[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 35 (Thursday, March 24, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 24, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       THOUGHTS ON WELFARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. (Mr. Laughlin). Under a previous order of 
the House, the gentlewoman from Hawaii [Mrs. Mink] is recognized for 60 
minutes.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, I thank the Speaker for affording 
me the opportunity to continue on with this discussion. It is a very 
complex issue.
  Mr. Speaker, the matter that I want to turn to now is a proposal that 
comes from our colleague, Jan Meyers of Kansas. She has proposed that 
one of the ways to deal with this problem of welfare reform is to 
require teenagers under the age of 18 who become pregnant and have a 
child as a single parent be required to live at home.
  As I said earlier, I am not for forcing people by law, by mandating, 
that they go to work. I believe that given the incentives and the 
support of child care and so forth, that these parents will go to work. 
They can improve themselves. Just by earning minimum wage, they would 
get better than $125 a month.
  On this teenage parent situation, perhaps the moral argument ought to 
be that society should try to encourage the teenager to stay at home 
and remain with their parents, but this cannot always be the case. You 
might have an abusive family situation, totally disengaged with the 
reality of providing the support for this teenaged parent, and so 
again, I do not support the idea of creating a mandate that applies to 
all teenagers below the age of 18.
  In raising this issue, the proponents of this idea leave the 
impression that out of the 9 million children that we are dealing with, 
that we have a huge number of teenagers that are mothers. This is not 
the case at all. Again, I have asked for the statistics from the Census 
Bureau and the Department of Health and Human Services, and their 
reports that I have here indicate that we are talking about a very, 
very small number of individuals, very small.
  Totally, in the whole United States, in terms of female adult AFDC 
recipients by age, totally in the United States, out of the nearly 4 
million in this particular census period, those teenaged mothers 
between the ages of 14 and 15 number, countrywide, 3,932; 16 years of 
age, they number 11,795; 17 years of age, they number 31,453.
  I submit that those are not such large numbers as to require a 
Federal mandate. It is not such a huge problem that we have to deal 
with it in this sort of punitive way. We can create incentives so that 
the young teenaged mother would stay at home by allowing 
Federal support, irrespective of the fact that the parents are wage 
earners and maybe earn more than the family income criteria would 
require, and in some way encourage that teenager to maintain her 
household in that environment.

  However, to go and force such a child to live in a home where her 
situation might be tenuous, at best, I thing is the wrong way to go.
  Mr. OWENS. Will the gentlewoman yield?
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Yes, I will be happy to yield.
  Mr. OWENS. You have said that the plans that are being developed by 
the White House indicate they want to focus in on the youngest welfare 
recipients, which means that the ones coming in now, the youngest ones, 
would have the youngest children.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Exactly.
  Mr. OWENS. Is there any scientific evidence that supports their 
reasoning there in terms of the taking away out of the home, or they 
are saying they are going to cut them off in 2 years? It means a woman 
with a new baby, the baby is 2 years old, taking the mother away from a 
2-year-old baby. Does that jibe with current scientific evidence about 
raising children? Or will it do more harm than good by throwing those 
children into an artificial situation? Even the best day care cannot 
make up for what a mother could do at home. Are they considering all of 
this?
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. It goes exactly against the best scientific 
information, which says the best nurturer of the child is the mother of 
the child.

