[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 36 (Monday, February 27, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E445-E446]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                      GOP WELFARE PLAN IGNORES WORK

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                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Monday, February 27, 1995
  Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, the so-called welfare reform 
legislation developed by Republicans fails to address the single most 
urgent need for ending the current welfare system: putting people to 
work.
  The Republicans have walked away from their early commitment to work 
as a key component of welfare reform. In the Contract With America, 
half of the welfare caseload would have been required to work by 2003. 
And the contract promised nearly $10 billion to pay for the new work 
requirement programs; the pending Republican bill has no money, and no 
work programs to speak of. In fact, as the New Republic points out, the 
great model program in Michigan by Republican leaders would authorize 
activities like checking a book out of a library as constituting work 
activity.
  The Democratic leadership of the House, together with the Clinton 
administration, has endorsed a much tougher policy that would require 
recipients to accept work and training, and would require States to 
provide welfare recipients with a plan for moving from dependence to 
self-sufficiency.
  Only in such a way will we end not only welfare, but poverty, too. By 
contrast, the Republican legislation promises only to throw people off 
welfare, whether or not any effort has been made to prepare them for 
self-sufficiency. The Republican scheme will mean millions of former 
welfare recipients without jobs, without homes and without any way to 
provide for their children. It will mean even more homelessness and 
huge additional costs for local communities and property taxpayers who 
will have to support this army of the impoverished through local 
general assistance programs.
  In short, the Republican plan is not to end poverty, but to throw 
people off welfare. That will solve neither their problems, nor ours. 
We cannot allow the Republican plan to masquerade as welfare reform.
                [From the New Republic, March 13, 1995]

                           Workfare Wimp-Out

                            (By Mickey Kaus)

