[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 27 (Friday, March 11, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: March 11, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
WELFARE REFORM; THE GENDER ISSUE
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of South Dakota). Under the
Speaker's announced policy of February 11, 1994, the gentlewoman from
Hawaii [Mrs. Mink] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the
majority leader.
Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. I thank the Speaker for allotting me this time
and I thank the majority leader.
The matter I would like to introduce tonight in a series of special
orders that I hope to take, by engaging my fellow colleagues in the
House to join me, is a discussion of the whole welfare reform issue.
Welfare reform has become a topic that has been linked with health care
reform. It is linked to budget deficit considerations, and it has risen
to prominence in terms of the Clinton administration's priorities.
Therefore, I believe it is incumbent upon us as Members of this House
to put this issue in proper perspective. So much of what has been said
and what we have seen in the press and elsewhere is extremely negative
criticism of people, who though no fault of their own, have come to
difficult circumstances and have, therefore, had to ask for Government
assistance.
If the subject matter were simply to be dropped at that point,
perhaps it would not be necessary to take special orders to discuss
this issue with greater compassion and clarity.
But the point that I wish to make in this hour that I have taken is
that the brunt of our criticism, the brunt of our attack, the brunt of
the burden of this debate is being heaped upon women in this society.
It is grossly unfair to put this kind of criticism on the people of our
society who are already in a highly difficult situation.
We all know the statistics as women: Women have the greatest
difficulty in finding jobs that pay decent wages; they have the
greatest difficulty in finding jobs that have even the slightest amount
of upward mobility. We speak about being locked into a job situation
that barely pays enough to stay above the poverty line let alone to
survive and provide for a family of two or three children.
The statistics are there. The comparisons in terms of wages earned by
women at the lowest end of the work force prove this time and time
again, that despite all progress which we have made in terms of gender
equity in this society, that there are still monumental problems with
respect to women being able to earn a decent living and to be paid
according to their talent and ability.
We only need to look at the statistics to bear this out. Women are
still at the level of 60 cents to 70 cents on the dollar, based upon
equal educational background and equal experience when it comes to men
holding the same position.
Talk about the glass ceiling, the glass ceiling is often discussed
for the higher levels, ``Why don't we have more judges, more people
heading corporations, more people in the professions?'' The glass
ceiling that we need to be concerned about is the one that keeps women
in our society at the lowest level of earning, at the most menial jobs,
the jobs which have the least potential of being able to lift them up
to the ability to sustain their families.
It is under these circumstances that we are now debating this whole
welfare reform issue.
Most of these families are on public assistance because they have
nowhere else to go. I cannot believe that this great Nation is going to
forget its history of compassion and concern for those in our society
who are unfortunate, who have come to unfortunate circumstances, and
abandon them with such harsh rules as 2 years and you're out. It sounds
something like ``three strikes and you are in a lifetime prison
situation.'' I cannot believe this Nation is going to move forward to
place those kinds of harsh consequences upon these families.
The most important point that the country needs to know when we are
talking about people on family assistance is that the vast majority of
persons on family assistance are children. We are talking about some 10
million children, perhaps, who are on AFDC rolls. If we adopt a policy
that says that the single parent can receive assistance only for 2
years, what is to happen to these children? What is to happen to the
support mechanism for these children?
I believe that we need to look at some of these harsh recommendations
for the stark reality that they will present to America.
All of us join with our concerns about the homeless: What do we do
about the people on our streets who have no home, about families that
are living in vacant lots or in car bodies or are pitching a tent on
the mountain or on the seashore because they do not have the
wherewithal to pay the rent and to take care of their families?
What will happen if we adopt a 2 years and you're out rule is that
there will obviously be more families who will be forced to take to the
streets and to fill our homeless shelters and to depend upon the
private charitable organizations of the country.
One of the reasons I believe the welfare reform debate is heating up
is because of the expenses that have been mounting under one of the
entitlement programs called Medicaid, because poor families have a
program which entitles them to receive health care when they need it.