                             {time}   2250

  So to break up this relationship in a forceful manner by mandating a 
law that requires this seems to me an abrogation of our public policy 
stances, which has always been to support the family. We always stand 
up and say, ``I am for the family,'' and we debate how much we excel in 
terms of your beliefs in the family and mine. And yet when it comes to 
something like welfare reform, we somehow feel that we can abrogate 
these fundamental beliefs, and I think that is wrong.
  Mr. OWENS. Do they give any reasons for singling out this particular 
category?
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. I must admit that I was shocked in talking to 
some of the members of the task force. They argue that they must start 
with the youngest in order that welfare does not become as habit.
  Mr. OWENS. Oh, I see.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. They are into this myth, welfare as we know it, 
myth.
  Mr. OWENS. What about the habits of the mothers who are on welfare 
and the child is 6 years old? They are saying that they cannot be 
saved?
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Cannot be saved.
  Mr. OWENS. It is more reasonable to take the 5-year-old and 6-year-
old as the cutoff point where the child is older and able to go to Head 
Start or school, kindergarten or regular school, and they are just 
going to overlook all of the evidence that all of the psychologists and 
the experts on raising children have shown? So we are going to create a 
generation of scarred children who do not get the nurturing, who have a 
multitude of problems.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Separated from their mothers.
  Mr. OWENS. So we have to have more support services for them when 
they get to regular school, and then eventually they are going to have 
a larger percentage of the juvenile delinquents, and later on the 
criminals. We are just going to throw away all scientific evidence and 
march into something on the basis of not much sound evidence.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Current Federal law says if the mother has a 
child 3 years or younger they cannot even be part of the jobs programs. 
So we have always kept to this idea that the best nurturer of a young 
child is the mother. But of course if she wants to go out to work, then 
we help to find child care. But this is a forcible policy that they are 
trying to enact, a requirement that unless you sign up, the day you 
register for welfare you have to sign a contract with the Government 
saying yes, I will go for education; yes, I will go for job training; 
yes, I will be in a job within 2 years. That is the contract that you 
have to sign to go on welfare if this whole program comes about.
  So what we are doing is forcibly requiring these young mothers with 
infants to sign up in order to get welfare, cash assistance, to say 
that they will abandon their children and seek a job outside the home.
  Many of the mothers do that. I certainly as a person who has stood 
for women's rights and opportunities have always said women ought to 
have that option if they wish to work. But certainly I do not believe 
it is appropriate for the Federal Government to pass a law that 
requires this policy.
  Mr. OWENS. We are driven by some forces that are irrational here. I 
said before I hope welfare reform does not become revenge on the poor 
where we throw away any reason because there is a scream out there by 
people who really do not know who the fat cats on welfare are, and do 
not realize they are being swindled out of their taxpayers' money day 
in and day out by people who are in some cases billionaires. They just 
see poor people and they want to get revenge, get rid of any benefits 
that they are getting, and they lose their perspective, we lose our 
perspective and we create more problems than we solve. We are going to 
scar and hurt children in ways that will make it more costly for 
society in the future.

