[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 206 (Thursday, December 21, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S19086-S19107]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND WORK ACT OF 1995--CONFERENCE REPORT

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the clerk will 
report the conference report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The committee on conference on the disagreeing votes of the 
     two Houses on the amendments of the Senate to the bill (H.R. 
     4) to restore the American family, reduce illegitimacy, 
     control welfare spending and reduce welfare dependence, 
     having met, after full and free conference, have agreed to 
     recommend and do recommend to their respective Houses this 
     report, signed by a majority of the conferees.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, the Senate will proceed to 
the consideration of the conference report.
  (The conference report is printed in the House proceedings of the 
Record of December 20, 1995.)
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, sometime ago the American people reached a 
turning point concerning welfare reform. They understand that despite 
having spent over $5 trillion over the past 30 years, the welfare 
system is a catastrophic failure.
  In 1965, 15.6 percent of all families with children under the age of 
18 had incomes below the poverty level. And in 1993, 18.5 percent of 
families with children under the age of 18 were under the Federal 
poverty level. The system created to end poverty has helped to bring 
more poverty. By destroying the work ethic and undermining the 
formation of family, the welfare system has lured more Americans into a 
cruel cycle of dependency. The size and cost of the welfare programs 
are at historically high levels and are out of control. Federal, State, 
and local governments now spend over $350 billion on means-tested 
programs.
  Between 1965 and 1992, the number of children receiving AFDC has 
grown by nearly 200 percent. Yet, the entire population of children 
under the age of 18 has declined--declined by 5.5 percent over this 
same period. More than 1.5 million children have been added to the AFDC 
caseload since 1990. And if we do nothing, if we do nothing to reform 
it, the number of children receiving AFDC is expected to grow from 9.6 
million today to 12 million within 10 years.
  That is what the future holds if the current system is allowed to 
continue. A welfare system run by Washington simply costs too much and 
produces too little in terms of results.
  Twenty years ago, 4.3 million people received food stamp benefits. In 
1994, that number had grown to 27.5 million people, an increase of more 
than 500 percent. And between 1990 and 1994 alone, the number of people 
receiving food stamps grew by nearly 7.5 million people.
  In 1974, the Supplemental Security Income Program was established to 
replace former programs serving low-income elderly and disabled 
persons. SSI was considered to be a type of retirement program for 
people who had not been able to contribute enough for Social Security 
benefits. Of the 3.9 million recipients in 1974, 2.3 million were 
elderly adults. The number of elderly adults has actually declined by 
36 percent.
  But consider this: In 1982, noncitizens constituted 3 percent of all 
SSI recipients. By 1993, noncitizens constituted nearly 12 percent of 
the entire SSI caseload. Today, almost 1 out of every four elderly SSI 
recipients is a noncitizen.
  Before 1990, the growth in the number of disabled children receiving 
SSI was moderate, averaging 3 percent annually since 1984. Then, in the 
beginning of 1990, and through 1994, the growth averaged 25 percent 
annually and the number trimmed to nearly 900,000 children. The number 
of disabled children receiving cash assistance under the Supplemental 
Security Income Program has increased by 166 percent since 1990 
alone. The maximum SSI benefit is greater than the maximum AFDC benefit 
for a family of three in 40 States.

  Welfare reform is necessary today because while the rest of the 
Nation has gone through a series of social transformations, the Federal 
bureaucracy has been left behind, still searching in vain for the 
solution to the problems of poverty. It simply will not be found in 
Washington.
  Our colleague, Senator Moynihan, has reminded us on a number of 
occasions that the AFDC Program began 60 years ago as a sort of widow's 
pension. Consider that the AFDC Program cost $697 million in 1947 
measured in constant 1995 dollars. In 1995, the Federal Government 
spent $18 billion on the AFDC population, an increase of 2,500 percent 
measured in constant dollars. 

[[Page S19087]]

  Now, the AFDC Program was originally intended to be a modest means to 
keep a family together in dignity. But much has changed since then and 
the system has become a cruel hoax on our young people. It has torn 
families apart and left them without the dignity of work.
  Washington does not know how to build strong families because it has 
forgotten what makes families strong. It has failed to understand the 
consequences of idleness and illegitimacy.
  Last March, the House of Representatives charted an ambitious course 
for welfare reform in the 104th Congress. H.R. 4, the Personal 
Responsibility Act of 1995, was a bold challenge to all of us. It was a 
creative and comprehensive response to the many problems we currently 
face in the complex welfare system.
  Since then, the Senate has continued the national debate and built on 
the blueprint provided by the House. Just 3 months ago, the Senate 
demonstrated that it recognized dramatic and sweeping reforms are 
necessary. The Work Opportunity Act passed the Senate with an 
overwhelming and bipartisan vote of 87 to 12.
  Today, I am here to present to the Senate and to the American people 
H.R. 4, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1995. 
H.R. 4 ends the individual entitlement to Federal cash assistance under 
the current AFDC Program. It also caps the total amount of Federal 
funding over the next 7 years. These are the critical pieces of welfare 
reform which will institute dramatic changes the American people want.
  These two provisions are the key to everything else which will 
transpire in the States. They make all other reforms possible. They 
guarantee the national debate about work and family will be repeated in 
every statehouse. Fiscal discipline will force the State to set 
priorities. Block grants will provide them with the flexibility needed 
to design their own system to break the cycle of dependency. And most 
importantly, this legislation restores the work ethic and reinforces 
the value of the family as the fundamental cell of our society.

  Mr. President, after decades of research and rhetoric, it is indeed 
time to end welfare as we know it. This welfare reform initiative is 
built on three basic platforms and contains all the necessary 
requirements of authentic welfare reform.
  First, individuals must take responsibility for their lives and 
actions. The present welfare system has sapped the spirit of so many 
Americans because it rewards dependency. It has also allowed absent 
parents to flee their moral and legal obligations to their children. 
This legislation ends the individual entitlement to public assistance 
and provides for a stronger child support enforcement mechanism.
  Second, it restores the expectation that people who can help 
themselves must help themselves. For far too long, welfare has been 
more attractive than work. This legislation corrects the mistakes of 
the past which allowed people to avoid work. We provide additional 
funding for child care and incorporate educational and training 
activities to help individuals make the transition from welfare to 
work. Under this legislation, welfare recipients will know that welfare 
will truly be only a temporary means of support and must prepare 
themselves accordingly.
  Finally, this legislation transfers power from Washington back to the 
States where it belongs. This will yield great dividends to recipients 
and taxpayers alike. As the power is drained from Washington, Americans 
should eagerly anticipate the reciprocal actions that take place in the 
States. States will find more innovative ways to use this money to help 
families than Washington ever imagined.
  Freed from the current adversarial system, the States will be able to 
design their own unique methods to help families overcome adversity. 
The current system insults the dignity of individuals by demanding a 
person prove and maintain destitution. States will reverse this 
disordered thinking and raise expectations by shifting the emphasis 
from what a person cannot do to what a person can do.
  On balance, you will find that the conference reflects the work of 
the Senate on the major issues within the Finance Committee 
jurisdiction. And as you examine the individual parts and the bill as a 
whole, I believe you will find we have been responsive to the concerns 
of the Senate.
  The conference report provides the right mixture of flexibility to 
the States but still retains appropriate accountability. And I think 
the States will find this transfer of power to be a reasonable 
challenge.
  Here are the major specific items included in title I which creates 
the new block grants to States for temporary assistance for needy 
families with minor children.
  Each State is entitled to receive its allocation of a national cash 
welfare block grant which is set at $16.3 billion each year, and in 
return the States are required to spend at least 75 percent of the 
amount they spent on cash welfare programs in 1994 over the next 5 
years.
  In terms of funding, the States will be allowed to choose the greater 
of their average for the years 1992 to 1994 or their 1994 level of 
funding or their 1995 level of funding. By allowing the States to use 
their 1995 funding level, we have increased Federal spending for the 
block grant by $3.5 billion over the Senate-passed bill. We have 
maintained the $1 billion contingency fund.
  The States will be required to meet tough but reasonable work 
requirements. In 1997, the work participation rate will be 20 percent. 
This percentage will increase by 5 percentage points each year. By the 
year 2002, half of the State total welfare caseload must be engaged in 
work activities. As provided by the Senate bill, States will be 
required to enforce ``pay for performance.'' If a recipient refuses to 
work, a pro rata reduction in benefits will be made.
  We provide the resources to make this possible with $11 billion in 
mandatory child care funds for welfare families. Let me repeat. The 
conference report includes $1 billion more for child care than the 
Senate welfare bill.
  Another $7 billion in discretionary funds are provided to assist low-
income working families. There will be a single block grant 
administered through the child care and development block grant, but 
guaranteed funding for the welfare population.
  The House has agreed to accept the Senate definition of work 
activities to include vocational training.
  The House has agreed to drop its mandatory prohibition on cash 
assistance to teenage mothers. As under the Senate bill, this will be 
an option for the States to determine. The House has accepted the 
Senate authorization for the creation of second chance homes for 
unmarried young mothers.
  The family cap provision has been modified from both positions. Under 
the new proposal, States will not be permitted to increase Federal 
benefits for additional children born while a family is on welfare. 
However, each State will be allowed to opt out of this Federal 
prohibition by passing State legislation.
  The sweeping reforms in child support enforcement has unfortunately 
been overlooked in the public debate. This has been an important area 
of bipartisan action and an important method of assisting families to 
avoid and escape from poverty.
  We are strengthening the enforcement mechanism in several ways. In 
general, the conference report more closely reflects the Senate bill. 
We reconciled several of the differences between the House and Senate 
on items such as the Director of New Hires and the expansion of the 
Federal Parent Locator Service simply by choosing a midpoint. We have 
increased funding over the Senate bill for the continued development 
costs of automation from $260 to $400 million.
  One particular child support enforcement issue which may be of 
interest to you is the distribution of child support arrears. Beginning 
October 1, 1997, all post-assistance arrears will be distributed to the 
family before the State. As of October 1, 2000, all preassistance 
arrears will go to the family before the State will be allowed to 
recoup its costs.
  We believe that improving child support collection will greatly 
assist families in avoiding and escaping poverty.
  The American Bar Association strongly supports our child support 
enforcement changes. The ABA recently wrote that, ``if these child 
support reforms are enacted, it will be an historic 