And of course in discussing the health care reform issue, one of the
major areas that people are concerned about is the mounting cost, not
only of Medicare but also of the Medicaid population.
So, in order to come to grips with this rising cost of entitlements,
we need to do, they say, something about the welfare aspects. And it is
true. So I believe that one of the fundamental responsibilities that
this Congress has is to come forward with a health care reform package
that will make it possible to offer, finally, universal health care
coverage for everyone in America regardless of their status, their
economic ability, their family situation, or whatever.
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So that will take us one tremendous step in the direction of helping
to take care of some of the problems.
I have heard many families on public assistance saying that they have
to, in order to make sure that their children's health care needs are
met, that there is no other way for them to provide for this health
coverage, and so they maintain themselves with all the restrictions on
welfare in order to protect their children. So, if we enact the health
care reform proposals that are before us and assure the country of
universal coverage, the part of the problem with reference to those on
public assistance will be met.
The AFDC program is a program that costs about $11.8 billion in
Federal benefits. Basically AFDC is a matching program where the States
come up with roughly about 50 percent of the costs, and the Federal
Government comes up with 50. It is not a federalized program in the
sense that there is a minimum established for child assistance
throughout the country. There is a wide disparity. It depends upon the
decisions at the local level.
So, Mr. Speaker, it is very much a program that depends upon what the
States feel they want to contribute to the support of a family.
In my own State the support figures that go back to January 1991
indicate that the support, maximum support, grant is $695. By contrast,
Mr. Speaker, we have States like Alabama at $124, we have Mississippi
at $120, we have California at $694. We have Alaska at $891, Arizona at
$293. The States vary tremendously in the amount of money that is
provided to each of these families.
I have long felt that one of the solutions is to perhaps put all of
this under the Federal Government and to provide a uniform support
basis for the children all across America rather than to leave it
dependent upon where they happen to live, and this might provide some
substantial support for children throughout the country.
There are today, according to the latest Census Bureau memorandum
which I just received the other day dated March 3, in America 36.9
million Americans living below poverty, and this is a 1992 statistic.
This figure has increased since 1991. At that time it was 35.7 million.
In 1989 it was 31.5 million.
So, Mr. Speaker, this is a very high number of persons living in
poverty. It is the highest number since 1962 according to the Census
Bureau.
Fifty-four percent of the mothers between 18 and 44 years of age in
1992 who had born a child in that year were working. Fifty-four percent
of the women. In 1982 it was 44 percent. In 1976 it was 31 percent.
More women are in the work place today contributing to the commerce of
this country, finding employment, providing for their families and, in
many cases, at the lowest wages that that community offers. It is
difficult for the families, and if something should happen to disrupt
those families, divorce, death, separation or whatever, many of them
have no other recourse than to seek assistance under the AFDC program.
There have been societal changes, too, in the last 10 or 15 years.
Twenty percent of the preschoolers whose mothers worked in 1992 have
fathers at home as the primary care giver, and this is up from 15
percent of the preschoolers being cared for by their fathers in 1988.
The statistics in 1992 show 16 percent are cared for by their
grandparents and 8 percent by other relatives. Thirty-one percent of
recent mothers who had a child in 1992 had high school educations--
excuse me--31 percent had less than a high school education as compared
to 72 percent that had graduate degrees, and so we see a changing
situation among the working mothers. In 1993, Mr. Speaker, the Census
Bureau advises that 80 percent of Americans 25 years and older
completed high school. That is a remarkable number of people.
So, Mr. Speaker, we are succeeding despite all the naysayers in our
society. Most Americans are continuing high school and finishing high
school. They still have difficulty finding a job.
We have millions of people that are unemployed. It is not only the
welfare recipient who has no job or cannot find one. There are millions
of other Americans who have, because of downsizing of industry or
whatever, lost their jobs despite having good education, good
experience. They are unable to find work. Yet we find the policymakers
who are talking about welfare reform stressing the fact that the
solution to AFDC is job training, job search and, ultimately, a job.