  I want to thank the gentlewoman from Hawaii. I am going to have to 
leave now, but I look forward to further dialogues with her. I hope 
that the American people are watching closely as we develop this 
welfare reform program. The gentlewoman has facts and statistics and is 
on top of the program and following the development of the plans in a 
way which is commendable, and I look forward to the use of her 
monitoring of the program as a resource. I have in my district large 
numbers of people who are on welfare. I have large numbers of people on 
welfare who tell me all of the time that they would like very much to 
get off. Nobody seems to want to stay on welfare. And one of the major 
problems they point out right away is that they cannot find a job, and 
the jobs that they find do not have health care. And immediately, if 
you have a child, the first thing you worry about is being able to have 
some way to deal with their health problems that will not cost you an 
arm and a leg. They just cannot on a minimum wage job, and most of the 
jobs are minimum wage jobs, where they can barely make ends meet in 
terms of food, clothing, and shelter, and if the child gets sick, if 
you do not have health care, you are wiped out. And I imagine that many 
of the mothers, you say they leave welfare and they come back, I would 
wager if a detailed study and analysis were made of why they come back, 
a sick child probably is often one of the reasons that they come back.
  We want welfare reform. I am all for welfare reform. I am all for the 
principle that people should not accept any Federal handouts, any 
government subsidies, you know, without a closed end. It should not be 
on and on assistance, it should not go on and on without some kind of a 
terminal point.
  But that should apply across the board to everybody, all Federal 
subsidies, all assistance to victims. And I think that if there is 
going to be a 2-year rule for welfare, we ought to calculate how much 
money is involved in that. It may be that even in very liberal States 
like Hawaii and New York we are talking about $15,000 a year as a 
subsidy, which over a 2-year period would be $30,000, and that may be 
the standard, $30,000 of assistance to all victims in America. If you 
are a victim of anything, if you are a victim of an earthquake you are 
entitled to $30,000.
  If you are victim of a flood, you are entitled to $30,000 worth of 
assistance. If you are a victim of a hurricane you are entitled to 
$30,000 worth of assistance. The farmers, they have already gotten 
their $30,000 a long time ago. But maybe we will give them 2 more years 
at $30,000 a piece, and the ranchers who are grazing on the lands for 
free, and making big profits, we give them $30,000 worth of discounted 
grazing, and that is it.
  Let us be fair right across the board, and we would save a lot of 
money by being fair, having the same standard apply to them, and we 
would save a lot of money that would allow us to be able to provide the 
kinds of job training, and the kinds of education and child care that 
would solve the welfare problem.
  It is a pleasure to hold this discourse with the gentlewoman, and I 
look forward to it in the future.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. I thank the gentleman very much for his support 
this evening.
  In discussing welfare, there is just so much information that I feel 
that the American public ought to have to understand what we are 
talking about. People have some impressions about welfare, but I do not 
feel that they are really necessarily based on facts.
  Going back to this teenage parents, talking about it one gets the 
impression that there are millions of these teenage mothers out there 
on welfare. The fact is that they are remarkably few in number, as I 
indicated.
  The gentlewoman from Kansas, who has proposed this idea of requiring 
the teenager under 18 to remain at home, in her State there are as 
total of 24,824 female adults who are on AFDC, and these are statistics 
from October 1991 to September 1992. In the age group 14 to 15 years of 
age, Kansas had zero teenagers, none whatsoever. In the 16-year 
category they had a total of 74 out of the 24,824 total AFDC 
recipients. In the 17-age category there were only 99 youths, young 
mothers. And this provides a grand total of 173 youths that would be 
affected by such a rule.
  The problem is not very large. It is small. The States ought to be 
able to handle it on a one-to-one basis. The caseworkers ought to be 
able to go and talk to the young mother and find out what is best for 
that family situation. There ought not to be a law that requires a 
certain action to be taken under those circumstances.

                              {time}  2300

  Even a big State like California with 575,000 females on AFDC in the 
age category of 14 to 15 years of age, there were only 1,151, and in 
the same category of 16, the same number, and in age 17, 4,027, for a 
total of 6,329 all total.
  The statistics are available. The Commerce Department has provided 
the information. For my own State, I wanted to insert in the Record 
that in Hawaii under this particular table we had 14,646 females; in 
the age category of 14 to 15, zero; at age 16 years of age, only 29; 
and 17 years of age, only 29, and these statistics are available, and 
you can request them from the census or in your own libraries across 
the country look up this information.
  There is one other subject that I wanted to mention before closing my 
special order this evening, one that I think raises some very grave 
concerns for the Congress and for the general public.
  I know how popular it is to zero in on foreigners and aliens and to 
argue that the country has no responsibility to aliens in our midst. 
Our country has always had a policy of inviting people from all 
countries, all walks of life, all kinds of economic circumstances under 
a very strict quota basis, under very strict requirements, under strict 
refugee requirements to come to the United States and to make it their 
home, our home. That has always been the policy of the United States.
  Under Supreme Court decisions, we have always maintained that one who 
is legally in the United States must be accorded the same treatment 
that U.S. citizens are treated and, therefore, we have struggled not to 
make any distinctions between those who lack citizenship but who are 
legally here in the United States.
  This is different from the illegal immigrant problem. There you have 
special concerns, and we need to deal with those separately.
  One of the suggestions that the welfare task force has come up with 
to try to raise the moneys necessary to pay for welfare reform is to 
take legal immigrants off of certain entitlement programs, Medicare, 
welfare, SSI, and a range of other things in the hope that by doing 
this they could raise enough money to pay for the welfare reform 
package. I think that this is a very bad idea. It reduces our country 
to setting up a different category of treatment or concern, compassion 
for people within the United States.