[[Page S19088]]
stride forward for children in our nation.'' Mr. President, we cannot 
afford to miss this historic opportunity.
  SSI is now the largest cash assistance program for the poor and one 
of the fastest growing entitlement programs. Program costs have grown 
20 percent annually in the past 4 years. Last year, over 6 million SSI 
recipients received nearly $22 billion in Federal benefits and over $3 
billion in State benefits. The maximum SSI benefit is greater than the 
maximum AFDC benefit for a family of 3 in 40 States.

  The conference agreement contains the bipartisan changes in the 
definition of childhood disability contained in the Senate-passed 
welfare reform bill. I am pleased we have addressed this problem on 
common ground.
  The conference rejected the House block grant approach. All eligible 
children will continue to receive cash assistance. We retain our 
commitment to serving the disabled while linking assistance to need.
  For children who become eligible in the future, there will be a two-
tier system of benefits. All children will receive cash benefits. Those 
disabled children requiring special personal assistance to remain at 
home will receive a full cash benefit. For families where the need is 
not as great, such children will receive 75 percent of the full 
benefit.
  No changes in children's benefits for SSI will take place before 
January 1, 1997. This will allow for an orderly implementation and 
protect the interests of current recipients.
  These changes will restore the public's confidence in this program 
and maintain our national commitment to children with disabilities.
  Current resident noncitizens receiving benefits on the date of 
enactment may continue to receive SSI, food stamps, AFDC, Medicaid, or 
title XX services until January 1, 1997. After January 1, 1997, current 
resident noncitizens may not receive food stamps or SSI unless they 
have worked long enough to qualify for Social Security. States will 
have the option of restricting AFDC, Medicaid, and title XX benefits.
  Legal noncitizens arriving after the date of enactment are barred 
from receiving most Federal means-tested benefits during their first 5 
years in the United States. SSI and food stamps will remain restricted 
until citizenship or until the person has worked long enough to qualify 
for Social Security. The States have the option to restrict AFDC, 
Medicaid, and title XX benefits after 5 years.
  Mr. President, it is time to correct the fundamental mistakes made by 
the welfare system over the past three decades. All too often, the 
system simply assumes that if a person lacks money, he or she also 
lacks any means of earning it. The present welfare system locks 
families into permanent dependency when they only needed a temporary 
hand up. It creates poverty and dependence by destroying families and 
initiative. To end welfare as we know it, we must put an end to the 
system which has done so much to trap families into dependence. The 
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1995 will 
accomplish precisely these goals.
  From the early days of his administration, President Clinton promised 
welfare reform to the American people. H.R. 4 meets all principles he 
has outlined for welfare reform. If the President vetoes H.R. 4, he 
will be preserving a system which costs and wastes billions of 
taxpayers' dollars. More importantly, however, if the President vetoes 
H.R. 4, he will be accepting the status quo in which another 2\1/2\ 
million children will fall into the welfare system.
  On January 24, 1995, President Clinton declared at a joint session of 
Congress, ``Nothing has done more to undermine our sense of common 
responsibility than our failed welfare system.''
  Mr. President, vetoing welfare reform will seriously undermine the 
American people's confidence in our political system. The American 
people know the present welfare system is a failure. They are also 
tired of empty rhetoric from politicians. Words without deeds are 
meaningless. The time to enact welfare reform is now.
  Mr. President, I yield back the floor.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, just as a point of inquiry, we have 3 
hours this evening, and I assume it will be equally divided? Is that 
agreeable to my friend, the distinguished chairman?
  Mr. ROTH. That is correct. That is my understanding.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. That is correct.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, first, may I express my appreciation for 
the thoughtfulness and sincerity with which the Senator from Delaware 
has addressed this troubled issue. It is not necessarily the mode of 
address in these times with regard to this subject. And if I do not 
agree with him, it is not for lack of respect for his views. He knows 
that.
  He mentioned the subject of a presidential veto, sir. And I must say 
that there will be such. The President this morning issued a statement 
saying that, ``If Congress sends me this conference report, I will veto 
it and insist that they try again.'' And I hope we will try again.
  He spoke to the idea that, as he says as he concludes, ``My 
administration remains ready at any moment to sit down in good faith 
with Democrats and Republicans in Congress to work out a real welfare 
reform plan.''
  May I say in that regard, first of all, that it is disappointing 
considering the degree of bipartisan efforts we have made with respect 
to the Social Security Act. As the Senator from Delaware stated, this 
bill would repeal the individual entitlement under title IV-A of the 
Social Security Act, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children 
program.
  The conference report before us states:

       The committee on conference on the disagreeing votes of the 
     two Houses on the amendments of the Senate to the bill (H.R. 
     4), to restore the American family, reduce illegitimacy, 
     control welfare spending and reduce welfare dependence, 
     having met, after full and free conference, have agreed to 
     recommend--

  Full and free conference? No, Mr. President. There was one meeting of 
the conferees on October 24, 2 months ago. We took the occasion to make 
opening statements, and the conference, as such, has never met since. 
We received a copy of this report late this afternoon. This is no way 
to address a matter of this consequence. Let me, if I may, state to you 
what consequence I refer to.
  It is possible to think of the problem of welfare dependency, an 
enormous problem, as somehow confined to parts of our society and 
geography, the inner-city, most quintessentially. It is certainly 
concentrated there but by no means confined there.
  The supplemental security income provision, established in 1974, is 
what is left of President Nixon's proposal for the Family Assistance 
Plan that would have created a guaranteed level of income. I remarked 
earlier, a quarter century ago I found myself working with our 
masterful majority leader in this purpose--the children were left out. 
But we established a guaranteed income for the aged, the blind and 
disabled and later expanded it greatly for children. But, basically, 
the provision to replace AFDC with a negative income tax was dropped.
  In the course of the 1960's we developed a new set of initiatives, in 
particular the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965. We had learned, as a 
matter of social inquiry, that there is just so much you can do with a 
one-time survey of the population to understand the condition of that 
population. You can extrapolate, you can use your mathematical skills 
as much as possible, sampling and surveying periodically. But we said, 
if you are going to learn more, you are going to have to follow events 
over time. Longitudinal studies, as against vertical. The distinguished 
Presiding Officer knows those words from his experience as an applied 
economist in the world of business. In 1968, we established the panel 
study of income dynamics at the University of Michigan at the Survey 
Research Center, and they have been following a panel of actual 
persons, with names and addresses, for almost 30 years. We now know 
something about how people's incomes go up and down, and such.
  A distinguished social scientist, Greg J. Duncan, at Northwestern 
University and Wei-Jun Jean Yeung of the University of Michigan have 
calculated the 

[[Page S19089]]
incidence of welfare dependency in our population for the cohort, by 
which we mean people born, between 1973 and 1975. These people will be 
just going into their twenties and out of age of eligibility.
  Mr. President, of the American children born from 1973 to 1975, now 
just turning 20, 24 percent had received AFDC benefits at some point 
before turning 18. That includes 19 percent of the white population and 
66 percent of the black population. Do not ever forget the racial 
component in what we are dealing with.
  If you include AFDC, supplemental security income, and food stamps, 
you find that 39 percent of your children, 81 percent of African-
Americans and 33 percent of whites--received benefits at some point in 
their youth.
  Problems of this magnitude deserve careful analysis and careful 
response. That is why persons whose voices have been most persuasive in 
this debate, those asking, ``What are you doing?'' have been 
conservative social analysts, social scientists. James Q. Wilson at the 
University of California, Los Angeles, for example; Lawrence Mead on 
leave at Princeton. His chair is at New York University. And George 
Will, a thoughtful conservative, who had a column when we began this 
discussion last September called ``Women and Children First?'' He said:

       As the welfare reform debate begins to boil, the place to 
     begin is with an elemental fact: No child in America asked to 
     be here.

