[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 51 (Tuesday, May 3, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 3, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
               A NEW WAY OF DOING BUSINESS IN WASHINGTON

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Coppersmith). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of February 11, 1994, the gentleman from New Hampshire 
[Mr. Swett] is recognized for 60 minutes as the majority leader's 
designee.
  Mr. SWETT. Mr. Speaker, for the last 2 months I have given a number 
of speeches here on the House floor to bring about a dialog on the need 
for a new way of doing business here in Washington. My remarks tonight 
will be a continuation of that dialog.

                              {time}  1850

  All too often debates here in Washington do not focus on real 
problems and real solutions. Debates become battles between extremes 
with each side employing hyperbole to score political points. Neither 
side bothers to really listen to the opposing point of view. Each side 
blasts at the other with sound bites designed for partisan advantage 
and a spot on the evening news.
  I might just add that the debate that we just heard concerning the A 
to Z program that is being championed by my Republican colleague, the 
gentleman from New Hampshire [Mr. Zeliff], is the outcome where we have 
not been able to debate these things, and I think there has to be some 
dialog that allows us to get at the issues that are bothering the 
American people with regard to spending, and for that effort I think my 
colleague, the gentleman from New Hampshire [Mr. Zeliff], needs to be 
commended.
  But this extremism, when it is not allowed to take place in a 
deliberative and thoughtful process, creates false impressions, false 
questions, false choices, and ultimately, I think, faulty public 
policy, because real problems and real solutions are not typically part 
of the debate that takes place.
  The time has come to devise a new way of doing business in Washington 
which focuses on reality and not on the rhetoric that we so often hear. 
That is what this series of speeches is all about. It is designed to 
provide a forum for an emerging coalition in the House known as the New 
Democrats, a small group dedicated to getting results and dedicating 
themselves to accountability in Government programs.
  We also believe that for real programs to be enacted that are going 
to have an impact, an impact of longevity and constructive impact, they 
have to be of bipartisan nature, and that is an important part of the 
work that these New Democrats are engaged in. This new coalition is 
building in strength. New Democrats played a prominent role in the 
development of the Penny-Kasich amendment of last October, which sought 
to cut Government spending by $90 billion over and above the budget 
cuts proposed by President Clinton, again, a bipartisan effort. New 
Democrats are also helping to drive through Congress a piece of 
legislation coauthored by a Republican, the gentleman from Connecticut 
{Mr. Shays], and myself, the Congressional Accountability Act.
  The idea behind this legislation is simply Congress should abide by 
the same laws that it passes for the rest of the country. The 
Congressional Accountability Act will change all of what we have now 
where Congress does not have to abide by the same laws it passes for 
the rest of the land, and it will require Congress to come into line 
and, more importantly, to live firsthand the same kind of life under 
regulations that the rest of the country must live. I think that that 
brings a much cleaner, keener awareness to the Congress of what is 
happening out in the neighborhoods across this great land.
  New Democrats have also joined together to demonstrate their support 
for increased accountability in Government-funded research, an area I 
have become familiar with through my work on the Committee on Science, 
Space, and Technology.
  Tonight I come before you to talk about welfare reform. It is an 
issue that in one way or another affects us all, and one that 
particularly calls for the New Democrat strategy of bringing people 
together to work toward a common and comprehensive solution.
  Like many Americans, I believe there are fundamental problems with 
the Nation's welfare system. Currently our system of welfare 
discourages work, isolates the poor in a separate welfare economy, 
fosters dependency, empowers bureaucracies and social service providers 
rather than poor citizens, and rewards failure, not success.
  Most absurd perhaps is that our current welfare system 
unintentionally promotes the breakup of families by penalizing marriage 
and underwriting out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood. This 
perverse system tears at the very fabric of our society.
  To deal with these chronic problems, some of my colleagues and I 
formed the Mainstream Forum Welfare Working Group. Our working group is 
dedicated to helping President Clinton in his pledge to ``end welfare 
as we know it.'' In calling for an end to this flawed system, the 
President has created a rare opportunity to fundamentally change a 
public system that is failing those it is intended to help and those 
who pay for it.
  As the President said many times in his 1992 Presidential campaign, 
``People are not looking for a handout, they are looking for a hand 
up.'' Poor Americans are looking for opportunity, and it is time we 
gave it to them.

