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


          THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO WELFARE REFORM PLANS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OLVER. Mr. Speaker, I am happy to add my little figure of the 
8,200 students in my district in Massachusetts who are in danger of 
losing their School Lunch Program.
  Mr. Speaker, we are nearly at the end of the debate on the Welfare 
Reform Program, and I do not understand really how anybody who has been 
listening to this debate or watching this debate could really 
understand the essential differences between the major bills, the Deal 
bill named after Congressman Nathan Deal from Georgia, and the 
Republican bill because I have rarely seen such deliberate 
misrepresentation in a debate. Today we saw Republican Representative 
from Missouri--and each of us has our charts--claiming with his chart 
that the Deal bill does not require work, does not require people to 
work, when the fact is that because--it was only because the Republican 
bill was ridiculed all over the country for not requiring work that 
they added an amendment just yesterday that brought the work 
requirement in their bill close to the Deal bill.

                              {time}  2130

  We had another top Republican leader from Pennsylvania going to the 
very edge of personal vilification today in suggesting to a Member that 
it was corrupt and immoral, yes, the words corrupt and immoral, not to 
support the Republican version of this legislation.
  Well, my colleagues, the Deal bill had the strongest work requirement 
of any of the bills by honestly recognizing that if you care about 
getting people to work, you have also got to combat illiteracy and 
provide people with job training and a good piece of education and 
maybe some job placement services and reliable and safe child care so 
that parents can go to work.
  All of those programs were cut under the Republican bill. All of 
those provisions were cut under the Republican bill.
  Also a bill, by the way, that does not cut breakfast and lunches in a 
mixture, in a whole shell game of block grants. And it does not cut 
protection for abused children, and it does not cut day care for 
children so that their parents can work.
  That was the kind of a bill that every Member of my party proudly 
voted for, and it represented real reform and a real opportunity to 
change the way we deal with welfare people in this country.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, the Republicans say that the war on poverty is 
lost, so they are substituting a war on poor children for the war on 
poverty. Five million families with 9.5 million children who are living 
on AFDC, plus millions more families with millions more children who 
are working families but low-income working families, those families 
would, under the Republican bill, lose $50 billion of income and of 
food and of care for children while the parents work.
  And for protection for children, protective services for abused 
children, all of those would be given over instead to some of the 
wealthiest people in America.
  It is not to balance the budget, not even to deal with the deficit 
that we have in this country that we have been running. That is the 
kind of deficit that has been building, those huge deficits under 
President Reagan and President Bush year after year after year after a 
nearly balanced budget for many years beforehand. Not to do anything 
like that because they added an amendment that allows this money to not 
be used for the deficit but to be used for the tax cut that I have 
described.
  This $50 billion, and I have left out the $17 billion that is used to 
pay by way of legal immigrants and changes in the legal immigrant 
status, this $50 billion is exactly the amount of money that would be 
used in the next 5 years to provide tax cuts for the top 2 percent of 
Americans, those families making more than $200,000 per year.
  Mr. Speaker, only in Newt Gingrich's Washington would cutting $50 
billion in food and housing and income for low-income working and 
nonworking people and shifting that to the wealthiest Americans, only 
in Newt Gingrich's America would that be even possible.

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