  No child in America asked to be here.

       Each was summoned into existence by the acts of adults. And 
     no child is going to be spiritually improved by being 
     collateral damage in a bombardment of severities targeted at 
     adults who may or may not deserve more severe treatment from 
     the welfare system.

  We are talking about these children.
  I ask unanimous consent that this column be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 14, 1995]

                       Women and Children First?

                          (By George F. Will)

       As the welfare reform debate begins to boil, the place to 
     begin is with an elemental fact: No child in America asked to 
     be here.
       Each was summoned into existence by the acts of adults. And 
     no child is going to be spiritually improved by being 
     collateral damage in a bombardment of severities targeted at 
     adults who may or may not deserve more severe treatment from 
     the welfare system.
       Phil Gramm says welfare recipients are people ``in the 
     wagon'' who ought to get out and ``help the rest of us 
     pull.'' Well. Of the 14 million people receiving Aid to 
     Families with Dependent Children, 9 million are children. 
     Even if we get all these free riders into wee harnesses, the 
     wagon will not move much faster.
       Furthermore, there is hardly an individual or industry in 
     America that is not in some sense ``in the wagon,'' receiving 
     some federal subvention. If everyone gets out, the wagon may 
     rocket along. But no one is proposing that. Instead, welfare 
     reform may give a whole new meaning to the phrase ``women and 
     children first.''
       Marx said that history's great events appear twice, first 
     as tragedy, then as farce. Pat Moynihan worries that a 
     tragedy visited upon a vulnerable population three decades 
     ago may now recur, not as farce but again as tragedy.
       Moynihan was there on Oct. 31, 1963, when President 
     Kennedy, in his last signing ceremony, signed legislation to 
     further the ``deinstitutionalization'' of the mentally ill. 
     Advances in psychotropic drugs, combined with ``community-
     based programs,'' supposedly would make possible substantial 
     reductions of the populations of mental institutions.
       But the drugs were not as effective as had been hoped, and 
     community-based programs never materialized in sufficient 
     numbers and sophistication. What materialized instead were 
     mentally ill homeless people. Moynihan warns that welfare 
     reform could produce a similar unanticipated increase in 
     children sleeping on, and freezing to death on, grates.
       Actually, cities will have to build more grates. Here are 
     the percentages of children on AFDC at some point during 1993 
     in five cities: Detroit (67), Philadelphia (57), Chicago 
     (46), New York (39), Los Angeles (38). ``There are,'' says 
     Moynihan, ``not enough social workers, not enough nuns, not 
     enough Salvation Army workers'' to care for children who 
     would be purged from the welfare rolls were Congress to 
     decree (as candidate Bill Clinton proposed) a two-year limit 
     for welfare eligibility.
       Don't worry, say the designers of a brave new world, 
     welfare recipients will soon be working. However, 60 percent 
     of welfare families--usually families without fathers--have 
     children under 6 years old. Who will care for those children 
     in the year 2000 if Congress decrees that 50 percent of 
     welfare recipients must by then be in work programs? And 
     whence springs this conservative Congress's faith in work 
     programs?
       Much of the welfare population has no family memory of 
     regular work, and little of the social capital of habits and 
     disciplines that come with work. Life in, say, Chicago's 
     Robert Taylor housing project produces what sociologist Emil 
     Durkheim called ``a dust of individuals,'' not an employable 
     population. A 1994 Columbia University study concluded that 
     most welfare mothers are negligibly educated and emotionally 
     disturbed, and 40 percent are serious drug abusers. Small 
     wonder a Congressional budget Office study estimated an 
     annual cost of $3,000 just for monitoring each worldfare 
     enrollee--in addition to the bill for training to give such 
     people elemental skills.
       Moynihan says that a two-year limit for welfare 
     eligibility, and work requirements, might have worked 30 
     years ago, when the nation's illegitimacy rate was 5 percent, 
     but today it is 33 percent. Don't worry, say reformers, we'll 
     take care of that by tinkering with the incentives: there 
     will be no payments for additional children born while the 
     mother is on welfare.
       But Nicholas Eberstadt of Harvard and the American 
     enterprise Institute says: Suppose today's welfare policy 
     incentives to illegitimacy were transported back in time to 
     Salem, Mass., in 1660. How many additional illegitimate 
     births would have occurred in Puritan Salem? Few, because the 
     people of Salem in 1660 believed in hell and believed that 
     what today are called ``disorganized lifestyles'' led to 
     hell. Congress cannot legislate useful attitudes.
       Moynihan, who spent August writing his annual book at his 
     farm in Delaware County, N.Y., notes that in 1963 that 
     county's illegitimacy rate was 3.8 percent and today is 32 
     percent--almost exactly the national average. And no one 
     knows why the county (which is rural and 98.8 percent white) 
     or the nation has so changed.
       Hence no one really knows what to do about it. 
     Conservatives say, well, nothing could be worse than the 
     current system. They are underestimating their ingenuity.

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. President, in our family, we have had the great privilege and joy 
since the years of the Kennedy administration to have a home, an old 
farmhouse on a dairy farm in up-State New York, Delaware County, where 
the Delaware River rises. Mormonism had some of its origins on the 
banks of the Susquehanna in our county.
  The population of Delaware County is largely Scots, the one main 
group that you can identify. This was sheep raising country in the 19th 
century. Presbyterian churches are everywhere. It is not so very 
prosperous, but more so now than when we moved there. In 1963, 3.5 
percent of live births in Delaware County were out of wedlock; in 1973, 
5.1; 1983, 16.6; 1993, 32.6. We are, in fact, above the national 
average in this rural traditional society.
  We talk so much about how the welfare system has failed. Mr. 
President, the welfare system reflects a much larger failure in 
American society, not pervasive, but widespread, which we had evidence 
of, paid too little attention to, but still do not truly understand. It 
will be the defining issue of this coming generation in American social 
policy and politics.
  There is nothing more dangerous to writer Daniel Boorstin, that most 
eminent historian, former Librarian of Congress, who said that it is 
not ignorance that is the great danger in society, it is ``the illusion 
of knowledge.'' The illusion exists where none exists. I have spent 
much of my lifetime on this subject and have only grown more perplexed.
  In the Department of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, we 
began the policy planning staff and picked up the earthquake that 
shuttered through the American family. We picked up the first trembles. 
If you told me the damage would be as extensive as it is today, 30 
years ago if I was told what would be the case, I would have said no, 
no, it would never get that way. It has.
  Now, we did make an effort. We did, indeed, do something very 
considerable, and in 1988, by a vote of 96-1, we passed out of this 
Chamber the Family Support Act, which President Reagan signed in a 
wonderful ceremony. Governor Clinton was there, Governor Castle for the 
Governors' Association, in a Rose Garden ceremony, October 13. He said:

       I am pleased to sign into law today a major reform of our 
     Nation's welfare system, the Family Support Act. This bill 
     represents the culmination of more than 2 years of effort and 
     responds to the call in my 1986 State of the Union message 
     for real welfare reform--reform that will lead to lasting 
     emancipation from welfare dependency.

  The act says of parents:

       We expect of you what we expect of ourselves and our own 
     loved ones: that you will 

[[Page S19090]]
     do your share in taking responsibility for your life and the lives of 
     the children you bring into the world.
       First, the legislation improves our system of securing 
     support from absent parents. Secondly, it creates a new 
     emphasis on the importance of work for individuals in the 
     welfare system.