  Welfare reform should not be about taking away from people. It should 
be about giving back to poor Americans hope, pride, opportunity, and 
the chance to become connected to their communities once again.
  The notion that welfare should offer poor Americans transitional 
support en route to a job rather than to subsidize a way of life widely 
seen as divorced from work and responsibility has clearly struck a 
responsive chord with the public.
  The New Democrats in the House have seized the idea that public 
assistance must be conditioned on responsible behavior by recipients, 
and we are going to run with it to pass a comprehensive reform, if not 
this year, hopefully in the next Congress.
  Recent surveys show that more than 90 percent of the public want to 
see dramatic changes in the welfare system. Yet Americans are less 
concerned about cost than about welfare's failure to reward basic 
American values, values like work and saving, marriage and family, 
individual initiative, and a sense of community.
  Our group has tried to embody all of these values into a 
comprehensive reform plan. The legislation expected soon in its final 
form will culminate an 8-month effort by our group to produce a plan 
based on all of these principles, and one that does not just talk about 
them but really puts them to good use and gives the American public an 
opportunity to see good legislation making a real impact on our 
community.
  Our group believes that imposing a time limit on welfare eligibility 
is the only way to fundamentally change the system from one that writes 
checks to one that puts people back to work. Welfare should be a way 
station, not a destination.
  A 2-year limit on assistance will transform a system based on the 
right to income maintenance into a system based on the obligation to 
work. However, since time limits without other reform measures would 
serve only to worsen the situation for over 14 million welfare 
recipients, 9 million of which are children, the Mainstream Forum works 
hard to include expanded opportunities for jobs, for child care, and 
child support enforcement. Employment clearly is the centerpiece of 
this reform effort. It has been said many times that the best social 
program is a job, but we must ensure that a welfare recipient is better 
off economically by taking a job than by remaining on welfare.
  To do this, we must eliminate the current disincentives within the 
system that make welfare more attractive than work.
  Toward this end, we must support health care reform, which I am proud 
to be doing. We must support the expansion of the earned income tax 
credit which, when people finish their tax forms for this year and 
start getting the checks back from the Government, we are going to see 
what an impressive difference that has made to many people across the 
country.
  We need to provide safe and affordable child care and allow 
recipients to accumulate a reasonable amount of assets before cutting 
off their benefits.
  The current system isolates poor Americans from the mainstream 
economy and inadvertently sets up barriers to work and to social 
mobility. The overriding goal of welfare reform must be to reconnect 
people to the world of work. Only through productive work can welfare 
recipients acquire the skills, the habits, experience, connections, and 
self-esteem necessary to become self-sufficient members of the 
community.

                              {time}  1900

  Although State flexibility is stressed throughout our plan, we have 
developed a Federal model for putting people back to work from which 
all States can draw. Improving child support enforcement is another 
critical part of our reform effort. We plan to enhance noncustodial 
parent location and identification, improve the process by which child 
support orders are established, establish hospital-based paternity, and 
enforce child support through punitive measures for deadbeat parents. 
These improvements in the child support system will insure that 
children can count on support from both parents and that the cost of 
public benefits is reduced while a working mother's real income is 
raised.
  Children must have the support of both parents, but not just the 
monetary support. We must do all we can to keep families together and 
remove all barriers to healthy, stable families. The Mainstream Forum 
is incorporating family-friendly stabilization strategies into its 
welfare reform proposal to provide incentives for families to remain 
strong and under one roof. For example, unwed mothers will be allowed 
to marry without losing their benefits. That is right, unwed mothers 
will be allowed to marry without losing their benefits.
  It is widely documented that long-term welfare dependency is 
increasingly driven by illegitimate births. Too many teens are becoming 
parents and too few are able to responsibly care for and nurture their 
newborn children. To address this problem, the Mainstream Forum will 
call for a national educational campaign, among other things, to teach 
young people that children who have children face tremendous obstacles 
to self-sufficiency. This is a reality that many young people just do 
not understand right now, and they need to hear about this and who 
better to tell them than those who are currently struggling under those 
obstacles themselves? That is how we can bring these people into the 
cause and give them a real reason, a real role to play which I think is 
going to help them in their self-esteem struggle as well.
  Lastly, the Mainstream Forum Working Group sees program 
simplification as a crucial part of its reform effort. The group 
intends to simplify the Federal waiver process for States, simplify the 
application process for AFDC and food stamps, encourage and increase 
Federal commitment to automation, and establish a uniform time frame 
for implementing an electronic benefits transfer system framework for 
State systems. Program simplification should make it easier for those 
in need to receive short-term assistance which, hopefully, is going to 
give them short-term benefits that will put them back into productivity 
much more quickly and keep these trying to defraud the system from 
doing so.