Mr. Speaker, I wish that it were that easy. I believe that the vast
majority of single parents, women who are on welfare, would be eager to
take a job to support their families, if they could be assured that the
income they earned would be sufficient to support their families and
that they would have the health care support that went along with that
job. And to prove that, that this is not a new idea, it is important to
know the history of where we are in the whole discussion of aid to
dependent children.
Aid to dependent children was established by Social Security in 1935
as a cash grant program to help families that were having difficulties,
whose fathers were absent and not at home. The program provided at that
time cash, welfare payments, for needy children who did not have a
mother or a father at home, or who was incapacitated, had disease or
was unemployed. So, it has always been a child oriented program, a
program designed to help families with dependent children. That is
exactly what AFDC is.
The myth out there in talking about welfare is this myth that there
are all these adults out there, five million perhaps, who are receiving
government assistance and not doing their best in terms of going out to
locate a job, and that, of course, is not the situation at all
In order to try to develop a new direction and a new structure for
the AFDC program, Mr. Speaker, in 1988 the Congress, in its wisdom,
enacted Public Law 100-485, which is the Family Support Act, 1988. It
revised the whole idea of AFDC by putting in education and training
requirements. As of October 1, 1990, States were required to have job
opportunities and basic skills programs. For short, we call it the jobs
program. The new program is designed to help needy families with
children avoid long-term welfare dependency.
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The Jobs Program replaced the Job Incentive Program that was referred
to as WIN, and other demonstration programs that had been supported by
previous administrations.
The Jobs Program was required to have an educational component. The
States were required to enroll those individuals receiving AFDC,
provided the youngest child was at least 3 years of age, to have some
sort of an educational program. They were automatically included in
Medicaid, and under the Family Support Act, it required the States to
guarantee child care if it was decided that child care was necessary
for the individual's employment or participation in education and
training activities.
So the major components of the administration's policies or
recommendations for welfare reform changes are already part of what the
Congress included in the Family Support Act of 1988. First, is that the
States should have a job training and education component, and, second,
in order to take advantage of the job training and education component
child care was necessary. The State was required to provide that child
care.
Under the Federal law, AFDC mothers were required to assign their
child support rights to the State and to cooperate with welfare
officers in establishing the paternity of the child and in obtaining
support payments from the father.
That is already law. Yet we hear this proposal coming from all
quarters as though it was a new discovery. It is already part of the
Family Support Act of 1988, that by receiving AFDC, you assign to the
State government the responsibility to locate the father, to establish
paternity, and to try to receive support payments.
If the State is successful in receiving these support payments, those
support payments are assigned to the State in order to help meet its
contributions or matching rates under the welfare program.
So that is an ingredient that is already with us under the Family
Support Act. One might ask, well, what is wrong with the Jobs Program?
Why did it not work and can we not make it work?
I believe that we could. The problems arise because of the lack of
funding. The Congress has not given enough money. The States have not
been able to provide enough resources and assets to make it work.
So my suggestion to this Congress is to take a hard look at the Jobs
Program and to see what ways we might improve it and make the ultimate
result, which was already stated in the enactment of that bill, to try
to reduce the number of persons on welfare by enabling them to find a
job.
That is not a very easy thing to do. You can do all the job training,
and we have heard so much criticism about the 100-plus job training
programs that exist now in the law for this, that, or the other kind of
person in our society and what the administration is arguing, that we
should consolidate all these training programs to better assure their
success.
The difficulty with job training is that we do not necessarily target
the training to a job availability. As a consequence, the job training
expenses are forfeited, and the person still has no job there that can
provide the income and the self-sustaining ability for that family.
