[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 47 (Tuesday, March 14, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H3123-H3124]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                THE EFFECTIVENESS OF OUR WELFARE SYSTEM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Talent] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, next week the House will take up an historic 
piece of legislation, the welfare reform bill. There has been a lot of 
discussion about spending on welfare in the context of that bill and 
there is going to be a special order later this evening which will 
discuss that further.
  I want to talk just for a few minutes not about spending as such, but 
about the relationship between spending on welfare and the 
effectiveness of our welfare system. And I am going to do that first by 
looking at this graph, which is very informative. It shows us how 
welfare spending has grown since the Great Society programs were 
announced in the mid-1960's.
  What you can see from that, Mr. Speaker, is that in approximately 
1965 we were spending about $30 billion in Federal and State spending 
on welfare. And that by 1992, we were spending close to $300 billion on 
welfare, or a tenfold increase in how much we were spending on welfare. 
So we had an explosion in welfare spending on the Federal and State 
level in the last 30 years.
  But look, Mr. Speaker, at what has happened to the poverty rate 
during that period of time. In 1948, it began a steep decline, down to 
about 15 percent in approximately 1965, at the same time as welfare 
spending has exploded and it has stayed the same. It has gone up 
slightly since 1965.
  This vast explosion of welfare spending has brought us not a decrease 
in poverty but, in fact, a slight increase in poverty and we are 
entitled to say, why? Why at the same time as we have increased, 
exponentially, spending on antipoverty programs has poverty stayed the 
same when it was declining beforehand?
  The reason is because of the incentives in the welfare system. The 
welfare system pays this money only on the condition that people have a 
child without being married, earlier than they probably otherwise 
would, and without having a job.
  so what the welfare system is doing is destroying work and marriage 
and family and responsibility. And if you destroy that, it does not 
matter how much money the government gives somebody, you are not going 
to get people out of poverty. It is like bailing water out of a boat 
with one hand while you are pouring water in with the other.
  I want to go to the other chart. I only have a few minutes. This is a 
projection of what is going to happen with welfare spending in the 
future.
  Now, this is a baseline before the welfare reform bill that we are 
working with that we will be debating next week. You will see that 
welfare spending is projected to go up from $300 billion in 1992 to 
close to $520 billion by 1998. By that time, it will be almost twice 
what we spend on defense.
  Now, the CBO numbers are not out, Mr. Speaker, so I did not put it on 
here. The Republican welfare bill we are going to debate allows welfare 
spending to go up about half that much by the rate of inflation.
  And I want to close with a couple of comments. In the first place, 
nobody in Washington is talking about cuts in welfare. The bill we will 
debate next week will allow welfare to grow at approximately the rate 
of inflation. If you hear anybody talking about cuts in welfare, they 
are either very much mistaken or they are simply uttering something 
that is not true.
  The second point that these two graphs graphically
   show is how much we are spending on welfare is a lot less important 
than how we spend it, because values are more important than money. 
What we have been doing in the past is spending money on welfare in a 
way that has destroyed families and destroyed work. And so we have 
gotten not only not less poverty, but more poverty.
  [[Page H3124]] What is exciting about our bill is that for the first 
time we begin spending money on welfare in a way that reinforces family 
and work and personal responsibility, and that will make a difference 
for the people caught up in the system.
  We take a step for the first time toward ending cash benefits at 
least for teen moms. We are going to give that money to the States and 
localities so they can take care of those moms in a way that reinforces 
family and work instead of destroying it.
  And not only are we going to stop punishing people for working, which 
is what the current system does, we are going to start requiring work 
so that by the end of the decade about 50 percent of the people on the 
welfare caseload, and that is an honest number, will have to work in 
order to get their welfare benefits.
  I am going to close, Mr. Speaker, with an observation that my friend 
Mr. Watts, our distinguished colleague from Oklahoma, often makes. 
Under the current system we have always measured the success of welfare 
by how many people we could get on food stamps and AFDC and medicaid 
and the 70-odd other Federal welfare programs. We measured success by 
how many people we could get on welfare; by how much money we could 
spend on welfare. We need to stop doing that because welfare is not a 
life of dignity and hope for anybody.
  We need to start measuring success, and we are going to start 
measuring success, by how many people we get off of welfare, off the 
AFDC, off of food stamps, off of medicaid, and into a life of dignity 
and hope and self-sufficiency which is the American dream. That is what 
we are offering to people.
  Mr. Speaker, that is what we are going to be debating next week.

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