  No State is free from the problems of poverty, joblessness, and 
homelessness. In my own State of New Hampshire, the caseload rate for 
AFDC has shown significant increases in recent years. AFDC grant 
payments for 1992 totaled over $54 million, a 29.7-percent increase 
over State fiscal year 1991.
  Our present system has no hope of reversing this trend. This drain on 
State economies must be stopped.
  While we may have differences in our ideas and approaches to welfare 
reform, there is a bipartisan consensus that our welfare system is 
badly in need of improvement. To achieve this goal, a political bargain 
must be struck, liberals must accept work requirements while 
conservatives must accept more public spending to support people's 
struggle to work.
  Solely reducing spending would force families further into poverty 
and, in the long run, drain our country in terms of social and economic 
costs. The cost of this radical redesign of social welfare is likely to 
cost more in the short run, but, as noted before, the long-term savings 
will be extraordinary. And that is what we need to see into the first 
decade of the 21st century, much reduced numbers on welfare, much 
increased numbers working, providing for families, holding those 
families together, educating those children to behave as responsible 
citizens. It has an impact not only on families and on welfare, it has 
an impact on crime, education, and ultimately this Nation's 
competitiveness.
  One such savings will come through the delaying of teen births. The 
Center for Population Options estimated that if all births to teens had 
been delayed until the mother was in her twenties, taxpayers could have 
saved $13 billion. If all teens had delayed births until the mothers 
had been in their twenties, $13 billion could be saved over 30 years. 
This group also found that each family begun in 1992 by a first birth 
to a teen of 15 to 17 years of age will cost the public on average over 
$25,000, $25,575 over the next 20 years. This is a cost that this 
country can ill afford.
  What is really ludicrous about this cost is that it is incurred when 
we could keep that from happening, when we could actually take better 
care of our neighbors and our children and reduce this expenditure 
significantly and, in the meantime, create a better sense of community 
throughout the country as well.
  In his inaugural speech, President Clinton said, and I quote:

       It is time to break the habit of expecting something for 
     nothing from our Government or from each other. Let us all 
     take more responsibility, not only for our families, but for 
     our communities and our country.

  This sentiment is not new, and echoes frustration felt around the 
country. However, these feelings of frustration should not frame the 
welfare reform debate. Underlying problems to welfare dependency must 
be addressed. We cannot ask people to take more responsibility for 
themselves and then not give them the means to do so. We must dedicate 
ourselves to helping people become self-reliant. Public welfare systems 
must demand mutual responsibility by both Government and recipient. In 
this process we will be able to move this Nation from a system centered 
on maintenance and consumption to a system oriented around work and the 
development of self-esteem and personal assets.
  Remember, the best social welfare program is a job. And as we work 
through this very difficult program of welfare reform, we are going to 
have to continue doing what we can to expand the economy, because as 
people gain in education, as they put their children into the childcare 
facilities that will enable them to become more productive citizens, we 
are going to have to expand the economy to accommodate their 
productivity as workers in America.
  It is my hope that we can address all of these issues, that we can 
identify the funding to invest in welfare reform in the short term so 
that we can reap the benefits of the long-term gains. It is my hope 
also that my colleagues will join me in a bipartisan manner in 
accomplishing this most important work.

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