So we have to be careful when we are talking about some sort of
miracle work, such as training and education, as though it could
immediately result in a job opportunity that can transfer to a family
that has been on public assistance. It is very difficult. It needs
counseling, it needs matching, it needs job searching, it needs a
considerable amount of resources, far more than we are now willing to
put into the AFDC Program or any Jobs Program.
I am fully in support of the notion that we have to do more to help
these families, and I embrace all of the suggestions that have been
made thus far, that we should provide more money for education and
training, counseling, and go out there to look for jobs that these
families could fill.
But the difficulty is it is not that simple, and it is a very costly
enterprise. My guess would be that while we spend about $11 billion for
AFDC currently as cash benefit payments to these families, if we embark
on a full-scale education, training, job search, job location program,
it will certainly cost at least that much more for it to be successful.
Now, the proposals almost confess that they may not succeed. And the
may-not-succeed part of the proposals suggest that if a job cannot be
found, that it will be the responsibility of the Government to look for
a community service job in the private sector, in the nonprofit sector.
And I think that is fine. It is already part of the law. It is part of
the family support assistance law. It is a provision called community
work experience.
Let me read you a short synopsis of the community work experience
part of the law.
The purpose of the CWE Program is to provide experience and training
for individuals not otherwise able to obtain employment. CWE programs
must be designed to improve the exployability of participants through
actual work experience and training, and to enable individuals employed
under CWE programs to move them into regular employment. CWE programs
must be limited to projects which serve a useful public purpose in
fields such as health, social service, environmental protection,
education, urban and rural development and redevelopment, welfare,
recreation, public facilities, public safety, day care. A State
electing to operate a CWE Program must ensure that the maximum number
of hours that any individual may be required to work under a CWE
Program is no greater than the number of hours derived by dividing the
total AFDC benefit by the minimum wage.
So, what we have done in the 1988 statute under community work
experience is to make people work for the AFDC benefit that they
receive. So that is already part of the law. But now we are moving
ahead, with education, training and trying to get them a job. If they
do not have a job the plan is to put them into a community service job
supported either by the local government, the State government, the
Federal Government, or a local entity, with a guarantee of at least
minimum wage.
The problem with that solution is that it is not going to bring that
family out of poverty. Minimum wage is likely to produce about an
$11,000 or $12,000 income for that individual, hardly enough to support
a family, unless the Government has already assured them housing
assistance, and has assured them child care.
That is another element which the Family Support Act of 1988 also
took cognizance of. You cannot have employment and training and all of
that which leads to the work ethic, unless you have child care
provisions for young children who are not of school age and, for those
of school age, some after school program that will enable that child to
be protected and safe and not on the streets being tempted or otherwise
subjected to abuse and violence by the elements on the street.
Child care is already at about a $1 billion level in terms of Federal
support to AFDC families in job training under the JOBS Program. There
is a transitional day-care program for 1 year for AFDC families that
are moving off welfare, and another $300 million program for at-risk
families. So we are already providing support in the child care area.
If we move to a policy which says everybody must find something in
terms of work, either in the public or the private sector, because
after 2 years there will be no more assistance, then there will be this
great issue of what happens to child care for the remainder of the
time.
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Is this going to continue to be a Government responsibility? If it
is, that is going to add another considerable amount of money for child
care.
The discussion of welfare reform is not a simple one. I have
attempted to get answers from the Congressional Research Service for
many of the questions that are asked of me constantly. I know that the
search for information is only just the beginning. Let me give you a
few of the bits of information that CRS has provided me, based upon
questions which I posed to them recently.
The No. 1 point on welfare reform is to remember that when we are
talking about welfare, we are talking about 10 million children. This
is data dated November 1993: 9.6 million children are in the program;
5.4 million adults, 700,000 of them from two-parent families.
The two-parent families were added recently, called the AFDC
Unemployed Parent Program, where to-parent families are entitled to the
AFDC if, because of unemployment, they are now in a difficult
circumstance. Prior to that amendment, AFDC was reserved only to the
single-parent situation.