  All we are saying all this year has been what President Reagan said. 
We put that legislation into place.
  I offered on the floor a bill to bring it up to date, the Family 
Support Act of 1995. It got 41 votes, all, I am afraid, on this side, 
because both the present and previous administration, to be candid, 
have somehow not been willing to assert what has been going on under 
the existing statute.
  I stood on the floor when we were debating the welfare bill and 
Senator after Senator on our side talked about the extraordinary things 
going on in his or her State by way of welfare changes, and none 
acknowledging that they are going on under the existing law.
  On Wednesday, Senator James T. Fleming, a Republican, the majority 
leader of the Connecticut Senate, had an op-ed article, as we say, in 
the New York Times, called ``Welfare in the Real World.'' He talked 
about Connecticut's new welfare legislation, which is tough. ``It 
imposes the Nation's shortest time limit on benefits, 21 months, and 
reduces payments under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children 
program by an average of 7 percent.''
  Then he goes on to complain that to do this, the State had to get a 
waiver from Washington, which it did, particularly objecting to the 
fact that the administration has also refused to permit a two-tier 
payment system which discourages welfare migration by paying newcomers 
a lower cash benefit. He says the administration desperately clings to 
the discredited theory that Washington knows best.
  Mr. President, I have spoken to our extraordinarily able, concerned, 
Secretary of Health and Human Services about this proposition. Why did 
you refuse the two-tier system? And she said, because it was 
unconstitutional, that is why. We have a Constitution which provides 
that an American citizen has equal rights with any other citizen of any 
State he or she happens to live in. That is what it means to be an 
American citizen--and that Connecticut cannot say you came from New 
York and therefore you get half of what somebody who was born here 
gets. We do not do that. That is all they did.
  In point of fact, under the Clinton administration, 50 welfare 
demonstration projects have been approved in 35 States; 22 States have 
time-limited assistance in their demonstrations. This kind of 
experimentation is going on around the country. Governors have finally 
come to terms with the reality here. A new generation of public welfare 
officials is learning that they are no longer dealing with the old 
system. Frances Perkins, who I had the privilege to know years ago, was 
Secretary of Labor when the Social Security Act was passed, which 
created the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. It was 
simply a bridge program until old age assistance matured, as there was 
old age assistance. She described a typical recipient as a West 
Virginia coal mine widow. The widow was not going to go into the coal 
mines and was not going to get into the work force.
  A wholly new population has come on to the rolls. We know it is 
extraordinary. We have had intense efforts. Douglas Besharov describes 
them in an article in the current issue of Public Interest, which I ask 
unanimous consent to have printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Public Interest, Winter, 1995]

                     Paternalism and Welfare Reform

             (By Douglas J. Besharov and Karen N. Gardiner)

       After years of collective denial, most politicians (and 
     welfare policy makers) have finally acknowledged the link 
     between unwed parenthood and long-term welfare dependency, as 
     well as a host of other social problems. But it is one thing 
     to recognize the nature of the problem and quite another to 
     develop a realistic response to it. For, truth be told, there 
     has been a fair amount of wishful thinking about what it 
     takes to help these most disadvantaged parents become self-
     sufficient.
       Young, unwed parents are extremely difficult to help. 
     Besides living in deeply impoverished neighborhoods with few 
     social (or familial) supports, many suffer severe educational 
     deficits and are beset by multiple personal problems, from 
     high levels of clinical depression to alcohol and drug abuse. 
     As a result, even richly funded programs have had little 
     success with these mothers; and they rarely, if ever, try to 
     reach the fathers.
       The best remedy, of course, would be to prevent unwed 
     parenthood in the first place. But, even if the number of 
     out-of-wedlock births were somehow reduced by half, there 
     would still be over 600,000 such births each year. Thus 
     social programs must do a much better job of improving the 
     life prospects of unwed mothers and their children (without, 
     of course, creating more incentives for them to become unwed 
     mothers). This will require de-emphasizing the voluntary 
     approaches of the past that have proven unsuccessful, and, in 
     their place, pursuing promising new policies that are more 
     paternalistic.


                        unwed mothers on welfare

       In the last four decades, the proportion of American 
     children born out of wedlock has increased more than 
     sevenfold, from 4 percent in 1950 to 31 percent in 1993. In 
     that year, 1.2 million children were born outside of 
     marriage. These children, and their mothers, comprise the 
     bulk of long-term welfare dependents.
       Images of Murphy Brown notwithstanding, the vast majority 
     of out-of-wedlock births are to lower-income women: nearly 
     half are to women with annual family incomes below $10,000; 
     more than 70 percent are to women in families earning less 
     than $20,000. In Addition, most unmarried mothers are young 
     (66 percent of all out-of-wedlock births were to 15- to 24-
     year-olds in 1988), poorly educated (only 57 percent have a 
     high-school diploma), and unlikely to have work experience 
     (only 28 percent worked full time and an additional 8 percent 
     part time in 1990).
       Consequently, most unwed mothers go on welfare. In 
     Illinois, for example, over 70 percent of all unwed mothers 
     go on welfare within five years of giving birth to a child. 
     Nation-wide, an unmarried woman who has a baby in her early 
     twenties is more than twice as likely to go on welfare within 
     five years than is a married teen mother (63 percent versus 
     26 percent). And, once on welfare, unwed mothers tend to stay 
     there. According to Harvard's David Ellwood, who served as 
     one of President Clinton's chief welfare advisors, the 
     average never-married mother spends almost a decade on 
     welfare, twice as long as divorced mothers, the other major 
     group on welfare.
       Unwed parenthood among teenagers is a particularly serious 
     problem. Between 1960 and 1993, the proportion of out-of-
     wedlock births among teenagers rose from 15 percent to 71 
     percent, with the absolute number of out-of-wedlock births 
     rising from 89,000 to 369,000.
       Teen mothers are now responsible for about 30 percent of 
     all out-of-wedlock births, but even this understates the 
     impact of unwed teen parenthood on the nation's illegitimacy 
     problem. Sixty percent of all out-of-wedlock births involve 
     mothers who had their first babies as teenagers.
       Because so many unwed teen mothers have dropped out of 
     school and have poor earnings prospects in general, they are 
     even more likely to become long-term welfare recipients. 
     Families begun by teenagers (married or unmarried) account 
     for the majority of welfare expenditures in this country. 
     According to Kristin Moore, executive director of Child 
     Trends, Inc., 59 percent of women currently receiving Aid to 
     Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) were 19 years old or 
     younger when they had their first child.
       These realities have changed the face of welfare. In 1940, 
     shortly after AFDC was established as part of the Social 
     Security Act of 1935, about one-third of the children 
     entering the program were eligible because of a deceased 
     parent, about one-third because of an incapacitated parent, 
     and about one-third because of another reason for absence 
     (including divorce, separation, or no marriage tie). By 1961, 
     the children of widows accounted for only 7 percent of the 
     caseload, while those of divorced or separated and never-
     married mothers had climbed to 39 percent and 20 percent, 
     respectively. In 1993, the children of never-married mothers 
     made up the largest proportion of the caseload, 55 percent, 
     compared to children of widows (1 percent) and divorced or 
     separated parents (29 percent).
       The face of welfare dependency has changed for many and 
     infinitely complex reasons. But there should be no denying 
     that the inability of most unwed mothers to earn as much as 
     their welfare package is a major reason why they go on 
     welfare--and stay there for so long. (A common route off 
     welfare is marriage, but that is a subject for another 
     article.) Hence, since the 1960s, most attempts to reduce 
     welfare dependency have focused on raising the earnings 
     capacity of young mothers through a combination of 
     educational and job-training efforts. Given the faith 
     Americans have in education as the great social equalizer, 
     this emphasis has been entirely understandable. However, the 
     evaluations of three major demonstration projects serve as an 
     unambiguous warning that a new approach is needed.


                          three demonstrations

       Beginning in the late 1980s, three large-scale 
     demonstration projects designed to reduce welfare dependency 
     were launched. Although the projects had somewhat different 

[[Page S19091]]
     approaches, they all sought to foster self-sufficiency through a 
     roughly similar combination of education, training, various 
     health-related services, counseling, and, in two of the 
     three, family planning.
       New Chance tried to avert long-term welfare recipiency by 
     enhancing the ``human capital'' of young, welfare-dependent 
     mothers. Designed and evaluated by Manpower Demonstration 
     Research Corporation (MDRC), the program targeted those at 
     especially high risk of long-term dependency: young welfare 
     recipients (ages 16 to 22) who had their first child as a 
     teenager and were also high-school dropouts. Its two-stage 
     program attempted to remedy the mothers' severe educational 
     deficits--primarily through the provision of a Graduate 
     Equivalency Degree (GED) and building specific job-related 
     skills.
       The Teen Parent Demonstration attempted to use education 
     and training services to increase the earnings potential of 
     teen mothers before patterns of dependency took root. 
     Evaluated by Mathematical Policy Research, the program 
     required all first-time teen mothers in Camden and Newark, 
     New Jersey, and the south side of Chicago, Illinois, to 
     enroll when they first applied for welfare. The program 
     enforced its mandate by punishing a mother's truancy through 
     a reduction in her welfare grant.
       The Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP), which 
     is still operating, seeks to break patterns of 
     intergenerational poverty by providing an enriched 
     developmental experience for children and educational 
     services to their parents. A planned five-year intervention 
     is designed to enhance the intellectual, social, and physical 
     development of children from age one until they enter school. 
     Although not a requirement for participation, the majority of 
     families are headed by single parents. The program, evaluated 
     by Abt Associates, also provides classes on parenting, 
     reading, and basic skills (including GED preparation), as 
     well as other activities to promote self-sufficiency.
       These three projects represent a major effort to break the 
     cycle of poverty and to reduce welfare dependency. New Chance 
     involved 1,500 families at 16 sites and cost about $5,100 per 
     participant for the first stage, $1,300 for the second, and 
     $2,500 for child care (for an 18-month total of about $9,000 
     per participant). The Teen Parent Demonstration, involving 
     2,700 families at three sites, was the least expensive at 
     $1,400 per participant per year. The most expensive is the 
     CCDP, which serves 2,200 families at 24 sites for $10,000 per 
     family per year. Since it is intended to follow families for 
     five years, the total cost is planned to be about $50,000 per 
     family. These costs are in addition to the standard welfare 
     package, which averages about $8,300 per year for AFDC, food 
     stamps, and so forth.
       All three projects served populations predominantly 
     comprised of teen mothers and those who had been teens when 
     they first gave birth. The average age at first birth was 17 
     for New Chance and Teen Parent Demonstration clients, while 
     half of the CCDP clients were in their teens when they first 
     gave birth. As the project evaluators soon found, this is an 
     extremely disadvantaged--and difficult to reach--population. 
     Over 60 percent of Teen Parent Demonstration and New Chance 
     clients grew up in families that had received AFDC at some 
     point in the past. If anything, early parenthood worsened 
     their financial situations. All Teen Parent Demonstration 
     clients, of course, were on welfare, as were 95 percent of 
     those in New Chance. The average annual income for CCDP 
     families was $5,000.
       The mothers also suffered from substantial educational 
     deficiencies. Although most were in their late teens or early 
     twenties, few had high-school diplomas or GEDs. Many of those 
     still in school (in the Teen Parent Demonstration) were 
     behind by a grade. In New Chance and the Teen Parent 
     Demonstration, the average mother was reading at the eighth-
     grade level. Their connections to the labor market were 
     tenuous at best. Almost two-thirds of the New Chance 
     participants had not worked in the year prior to enrollment, 
     and 60 percent had never held a job for more than six months. 
     Only half of Teen Parent Demonstration mothers had ever had a 
     job. These young mothers also had a variety of emotional or 
     personal problems. About half of New Chance clients and about 
     40 percent of those in CCDP were diagnosed as suffering 
     clinical depression. The mothers also reported problems with 
     drinking and drug abuse. Many were physically abused by 
     boyfriends.


