percent (70 percent for families of less than three) of the area gross median income and requires owner occupancy.
Source: Bill sponsored by 45 Senators 03-S875 on Apr 10, 2003
Increase the earned income tax credit.
Johnson co-sponsored increasing the earned income tax credit
Provisions Relating to Earned Income Credit: Amends the Internal Revenue Code to repeal the supplemental young child credit and revise and increase the earned income credit.
Source: Tax Simplification Act (H.R.13) 1993-H13 on Jan 5, 1993
Fully fund Head Start; Job Corps; and WIC food program.
Johnson co-sponsored fully fund Head Start; Job Corps; and WIC food program
Making appropriations to begin a phase-in toward full funding of the special supplemental food program for women, infants and children (WIC) and of Head Start programs, and to expand the Job Corps program for the year ending September 30, 1994.