The CRS says that their data indicates that 43 percent of mothers who
first receive AFDC before age 24 were short-term cyclers who used the
program for a total of fewer than 24 months, that 32 percent were
longer-term cyclers who used it for a total of 25 to 54 months. And
then about 24 percent used it for longer periods.
Increasingly, the data, which is being provided me by various
research organizations, suggests that any concerted effort that the
government may make at the local, State or Federal level to help
individuals find jobs will ultimately be successful, if there are jobs
to be found, because these families are eager to work.
If you look at their cycle of in-and-out of AFDC, the kinds of jobs
they took, hoping that it would lead to a better circumstance for their
family, it clearly suggests that for at least two-thirds of these
families on welfare, a job for them is a better way to go. They are
anxious to do whatever they can to make that so.
Would that we could make America to be a mirror image of ourselves.
Would that we could make America into a completely homogeneous all-
alike society, everybody having equal potential to earn, to work, to be
successful. But that is not the condition of any civilized society.
There are always in our midst people who are less fortunate than we
are, less able to be productive and find themselves in difficult
circumstances.
I think that it has been the tradition of this Nation to not turn our
backs against these individuals but to find ways in which we could help
them be better off and provide better circumstances for their family,
and I believe that no matter what the debate may be on this issue of
welfare, that the vast majority of Americans would support such a
policy still today.
The CRS tells us that of the current 5 million families who are on
AFDC, it is estimated that 2.275 million or 44.5 percent have been
enrolled in AFDC continuously for about 2 years. So we are talking
about half of the persons on welfare who are already within that 2-year
limit. And we know perfectly well that if we have an augmented job
policy, job search, counseling and great efforts to find jobs, that
that percentage would easily fall. So that is a note that offers me, at
least, great optimism for the future.
In fiscal year 1991, CRS says that the States, in their reports,
indicated that 337,000 persons left AFDC because of earnings. So that
statistic would suggest, that a large body of individuals on welfare
are working and are in and out of the welfare situation.
In a sample month of fiscal year 1992, according to the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 274,000 AFDC
parents in the JOBS Program that I just described were attending high
school, were getting a GED certificate, or were engaged in higher
education or engaged in some vocational training.
The budget, as I recall, the budget figures in debate on the budget
resolution suggested there are about 500,000 families that currently
benefit from the JOBS Program. So it is a program which I hope will be
augmented with greater financial support in keeping with this current
insistence that these individuals get training which, hopefully, will
lead to a job.
AFDC recipients are also going to college. Of the number who are
going to college and receiving Pell Grants, Pell Grants are for those
coming from low-income families, according to the statistics provided
me by the CRS for the school year 1991-1992, there were 448,643
students receiving Pell Grants going to college and who were on AFDC.
That is another indication of tremendous drive and commitment to
improve themselves and to improve their family conditions.
The basic AFDC program is a matching one, as I indicated. There are
no restrictions in terms of whether the States must make specific
allotments for numbers of children. But all the data that I have seen
indicates that the average number of children on AFDC is two, that that
is the typical family size. So we are not facing a situation, as some
have suggested, that people go on welfare to have children because that
can lead to additional sums of money.
In fact, the additional sum that most States pay for additional
children while you are on welfare is minuscule sometimes as low as $60
or $70 a month.
The great issue out there that needs to be juxtaposed to this whole
question of whether job training and education for the welfare
recipient is going to lead to a job, is that we have to recognize,
because of the recent recession, job losses, plant closing, defense
closings, corporate downsizing, that there is an average of 9 million
jobless workers out there in our society looking for work whose
unemployment compensation benefits perhaps have already expired. And
they are still unable to find a job. That is the fact of America today
upon which we are trying to shove more people into the job market,
where the jobs for which they qualify are absent. So the success of the
program that is being suggested here is almost totally dependent upon
whether we can match the training and education to a job that is
available in the community.