                         Disappointing results

       Besides the intensity of the intervention, what set these 
     three demonstrations apart from past efforts is that they 
     were rigorously evaluated using random assignment to 
     treatment and control groups. Random-assignment evaluations 
     are especially important in this area because, at first 
     glance, projects like these often look successful. For 
     example, one demonstration site announced that it was 
     successful because half of its clients had left welfare, and 
     their earnings and rate of employment had both doubled. These 
     results sound impressive, but the relevant policy question 
     is: What would have happened in the absence of the project? 
     This is called the ``counterfactual,'' and it is the essence 
     of judging the worth of a particular intervention.
       Unfortunately, despite the effort expended, none of these 
     demonstrations came anywhere near achieving its goals. After 
     the intervention, the families in the control groups (which 
     received no special services, but often did receive services 
     outside of the demonstrations) were doing about as well, and 
     sometimes better, than those in the demonstrations. In other 
     words, the evaluations were unable to document any 
     substantial differences in the lives of the families served. 
     Here is a sample of their disappointing findings:


                           welfare recipiency

       All three evaluations were unanimous: Participants were as 
     likely to remain on welfare as those in the control groups. 
     Robert Granger, senior vice president of MDRC, summed up the 
     interim evaluation of New Chance: ``This program at this 
     particular point has not made people better off 
     economically.'' At the end of 18 months, 82 percent of New 
     Chance clients were on welfare compared to 81 percent of the 
     control group. The Teen Parent Demonstration mothers did not 
     fare any better. After two years, 71 percent were receiving 
     AFDC, only slightly fewer than the control group (72.5 
     percent). CCDP participants were actually 5 percent more 
     likely to have received welfare in the past year than were 
     those in the control group (66 percent versus 63 percent).


                           earnings and work

       Only the Teen Parent Demonstration program saw any gains in 
     employment. Its mothers were 12 percent more likely to be 
     employed sometime during the two years after the program 
     began (48 percent of the treatment group versus 43 percent of 
     the control group) and, as a result, averaged $23 per month 
     more in income. In most cases, however, employment did not 
     permanently end their welfare dependency. Nearly one in three 
     of those who left AFDC for work returned within six months, 
     44 percent within a year, and 65 percent within three years.
       The other programs did not show even this small gain. Fewer 
     New Chance clients were employed during the evaluation period 
     than controls (43 percent versus 45 percent), in part because 
     they were in classes during some of the period. Those who did 
     work tended to work for a short time, usually less than three 
     months. Given the lower level of work, New Chance clients had 
     earned 25 percent less than the control group at the time of 
     the evaluation ($1,366 versus $1,708 a year). Only 29 percent 
     of the CCDP mothers were working at the time of the two-year 
     evaluation, the same proportion as the control group; there 
     was no difference in the number of hours worked per week, the 
     wages earned per week, or the number of months spent working.


                         education and training

       All three demonstrations were relatively successful in 
     enrolling mothers in education programs. Teen Parent 
     Demonstration mothers were over 40 percent more likely to be 
     in school (41 percent versus 29 percent), and about one-third 
     of the CCDP clients were working towards a degree, 78 percent 
     more than the control group.
       About three-quarters more New Chance participants received 
     their GED than their control-group counterparts (37 percent 
     versus 21 percent). But the mothers' receiving a GED did not 
     seem to raise their employability--or functional literacy. 
     The average reading level of the New Chance Mothers remained 
     unchanged (eighth grade) and was identical to that of the 
     control group. This finding echoes those from evaluations of 
     other programs with similar goals, including the Department 
     of Education's Even Start program. Jean Layzer, senior 
     associate at Abt Associates, concluded that, rather than 
     honing reading, writing, and math skills, GED classes tended 
     to focus on test-taking: ``What people did was memorize what 
     they needed to know for the GED. They think that their goal 
     is the GED because they think it will get them a job. But it 
     won't--it won't give them the skills to read an ad in the 
     newspaper.''
       In this light, it is especially troubling that, while 
     increasing the number of GED recipients, New Chance seems to 
     have reduced the number of young mothers who actually 
     finished high school (6 percent versus 9 percent). According 
     to one evaluator, the projects may have legitimated a young 
     mother's opting for a GED rather than returning to high 
     school.


                           subsequent births

       Although the young mothers in New Chance and the Teen 
     Parent Demonstration said they wanted to delay or forego 
     future childbearing, the majority experienced a repeat 
     pregnancy within the evaluation period, and most opted to 
     give birth. Mothers in one project spent only 1.5 hours on 
     family planning, while they spent 54 hours in another, with 
     no discernible difference in impact.
       All New Chance sites offered family-planning classes and 
     life skills courses that sought to empower women to take 
     control of their fertility. Many also dispensed 
     contraceptives. In the Teen Parent Demonstration, the family 
     planning workshop was mandatory. Despite these efforts, over 
     7 percent more New Chance mothers experienced a pregnancy (57 
     percent versus 53 percent). One-fourth of both Teen Parent 
     Demonstration clients and the control group experienced a 
     pregnancy within one year; half of each group did so by the 
     two-year follow-up. Two-thirds of all pregnancies resulted in 
     births. Although it was hoped that the CCDP intervention 
     would reduced subsequent births, this was not an explicit 
     goal of the demonstration; nor was family planning a core 
     service provided by the sites. But, 

[[Page S19092]]
     again, there was no real difference between experimental and control 
     groups: 30 percent of mothers in both had had another birth 
     by the two-year follow-up.


                          Maternal depression

       Two of the projects, New Chance and CCDP, attempted to 
     lessen the high rates of clinical depression among the 
     mothers. All New Chance sites provided mental-health 
     services, most often through referrals to other agencies 
     (although the quality of such services differed by site). Yet 
     program participants were as likely as those in the control 
     group to be clinically depressed (44 percent). CCDP clients 
     likewise received mental-health services as needed. But, 
     again, there was no discernible impact. Two years into the 
     program, 42 percent of the mothers in both the program and 
     control groups were determined to be at risk of clinical 
     depression. Measures of self-esteem and the use of social 
     supports also showed no differences.