       Call me naive, but I almost believed House Republicans when 
     they pledged in their ``contract'' to reform welfare through 
     ``a tough two-years-and-out provision with work 
     requirements.'' Making welfare recipients work, after all, is 
     wildly popular (if it weren't, it wouldn't be in the 
     contract). Newt Gingrich's political action committee once 
     even listed ``workforce'' as one of the ``Optimistic Positive 
     Governing Words'' it recommended to fellow revolutionaries. I 
     figured Gingrich himself had talked so much about the need 
     for a ``mandatory requirement of work for everybody'' that he 
     might 
     [[Page E446]]  actually mean it, or at least would be too 
     embarrassed to admit he didn't mean it. I underestimated him.
       House Republicans unveiled their welfare reform plan on 
     February 10. Most welfare-watchers expected the new bill to 
     dilute somewhat the contract's work provisions. But few 
     expected the abject abandonment of any credible attempt to 
     require work. Yet that's more or less what Representative 
     Clay Shaw, the lead Republican on welfare reform, announced. 
     The new GOP bill, which has cleared Shaw's subcommittee, is 
     not only weaker on the work issue than President Clinton's 
     welfare proposal, it is in some respects weaker than the 
     current welfare law Republicans deride.
       It's certainly a long way from the Contract with America. 
     The contract would have required work by those who had 
     received welfare ``for at least twenty-four months.'' Work 
     meant ``an average of not fewer than thirty-five hours per 
     week.'' No funny business. By 2003, 50 percent of the welfare 
     caseload (which currently consists of more than 5 million 
     households) would be working.
       The rationale behind these provisions was obvious: if 
     potential welfare recipients (mainly young women) knew they 
     were really going to have to work after two years, they might 
     think twice before doing the things (mainly becoming single 
     mothers) that put them on welfare in the first place. But 
     Republican governors, it turns out, don't like work 
     requirements much--in part because putting a welfare mother 
     to work costs money (an extra $6,000, over and above the cost 
     of benefits, to pay for supervisors and day care, according 
     to the Congressional Budget Office).
       Why raise state taxes to make welfare recipients perform 
     community-service work--annoying public employee unions in 
     the process--when you can do what Michigan's Republican 
     Governor John Engler does: cycle recipients through 
     inexpensive education and ``job search'' programs while 
     claiming to be a great reformer? Engler's inflated reputation 
     was recently punctured by journalist David Whitman (see 
     ``Compleat Engler,'' TNR February 6). But that didn't stop 
     him from leading the charge to gut the contract's work 
     requirements when House Republicans decided, after the 
     election, to negotiate with GOP governors over replacing the 
     federal welfare program with a ``block grant'' to the states.
       Engler's mission was successful. Look first at the numbers. 
     The bill unveiled by Shaw requires that, in 1996, states 
     place 2 percent of the welfare caseload ``in work 
     activities.'' The requirement rises to 20 percent--not the 
     contract's 50 percent--by 2003. In meeting this requirement, 
     governors could count the 6 percent of recipients who already 
     work at least part-time. Another 5 percent are already 
     required to work by a 1988 reform law now in effect (which 
     the Republican bill would repeal). That makes 11 percent 
     already working. With a little creative bookkeeping--say, by 
     counting all those who work, even for a few days, over the 
     course of a year--most governors could meet the 20 percent 
     ``work activity'' standard without doing anything they're not 
     already doing.
       But creative bookkeeping won't be necessary, because the 
     Shaw bill lets the states decide what a ``work activity'' is. 
     It needn't be actual work. Under the bill, a governor could 
     declare, as Engler has, that checking a book out of a library 
     counts as a ``work activity.'' Leafing through the want ads 
     might also qualify, or circulating a resume or attending a 
     ``self-esteem'' class.
       Republicans criticized President Clinton's ill-fated two-
     years-and-work plan because it only would have required 
     approximately 500,000 recipients, or about 10 percent of the 
     caseload, to be in a work program by 2003. But at least in 
     Clinton's plan those 500,000 people would really have to be 
     working. (An additional 900,000 or so would be in education 
     and training programs.) The House Republicans say they will 
     put ``at least 1 million cash welfare recipients in work 
     programs by 2003,'' but the ``work'' could be completely 
     phony. Workfake, you might call it.
       It is all the more likely to be fake because the Shaw bill 
     provides no money to make it real. The Contract with America, 
     in a fit of honesty, earmarked $9.9 billion to pay for its 
     work programs. The new bill contain no new funds. It does 
     retain language that seems to requires states to make 
     recipients work--sorry, ``engage in work activities''--after 
     two years. But GOP aids admit this provision is ``mostly 
     rhetoric'' not meant to be obeyed. There are no penalties for 
     states that ignore it. (If it were obeyed, a lot more than 20 
     percent of the caseload would wind up ``working.'')
       House Republicans don't even try very hard to pretend they 
     haven't caved on the work issue. It was the price, they 
     argue, of getting the governors to agree to a stingy ``block 
     grant,'' and to accept the contract's cutoff of aid to young 
     unwed mothers. Priorities! Bizarrely, the Newtoids sacrificed 
     the popular parts of the contract (``make 'em work'') to save 
     the unpopular parts (``cut 'em off''). It was too much even 
     for some conservatives. Robert Rector, the Heritage 
     Foundation's welfare expert, called the Shaw work provisions 
     a ``major embarrassment,'' Jack Kemp issued a statement 
     warning that Republicans were squandering welfare reform in 
     the pursuit of a decentralized ``funding mechanism.''
       Shaw now says he will try to shore up the work provisions--
     specifying what counts as a ``work activity,'' for example. 
     But it may be difficult to convince the governors to endorse 
     a major tightening--after all, the chief virtue of Shaw's 
     bill, for them, was that it let them weasel out of the 
     contract's work requirements.
       It also may be too late. The premise of the GOP's new 
     state-based welfare bill is that the nation's governors are 
     reformist tigers who need only to be unlashed by the 
     bureaucrats in Washington. But the governors have now shown 
     their hand, and it's obvious to all that they have no 
     appetite for radical reform especially reform based on work. 
     Instead, they have with great effort turned the contract's 
     ambitious plan into a bill that allows them to preserve the 
     status quo. Even the controversial cutoff of young unwed 
     mothers may be mainly an accounting trick. (States can simply 
     pay the benefits out of their ``own'' funds.) The 
     Republicans' welfare reform is looking less like a menace and 
     more like a fraud.
     

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