We cannot talk about trying to move these people around to a job that
may exist in Texas, when the family is living in New York or in Boston.
That is unrealistic. We have to talk about fashioning training programs
for jobs that actually exist in the communities in which these families
live, and we have to bear in mind that it is not simply a minimum wage
job. We are talking about women here who deserve better. Millions of
women across the country already hold down the jobs of the least pay in
our society.
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That is a condition that is intolerable. Therefore, when we talk
about gender equity and economic equity and employment equity, we have
to bear in mind that our society has not yet solved that problem, so
the very people that we are dealing with in this dimension of welfare
reform are the very women that we are going to victimize again with low
pay, unless we are careful and open up job training, job opportunities,
educational opportunities that will lead them into job situations which
will afford them a greater opportunity to earn more money.
In 1992, an estimated 9 million single parents cared for children
below the ages of 18. In fiscal year 1991, about 416,000 infants were
born into AFDC units.
One other statistic which I think is very instructive in trying to
picture this situation, the Congress has consistently insisted that we
fully fund the WIC Program. WIC, the program for women, infants and
children, is a feeding program to help mothers across the country.
One could infer that most of the mothers and infants and children in
the WIC Program are AFDC, or fall in the poverty category, but the
statistics given me by CRS indicate that only 29 percent of the infants
under WIC are AFDC, just 29 percent, which indicates the scope of real
poverty in America where some 70 percent of infants and children and
mothers qualify for WIC.
It suggests to us that we have an endemic problem of poverty in our
country, and that really, when we are talking about welfare reform, we
ought to be talking about poverty, what are we going to do about
poverty, the conditions of poverty in our society. Truly, that is the
direction we ought to be going.
So many of us, in debating the budget, debating economic recovery,
have argued that the one course that we have not taken in any of our
programs and deliberations is a dynamic jobs program, opening up the
possibility of job creation through the injection of Federal funds into
various kinds of programs. We have failed to do that. We tried to do an
economic stimulus package in the early months of the Clinton
administration, and it failed. I believe it is still important for the
Congress to consider that.
If we did that, we could provide jobs for the millions of people who
are unemployed; we could provide job opportunities for those on
welfare, where it would be a meaningful opportunity for their families.
This whole issue is one that I am sure is going to raise a lot of
discussion and debate in the ensuing months. I hope to engage this
House on some of the issues, knock down some of the myths about this
program, and to try to deal with it in a meaningful way.
One of the first things we have to do is get rid of this idea that we
have to put these constraints on these families, that they cannot earn
anything or they will lose their opportunity to receive any Government
support. That is idiocy. On the one hand, we are saying, ``You must go
to work,'' but if you do, you will lose the support that is so
necessary to keep the family together. So we have to find some way to
enable a family to try to do better, to try to improve their condition,
and not punish them in the process.
I have heard suggestions, and I believe there is a bill which also
says that if you are below 18 years of age, no welfare assistance. It
seems to me that that, again, is punitive. There are not very many
welfare recipients in this category, and I cannot imagine any teenager
becoming pregnant to have a child merely so that there can be some
financial assistance under the welfare program.
Mr. Speaker, I hope that in the course of the debates we can discuss
the real issue facing America that has faced us for many generations,
and that is what can we do about poverty. When I first came to the
Congress in 1965, under the Johnson administration, we inaugurated a
war against poverty. Many of those programs have been retained.
Head Start, for instance, has become a word that almost everybody in
our society understands. It has brought great benefits to the children
of this country. It is here to stay, hopefully, and it is going to be
fully funded one day, and it is for the children that come from the
impoverished communities all across this country. It is going to make
America better, because the children will have a better opportunity in
their future.
I am hoping that the war against poverty that we started in 1965 has
not been lost, is not falling upon deaf ears, but as we begin the
debate on welfare reform, that we turn it into a meaningful discussion
about poverty in America and what this country needs to do to eradicate
it, rather than to punish the poor.
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