                  Child development and child rearing

       The CCDP sought to prevent later educational failure by 
     providing five years of developmental, psychological, 
     medical, and social services to a group of children who 
     entered the program as infants. Developmental screening and 
     assessments were compulsory for all the children; those at 
     risk of being developmentally delayed were referred to 
     intervention programs.
       A major CCDP goal was to improve the ability of the parents 
     to nurture and educate their children. But, at the end of the 
     first two years, the evaluation found only scattered short-
     term effects on measures of good parenting, such as time 
     spent with the child, the parent's teaching skills, 
     expectations for the child's success, attitudes about child 
     rearing, and nurturing parent-child interactions. More 
     disheartening, especially given the success of other early 
     intervention programs, CCDP had small or no effect on the 
     development of the children in the program. Participating 
     children scored slightly higher on a test of cognitive 
     development but about the same in terms of social withdrawal, 
     depression, aggression, or destructiveness. They were only 
     slightly more likely to have their immunizations up to date 
     (88 percent versus 83 percent). CCDP's lack of success may be 
     explained by its approach to child development (delivering 
     about one hour per week of early childhood education through 
     in-home visits by case managers or, some-times, early-
     childhood-development specialists), which did not focus large 
     amounts of resources squarely on children.
       All in all, it's a sad story. But what is most discouraging 
     about these results is that the projects, particularly New 
     Chance and CCDP, enjoyed high levels of funding, yet still 
     seemed unable to improve the lives of disadvantaged families. 
     There are several explanations for their poor performance: 
     Many of the project sites had no prior experience providing 
     such a complex set of services; some were poorly managed; and 
     almost all were plagued with the problems that typically 
     characterize demonstration projects, such as slow start-ups, 
     inexperienced personnel, and high staff turnover. In 
     addition, the projects often chose the wrong objectives and 
     tactics. For example, most focused on helping the mothers 
     obtain GEDs, even in the face of accumulating evidence that 
     the GED does not increase employability. As for the two 
     programs that attempted to reduce subsequent births, program 
     staff tried to walk a fine line between promoting the 
     postponement of births and not devaluing the women's role as 
     mothers. Their sessions on family planning seemed to have 
     emphasized that the mothers should decide whether or not to 
     have additional children--rather than that they should avoid 
     having another child until they are self-sufficient.
       But even such major weaknesses do not explain the dearth of 
     positive impacts across so many goals--and so many sites. One 
     would expect some signs of improvement in the treatment group 
     if the projects had at least been on the right track. Hence, 
     one is impelled to another explanation: The underlying 
     strategy may be wrong. Voluntary education and job-training 
     programs may simply be unable to help enough unwed mothers 
     escape long-term dependency.


                          from carrot to stick

       Young mothers volunteered for both New Chance and the CCDP; 
     no one required that they participate. That level of 
     motivation should have given both projects an advantage in 
     helping them break patterns of dependency. As social workers 
     joke, you only need one social worker to change a light bulb, 
     but it helps to have a bulb that really wants to be changed.
       In both New Chance and the CCDP, however, initial 
     motivation was not enough to overcome decades of personal, 
     family, and neighborhood dysfunction. In relatively short 
     order, there was serious attrition. New Chance, for example, 
     was designed as a five-days-a-week, six-hours-a-day program. 
     Yet, over the first 18 months, the young mothers averaged 
     only 298 hours of participation, a mere 13 percent of the 
     time available to them. CCDP experienced similar attrition. 
     Although clients were asked to make a five-year commitment to 
     the program, 35 percent quit after the end of the second year 
     and 45 percent after the end of the fourth.
       These dropout rates make all the more significant the Teen 
     Parent Demonstration's success at enrolling non-volunteers. 
     Participation was mandatory for all first-time mothers and 
     was enforced through the threat of a reduction in welfare 
     benefits equal to the mother's portion of the grant, about 
     $160 per month. When teen mothers first applied for welfare, 
     they received a notice telling them that they had to register 
     for the program and that nonparticipation would result in a 
     financial sanction. Registration involved a meeting with 
     program staff and a basic-skills test. Over 30 percent came 
     to the program after receiving this initial notice. Another 
     52 percent came in after receiving a letter warning of a 
     possible reduction of their welfare grant.
       The 18 percent who failed to respond to the second notice 
     saw their welfare checks cut. Of these, about one-third (6 
     percent of the total sample) eventually participated. As one 
     mother recounted, ``The first time they sent me a letter, I 
     looked at it and threw it away. The second time, I looked at 
     it and threw it away again. And then they cut my check, and I 
     said `Uh, oh, I'd better go.' '' Thus sanctions brought in an 
     entire cohort of teen mothers--from the most motivated to the 
     least motivated and most troubled. For example, no exceptions 
     were made for alcoholic and drug-addicted mothers.
       Moreover, the Teen Parent Demonstration was able to keep 
     this population of non-volunteers participating at levels 
     similar to the volunteers in New Chance and the CCDP. After 
     registration, the mothers were required to attend workshops, 
     high-school classes, and other education and training 
     programs. In any given month, participation averaged about 50 
     percent, reaching a high of about 65 percent during the 
     period when the projects were fully operational. Sanctioning 
     was not uncommon: Almost two-thirds of the participants 
     received formal warnings, and 36 percent had their grants 
     reduced for at least one month.


                            More tough love

       Voluntary educational and training programs can play an 
     important role in helping those welfare mothers (often older 
     and divorced) who want to improve their situations. But, by 
     themselves, they seem unable to motivate the majority of 
     young, unwed mothers to overcome their distressingly 
     dysfunctional situations. Mandatory approaches are attractive 
     to the public and to policy makers because they seem to do 
     just that. In the ``learnfare'' component of Ohio's Learning, 
     Earning, and parenting Program (LEAP), AFDC recipients who 
     were under the age of 20 and did not have a high-school 
     diploma or GED were required to attend school. Those who 
     failed to attend school or did not attend an initial 
     assessment interview had their welfare grant reduced by $62 
     per month. This penalty continued until the mother complied 
     with the program's rules. Conversely, those who attended 
     school regularly got a $62 per month bonus. Thus the monthly 
     benefit for a ten with one child was almost 60 percent higher 
     for those who complied with the program ($336 versus $212). 
     The program also provided limited counseling and child care. 
     Based on a random assignment methodology, MDRC's evaluation 
     found that, one year after LEAP began, almost 20 percent more 
     LEAP participants than controls remained in school 
     continuously or graduated (61 percent versus 51 percent). 
     Over 40 percent more returned to school after dropping out 
     (47 percent versus 33 percent).
       Despite early concerns, such behavior-related rules have 
     not been burdensome to administer. Most have been implemented 
     without creating new bureaucracies or new problems. According 
     to MDRCC's Robert Granger, these ``large-scale programs have 
     not been expensive.'' The cost of the LEAP program in 
     Cleveland, for example, was about $540 per client per year, 
     of which about $350 was for case management and $190 for 
     child care.
       Nor do such rules seem unduly harsh on clients. The 
     sanctioning in the Teen Parent Demonstration caused little 
     discernible dislocation among the young mothers. In fact, 
     very few of them were continuously sanctioned (and, besides, 
     the sanction was applied against only the mothers' portion of 
     the grant). Rebecca Maynard, the director of the Mathematica 
     evaluation, found that the ``clear message from both the 
     young mothers and the case managers is that the financial 
     penalties are fair and effective in changing the culture of 
     welfare from both sides.'' Clients viewed the demonstration 
     program as supportive, although also serious and demanding. 
     Case managers believe it motivated both clients and service 
     providers. Similarly, the LEAP sanctions caused ``no hardship 
     whatsoever to the vase majority of participants and their 
     children,'' according to David Long of MDRC, a co-author of 
     the evaluation report. Mothers who had been sanctioned 
     reported that they were able to ``get by'' either by trimming 
     their budgets or by receiving assistance from others.
       The early success of such experiments linking reductions 
     (and increases) in welfare to particular behaviors led (as of 
     May 1995) more than two-thirds of the state to adopt, and 
     another nine to propose, one or more behavior-related welfare 
     rules. (State reforms are authorized by a federal law that 
     allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services to 
     ``waive'' certain federal rules.) Between 1992 and 1995, 21 
     states adopted learnfare-type programs, which tie welfare 
     payments to school attendance for AFDC children or teen 
     parents (with federal waivers pending in three more); eight 
     states adopted ``family caps'' that deny additional benefits 
     to women who have more children while on welfare (with 
     waivers pending in six more); 15 states adopted time limits 
     for receiving benefits (with waivers pending in nine more); 
     and 10 states adopted immunization requirements (with waivers 
     pending in three more). 

[[Page S19093]]
     In the coming years, expect more states to adopt such rules--and expect 
     more behaviors to become the subject of such rules.
       This attempt to regulate the behavior of welfare recipients 
     is a sharp break from the hands-off policy of the past 30 
     years--and an implicit rejection of past voluntary education 
     and training efforts. It was not so long ago that people such 
     as Princeton's Lawrence Mead were widely derided for 
     suggesting that welfare is not simply a right but an 
     obligation that should be contingent upon certain 
     constructive behaviors. But, because of both political and 
     practical experience, they are now in the mainstream of 
     current developments.


