[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 54 (Thursday, March 23, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H3706]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 ILLEGITIMACY AND REDUCTION OF POVERTY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hoke] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOKE. Mr. Speaker, tonight we are talking about welfare, and the 
reason we are talking about welfare is that H.R. 4 is on the floor and 
for the first time in 40 years we are going to undertake to reform a 
failed system.
  How do we know that this system has failed? Well, first of all, I 
suppose we know because there is acclamation on the point. I do not 
think anybody is arguing it. But, besides that, what we can do is look 
at certain indicia of whether or not it is a success. What have we 
done, what have we gotten after 35 years of great society?
  Well, what we have gotten is we have spent about $5.3 trillion on 
welfare since the early 1960s, $5.3 trillion. Have we reduced poverty 
in that time? No, we have not reduced poverty. In fact, what we have 
found is that provety was coming down year by year by year by year, 
right from the beginning of this century to the late 1950s and early 
1960s, and since we have been throwing money at the problem in 
tremendous amounts poverty has leveled off and stayed flat.
  But the amount of money that we have thrown at the problem has 
increased and increased and increased and increased by any measure, by 
measure of nominal dollars, current year dollars or by measure of 
percentage of Gross Domestic Product. In fact, when you measure by 
Gross Domestic Product, we have increased the amount from about less 
than 1 percent of GDP to nearly 4 percent of GDP that we are spending 
on welfare.
  What have we gotten? Have we reduced poverty? No, we have not reduced 
poverty. What have we done? Well, we have found that we are in a 
situation with respect to illegitimacy that is truly alarming, truly 
alarming because it has more impact, it has more implications for what 
will happen in the 21st century than any other social challenge that we 
face.
  Let us look at numbers for a minute. First of all, we know that in 
the minority community among blacks two out of every three births is 
now out of wedlock. For all those people that think this is a problem 
that is somehow only in the minority community, let me tell you that is 
absolutely wrong.
 One out of four white babies is now born illegitimate. Fully one out 
of three of all births in this country is now illegitimate.

  What do we know will happen with respect to kids who grow up in 
single-parent homes? Well, we know that welfare has failed children 
more than anyone. It is the cruelest thing that we could be doing to 
our children.

                              {time}  2030

  We know it for a number of reasons. First of all, children in 
families which are dependent on AFDC for prolonged periods have more 
developmental problems than children dependent for shorter periods. 
Sixty-nine percent of children in chronically dependent welfare 
families score in the bottom third of all children on vocabulary and 
language skill tests. The source on that is the Life Circumstances and 
Development of Children in Welfare Families, a profile based on 
national survey data in the Child Trends Magazine.
  We also know being raised in a family dependent on welfare 
dramatically reduces a child's intellectual abilities and life 
prospects. Researchers from Baruch College in New York City studied the 
effects of being raised in a welfare family on the intellectual 
abilities of children aged three to six. Children on welfare do worse 
in school, they tend to have other developmental problems, they are 
three times more likely to end up on welfare themselves. And teenage 
girls who grow up in fatherless families are far more likely to have 
early intercourse, pregnancies and abortions than those from two parent 
families.
  What kind of perverse and cruel form of compassion would encourage 
children to have children? And then condemn them to a dead end cycle of 
government dependency? What could possible be more cruel to children 
than this failed system?
  We could not have consciously designed a more destructive system than 
the one that we currently have. And that is what perplexes me the most 
about how it is that liberals are defending this system.
  What you hear from my friends on the other side of the aisle is well, 
yes, we need reform, but. It reminds me of the ``me too, but'' disease, 
where you say ``Yes, we are going to fix this now. We didn't bother for 
the past 30 years, even though we have been in control of this place 
for the past 40 years. But now we agree with you, we need to fix this, 
we need to have reform, but.''
  Then you start to equivocate and change and not come up with the real 
reforms that in fact will do the two things that we must do in order to 
restore some sort of confidence in a welfare system that will actually 
help people, to give them dignity. And those two things are to 
encourage marriage and to encourage work.


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