[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 54 (Thursday, March 23, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H3713-H3714]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida [Mr. Weldon] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, as I go through life, there are 
many events and things people say that become very riveting and 
memorable for me, and one of the most memorable events that I 
experienced in my campaign for the U.S. Congress was when I met a man 
who was an administrator of one of the hospitals in my community in the 
15th District of Florida, and this gentleman told me that, before he 
had moved to Florida, he had lived in Oklahoma, and he had taken part 
in a program where he would go into inner city housing projects and 
read to young children in those projects. This program started because 
it has been 
 [[Page H3714]] shown in research studies that, if you read to a child, 
you can improve their reading score. Actually there are some studies 
that show that, if you read to a child, you may actually be able to 
raise their IQ slightly, and he told me something that I will never 
forget.
  He was going into those projects and reading to those kids, and those 
children were, by and large, children of single parents on welfare, and 
he would ask, many of them 5, 6 and 7-year-old children, ``What do you 
want to be when you grow up?'' And, yes, some of them would say I want 
to be a fireman or a nurse, but some of them would say:
  ``I don't want to work. I want to collect a check.''
  Mr. Speaker, a program that does that to millions of children is not 
a program of compassion and caring to children. It is a program that is 
cruel and mean spirited to children.
  Today a young male being born to a mother, a single mother on welfare 
in the United States, has a greater likelihood of ending up on drugs or 
in the penitentiary than graduating from high school. The problem that 
we have with illegitimacy in our Nation today is a problem that has 
been created by the program that we are trying to change, and you 
cannot fix this problem by tinkering around the edges. The illegitimacy 
rate in this country has gone up from 5 percent to almost 25 percent in 
the white community. In the black community it has gone from less than 
25 percent to, in some areas, as high as 70 percent.
  If you look at what correlates best, what correlates in communities 
with problems like teenage pregnancy, drug use, illiteracy, juvenile 
crime, the thing that correlates best in those problems in those 
communities, Mr. Speaker, is the amount of illegitimacy, the amount of 
fatherlessness in those communities. A program that perpetuates and 
cultivates things like this is a cruel and mean-spirited program, and 
that program needs to be changed, and our bill makes a serious attempt 
at doing that.
  We are not talking about tinkering around the edges. We are talking 
about promoting family unity, discouraging teen-age pregnancy and 
illegitimacy.
  The fact that this program perpetuates it, Mr. Speaker, was driven 
home to me when I was a medical student working in an inner-city 
obstetrics clinic, and I had a 15-year-old girl come in to see me who 
was pregnant, and I had never seen this before, and I was so upset. I 
was grieved to see this. I looked at her and said her life is ruined, 
she cannot go to college, and I said to her, ``How did this happen, why 
did this happen,'' and she looked up to me and told me that she did it 
deliberately because she wanted to get out from under her mother in the 
project, and she wanted her own place and her own welfare check.
  This program needs to stop. The people have asked for it; we are 
trying to deliver.
  Mr. Speaker, I encourage the Members of the minority to stop their 
partisan rhetoric and join with us in reforming welfare and creating a 
program for the poor and the needy that strengthens family, does not 
undermine them, that strengthens the bonds of marriage, because it is 
strong families that make strong communities that makes strong nations, 
and our Nation cannot survive with a perpetuation of a program like 
this.


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