                          the limits of reform

       No one, however, should expect such paternalistic welfare 
     policies to eradicate dependency. Our political system is 
     unlikely to adopt rules and sanctions tough enough to 
     motivate the hardest-to-reach mothers--nor should it. No 
     politician really wants tough welfare rules that result in 
     large numbers of homeless families living on the streets. 
     Although those who remain on welfare should feel the pinch of 
     benefit reductions, they nevertheless need to be protected 
     from hunger, homelessness, and other harmful deprivations. 
     Thus there is a political limit to the amount of behavioral 
     change that financial sanctions might potentially achieve.
       Hence, in the coming years, states will have to grapple 
     with issues such as: How many behaviors can be subject to 
     regulation? How much can the sanctions be stiffened before 
     becoming punitive (and counterproductive)? How should 
     agencies handle clients who, because of emotional problems or 
     substance abuse, seem unable to respond to financial 
     incentives?
       Even the experts can only guess about the impact of future 
     rules. The jury is still out, for example, about the impact 
     of New Jersey's family cap; and time-limited programs have 
     yet to be tested in the ``real world.'' Just as important, no 
     sanctioning scheme can compensate for the inadequacy of 
     existing programs for low-skilled and poorly motivated 
     mothers. Programs need to hold out a palpable promise of 
     higher earnings, otherwise participants will drop out--even 
     in the face of financial sanctions. New Chance, the Teen 
     Parent Demonstration, and CCDP all had high dropout rates, 
     suggesting that they failed the consumer test. Describing the 
     services available to the Teen Parent Demonstration, Maynard 
     says: ``We did not have much to offer. We had lousy public 
     schools, boring and irrelevant GED programs, and very caring 
     case managers.''
       Current approaches need to be fundamentally rethought. For 
     example, many welfare experts now believe that education in 
     basic skills is less effective than simply pushing recipients 
     toward work. A recently released evaluation of welfare-reform 
     programs in three sites (Atlanta, Georgia, Grand Rapids, 
     Michigan, and Riverside, California) by MDRC found that 
     intensive education and training activities were only about 
     one-third as effective in moving recipients off welfare as 
     what it called ``rapid job entry'' strategies (6 percent 
     versus 16 percent).
       ``The mothers were taught how to look for work and how to 
     sell themselves to employers,'' according to Judith Gueron of 
     MDRC. ``The focus was on how to prepare a resume, pursue job 
     leads, handle interviews, and hold a job once you got one.'' 
     The programs also maintained telephone banks from which 
     recipients could call prospective employers. And, she 
     stresses, ``The program was very mandatory, backed up with 
     heavy grants reductions for mothers who did not comply with 
     job search requirements.'' Institutionalizing such programs 
     and developing others in all parts of the country will 
     require creativity, clarity of purpose, and patience, and 
     much trial and error. Still, success will be elusive.
       Even if behavior-related rules do not sharply reduce 
     welfare rolls, they could still serve an important and 
     constructive purpose. The social problems associated with 
     long-term welfare dependence cannot be addressed without 
     first putting the brakes on the downward spirals of 
     dysfunctional behavior common among so many recipients. Thus 
     it would be achievement enough if such rules could stabilize 
     home situations. Given the failure of voluntary approaches, 
     the accomplishment of that alone would at least provide a 
     base for other, more targeted approaches.
       Aristotle is credited with the aphorism: ``Virtue is 
     habit.'' To him, the moral virtues (including wisdom, 
     justice, temperance, and courage), what people now tend to 
     call ``character,'' were not inbred. Aristotle believed that 
     they develop in much the same way people learn to play a 
     musical instrument, through endless practice. In other words, 
     character is built by the constant repetition of divers good 
     acts. These new behavior-related welfare rules are an 
     attempt, long overdue in the minds of many, to build habits 
     of responsible behavior among long-term recipients; that is, 
     to legislate virtue.

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I am coming to a close. The three demonstration 
projects of intense efforts for young, unmarried mothers, training 
them, stimulating them, encouraging them, reassuring them--it is so 
hard. If we knew how hard it was, we would know what we are putting at 
risk here. We are abandoning the national commitment to solve a 
national problem. We are doing it with very little understanding, very 
little understanding.
  I have here, Mr. President, and I will close with these remarks--we 
are getting used to everyone who comes to the Senate floor having a 
poster--I have an artifact. Give this a little thought, just a little 
thought. What I am holding is a pen with which John F. Kennedy, in his 
last public bill signing ceremony at the White House, October 31, 1963, 
signed the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Health Centers 
Construction Act of 1963. I was there. I had worked on the legislation. 
He gave me a pen.

  In that act we undertook what was known as the deinstitutionalization 
of our great mental institutions. We developed tranquilizers, first in 
New York State, at Rockland State Hospital. We again used them 
systemwide. We thought we had a medication for schizophrenia. We 
thought it could be treated in the community, perhaps more effectively 
in the community than in a large mental institution. So we were going 
to build 2,000 community mental health centers by the year 1980. And 
then, thereafter 1 per 100,000.
  President Kennedy was very deeply interested in this. I have always 
thought, if some person with wonderful fast-forward vision was in the 
Oval Office at that moment and said, ``Mr. President, before you sign 
that bill could I tell you we are going to empty out our mental 
institutions. In 30 years time they will have about 7 percent of the 
population in this time. We are only going to build about 600 of these 
community mental health centers. Then we are going to forget we started 
that and go on to other things and leave it be.'' I think the President 
would have put that pen down. I think he would have put that pen down 
and said, ``What, do you want people sleeping on grates on Constitution 
Avenue? Sleeping in doorways? In cities around the country, 
schizophrenic persons with no medication, no location, simply cast onto 
the streets?'' He would have said, ``They will be called homeless or 
something?''
  I think he would not have signed the bill. I wish he had not. And 
that is why I am so pleased to say that President Clinton will veto 
this bill. And then we can get back together, work together for the 
next stage in what has to be a national effort for an extraordinarily 
severe national problem.
  Mr. President, I see my friend from North Carolina is on the floor 
but I yield the floor. I thank the Chair for his courtesy.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to my distinguished 
colleague from North Carolina.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. FAIRCLOTH. Mr. President, I have, many times over the course of 
this session's welfare reform debate stated that it is my strong belief 
that unless we address the root cause of welfare dependency--
illegitimacy--we will not truly reform our welfare system. And my 
belief in this principle has become stronger and strengthened by the 
twists and turns of almost a year of debate.
  It is with mixed feelings that I rise to discuss this conference 
report on welfare reform. I am pleased that many of the weak points of 
our first Senate bills have been strengthened. This conference report 
contains important provisions to require real work from welfare 
recipients, a concept known as ``pay-for-performance.'' This means that 
welfare recipients will only receive benefits as compensation for work 
done. While this commonsense principle is the undisputed standard in 
the private sector, can you believe it is a revolutionary thing for the 
Government to expect work for pay? ``Pay-for-performance'' requirements 
are the key to replacing welfare with workfare.
  I am also glad to see that the welfare conference report contains 
what has come to be called the family cap. Middle-class American 
families who want to have children have to plan for, prepare, and save 
money, because they understand the serious responsibility involved in 
bringing children into the world. It is grossly unfair to ask these 
same people to send their hard-earned tax dollars to support the 
reckless and irresponsible behavior of a woman who has a child out of 
wedlock and continues to have them, expecting support from the American 
taxpayer. In fact, their sole support would be the American taxpayer. 

[[Page S19094]]