  There is even a bill in the Congress that suggests that if you were 
born of an illegal parent that you could not become a U.S. citizen. 
That is a violation of the very basic policies throughout the world. 
Wherever you are born you are a citizen of that country, and so many of 
these ideas are now kind of impinging upon rational thought, and so 
here we have a suggestion that legal immigrants ought to be treated 
differently in terms of many of our programs.
  I saw a very interesting article in today's Washington Post, and it 
is entitled, ``Immigrants' Benefits At Risk; House Alliance Wants Fund 
For Welfare Reform.''
  What is interesting about the article is it states 85 percent of the 
noncitizen SSI recipients live in seven States, California, Texas, 
Florida, Illinois, New York, Connecticut, and one or two others. I did 
not discern it from the map. It also states that those who are legally 
in the United States, that the very largest number come from Mexico, 
93,000. These are legal immigrants that would be affected by this 
ruling. There are 35,590 from the Philippines; there are 32,000 that 
have fled Cuba and have come to the United States and are legally 
within the United States; there are 30,000 from China who came after 
the uprising in China and were legally admitted into the United States; 
30,990 Chinese; there are 40,030 Soviet Jews who are legally in the 
United States that would be affected by this program; 17,990 Vietnamese 
whom we invited to come to this country at the end of the Vietnamese 
war; 13,000 Laotians and 11,000 Cambodians. These are the people that 
are going to be affected by the harsh kind of recommendations that are 
coming from the welfare reform task force, saying that notwithstanding 
that they have been for some reason or another given legal status in 
the United States, coming in, fleeing their country, from Cuba, from 
Vietnam, from the Soviet Union's oppression of the Jews, coming from 
Laos and Cambodia from very difficult circumstances, that now because 
we have to find funds to support the welfare reform program that the 
benefits that they would otherwise be entitled to would be terminated.
  No wonder word has come out from the White House that there was some 
vigorous discussion about such a proposal, and I would hope that the 
idea has been scrapped and that they will look for other ways suggested 
by the gentleman from New York for the funds that are necessary.
  The important point in what the administration is struggling at this 
point is we have the criteria for reform which is education, training, 
counseling, job search, finding the job in the public or private 
sector, and then being able to assure child care for the single parent 
so that they could actually hold a job down, and the reality is setting 
in that this is a very expensive endeavor. And if we are to accomplish 
this reform as it is now described, moneys have to be found.
  The current welfare program is costing the Federal Government about 
$17 billion. That is 1 year, $17 billion. My own personal estimates on 
the cost of what I know my friends are paying for child care today that 
we are going to perhaps double or triple that amount of money with just 
the addition of child care, not to mention what the costs of education 
and training are going to be. Child care for most families on welfare, 
according to the statistics I have seen, require about a quarter of 
what that family earns just to take care of the child care expenses. So 
no wonder that after a few months off of welfare they find it 
impossible to survive when they have to come back for the cash 
assistance that welfare affords.
  This problem is a very difficult one, because it cannot be solved by 
simply passing laws that have no budget consequence. This is a reform 
effort that is going to be extremely costly, and what we are really 
dealing with is the systemic problem of poverty and the problem of 
trying to help people find jobs, suitable jobs that can lift them up 
out of poverty. I hope that the administration will carefully look at 
these questions that many of us have been raising in special orders and 
in correspondence and in ``Dear Colleague'' letters that have been 
circulated and join hands with us in looking at all the alternatives 
that we have suggested as probably appropriate, if not more appropriate 
ways to deal with this problem.