  The family cap sends an important message that higher standards of 
personal responsibility will be expected of welfare recipients. If this 
conference report becomes law, welfare recipients will no longer 
receive automatic increases in their benefits when they have additional 
children.
  I am very disappointed that the conference was unable to follow 
through on the courage and fortitude shown by our colleagues in the 
House of Representatives, who passed a welfare reform bill which would 
have prohibited the use of block grant funds for cash payments to unwed 
mothers under 18. In place of this crucial provision we merely have a 
statement that options exist for the States. We need much more.
  This is little more than a statement of current policy. And current 
policy has resulted in an out-of-wedlock birth rate which has 
quadrupled over the last 30 years. Today, more than one in every three 
American children is born out of wedlock. And in some communities, the 
illegitimacy rate approaches 80 percent.
  Children born out of wedlock are three times more likely to be on 
welfare when they become adults--three times more likely. Furthermore, 
children raised in single-parent homes are six times more likely to be 
poor, and twice as likely to commit crime and end up in jail.
  In fact, a young girl who is born out of wedlock, when she reaches 
early maturity is 164 percent more likely to herself have a child out 
of wedlock.
  To truly reform welfare we must reverse current welfare policies 
which subsidize, and thus promote, self-destructive behavior and 
illegitimacy--policies which are destroying the American family. This 
legislation fails to take this crucial step.
  It is also unfortunate that this conference report fails to make 
major changes in the way welfare is administered at the Federal level. 
Even though this legislation will block grant the AFDC program, and 
several other smaller programs, it still leaves in place a structure of 
too many bureaucrats running too many programs through too many 
different agencies. This bureaucratic structure will continue to stop 
and stifle substantial reform.
  Mr. President, in spite of these deficiencies, the welfare reform 
conference report before us does mark a turning point in the attitude 
which prevails here in Washington, and is reflective of the attitude 
that prevails around the country and that is that it is past time that 
we do something.
  Finally, we have legislation that recognizes what many of us on this 
side have known for so long. All of our problems cannot be solved by 
more Government programs and more spending. Government spending is no 
substitute for personal responsibility.
  This legislation is also significant as a step in the right direction 
after 30 years of failed welfare policies--30 years of them. But, Mr. 
President, it is only a very small step in comparison to the enormity 
of the problem our current welfare system has produced. And our current 
welfare system has produced, with $5 trillion of our dollars, the 
situation we find ourselves in today.
  Mr. President, if this legislation does pass, it should not be taken 
as an excuse to rest, or to rest on any laurels from it. This 
legislation should serve as a start, to push ahead on the vast 
remainder of unfinished welfare reform business. The real work of 
welfare reform is still to be done, but this is a start.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. FORD. Mr. President, on behalf of the floor manager for the 
minority, I yield 15 minutes to the distinguished Senator from 
Illinois.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
  Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
  Mr. President, it is with sadness that I rise today to discuss the 
conference report on H.R. 4.
  It is 4 days before Christmas, the season usually characterized by 
giving and good will. But here we are in this Congress in the middle of 
a partial Government shutdown considering legislation that will 
dismantle the Federal safety net for poor families and, in the process, 
push over 1 million additional children into grinding poverty.
  Mr. President, it seems to me that too many of our colleagues have 
forgotten the lesson that Dr. Seuss tried to teach us in ``The Grinch 
Who Stole Christmas.'' Not only are their hearts too small, but their 
vision is too narrow as well.
  We are, Mr. President, a national community--as Americans --the 
conditions in which the poor live, especially the poor children, affect 
us all no matter our wealth or where we happen to live in this great 
country.
  I have in my years in public life advocated making welfare work 
better. In fact, earlier this year I introduced a welfare bill that I 
believe addressed the critical problems entrenched in our current 
system; lack of incentives to move from welfare to work and lack of 
jobs in low-income communities to absorb those people who want to work.
  Mr. President, that bill acknowledged that changes are needed, and it 
also incorporated lessons that the States have learned--particularly 
those States that have already instituted successful reform. Those 
States have shown us that you cannot reform welfare on the cheap.
  This bill ignores that experience altogether. Welfare reform should 
center on eliminating the incentives for dependency on building strong, 
two-parent families and moving recipients into the economic mainstream.
  The Senate bill, though better than the House effort, did not 
accomplish those objectives, and this conference report is even worse. 
Reform may be needed, but not shortsighted reform.
  I support increased State flexibility, experimentation, and positive 
and constructive change. But this bill will lead to a complete 
abandonment of any national commitment to poor families. There is room 
for a shared Federal-State partnership, but this bill gives us no 
partnership at all but simply envisions the Federal Government as the 
check writer of last resort. There is no accountability for the money. 
There is no accountability for the rules nor for the money, and the 
bill encourages a race to the bottom among the States with the States 
doing the least, potentially hurting the poor the most. There is no 
recognition in this legislation that as a national community we must 
have a national safety net if poverty is not to become an accident of 
geography.
  In addition to dismantling the Federal safety net, this bill is 
flawed in a number of other ways.
  The plan makes a mockery of the goal to move welfare recipients into 
private sector jobs.
  The Congressional Budget Office, which has gotten a lot of support 
around these quarters in recent times, in discussions on the budget, 
has reported time and time again that the funding levels in this bill 
are inadequate to meet the work requirements. In fact, the 
Congressional Budget Office assumes that most States will fail to meet 
those work requirements and, therefore, will incur substantial 
penalties under the terms of the legislation.
  If only 10 to 15 States--which is the estimate of the number of 
States that might meet the work requirements--if only 10 meet those 
work requirements, what of the other 40? What will be the ramifications 
for them?
  Several studies, including one by Northern Illinois University, have 
shown that, even if the States could meet the work requirements in this 
legislation, the private sector job market cannot, at the present time, 
absorb all of the new workers entering the system. Half of the adults 
receiving AFDC in Chicago right now have never graduated from high 
school. And one-third of them have never held a job.
  This conference report will seal the doom of many of these people for 
whom it will be difficult, if not impossible, to employ without 
appropriate support services, education, job training, and assistance--
that is nowhere provided for in this legislation.
  The plan also cuts funding and block grants critical child welfare 
programs. Mr. President, this is the last place where we should be 
making cuts. Our child protection system is already overburdened and 
underfunded. I can think of no more vulnerable population than abused 
children, and there have been, frankly, far too many heart-wrenching, 
alarming stories this year about children who have been abused by their 
parents who should have been 

[[Page S19095]]
protecting them. This conference report would increase the chances that 
these children would languish in unsafe environments of abuse, neglect, 
disease, and death. This Congress should not blithely go down the road 
that will visit that kind of harm on the most vulnerable population of 
Americans.
  Finally, Mr. President, most frightening, the conference report will 
push 1.5 million children into poverty. This country already has a 
higher child poverty rate than any other industrialized nation. Why 
would this legislative body knowingly exacerbate that already shameful 
figure?
  It is clear to me that this plan fails those who need a national 
safety net the most. Welfare should have, I think, two goals at least--
protecting children and helping adult recipients to become self-
sufficient.
  During the floor deliberations, I noted repeatedly that the majority 
of people receiving assistance under welfare, as we know it, are 
children. Currently, these are the facts. These are hard facts. This is 
not somebody's idea or speculation.
  Currently, there are 14 million individuals receiving cash 
assistance, and two-thirds of them, or 9 million of them, are children. 
While the welfare rolls overall have declined recently, the number of 
children receiving welfare assistance has remained constant. And that 
trend is likely to continue because, while 50 percent of the recipients 
who go on welfare leave it within a year, many of them have a tendency 
to cycle on and off the rolls due to low-paying, entry-level jobs that 
barely provide a livable wage for a family. So we are looking at, 
again, 9 million children being involved in this debate.
  Mr. President, I am not arguing that anybody should get a free ride. 
I do not believe anybody in this body or in this legislature believes 
that adults should get a free ride. People who can work should work. 
The role of government is not to subsidize indefinitely those who are 
capable of working. But it is our role, and indeed our responsibility, 
to provide a national safety net for children. It is not their fault 
that they are poor. But it is our fault if this bill dooms them to stay 
that way.
  This Congress, Mr. President, should not pave the way to so-called 
welfare reform at the expense of poor children. What amazes me about 
this whole debate is that many of my colleagues know this and yet 
continue to support this legislation. Some of my colleagues believe 
that poor children are expendable and that it is, therefore, OK to 
experiment with their lives. If they can scratch and survive, that is 
fine. If they do not, well, that is life, and it is just too bad. It is 
a cruel game of survival of the fittest. We actually heard testimony to 
that effect in the Senate Finance Committee, and it was stunning to me.
  But, Mr. President, policy based on political rhetoric is wrong. This 
debate has focused on the stereotypes and it gets in the way of our 
understanding the facts. Senator Moynihan was brilliant earlier in 
talking about the notion that the facts here are--facts that we really 
have not gotten yet to the point of fully being able to appreciate, 
much less to know how, if you push one button, you will get one kind of 
consequence.
  So we are experimenting here based on stereotypes. We talked about 
the stereotype of the underdeserving, freeloading poor for so long that 
many of my colleagues, I think, are frankly determined not to let those 
misperceptions stand in the way of their policymaking.
  Mr. President, the fact is that most of the people who will be 
affected by this legislation are children.
  So my colleagues who support this legislation continue to talk about 
the parents so they will not have to face the consequences of the 
children.
  It is very difficult, Mr. President, to survive and to compete, or to 
be self-sufficient if you are a child. So I want to go over again some 
additional facts that we must not let escape this debate.
  Fact one, 22 percent of the children in this, the richest nation in 
the world, live in poverty. In fact, I have a chart here on child 
poverty rates. I just hope that this, again, does not get lost in this 
debate.
  Child poverty rates among industrialized countries--here is the 
United States, 21.5. Here is Australia, Canada, Ireland, Israel, the 
U.K. can you imagine is here? Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, 
Austria, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, 
Finland--from 2.5 to 21.5 percent of the children in this country live 
in poverty.
  Children living in poverty are more likely to have poor nutrition, to 
experience a greater incidence of illness, and to perform more poorly 
in school, to obtain low-paying jobs and then to live in poverty as 
adults themselves. And even more shocking, Mr. President, even more 
shocking, every day, every day in this country, 27 children die due to 
causes associated with their poverty.

  I think these facts are or should be common knowledge for anyone who 
would presume to legislate in an area such as this. And yet, Mr. 
President, this body has so far rejected attempts to provide some 
subsistence to just the children. Assuming for a moment their parents 
are off the deep end and do not want to be self-sufficient or cannot 
find a job through no fault of their own, at least let us provide for 
some subsistence for the children. And this body has rejected those 
attempts. Quite frankly, if that is not mean-spirited, I do not know 
what is.
  I am going to refer to this picture, which I am sure the Presiding 
Officer has seen. This is a picture that was taken at the turn of the 
century, and it was an article in the Chicago History magazine called 
``Friendless Foundlings and Homeless Half Orphans.'' It talked about 
the social service and social welfare system for children before we had 
the national safety net that this legislation seeks to dismantle. In 
that article on friendless foundlings and homeless half orphans, it 
talked about the phenomenon of what happened to children, the 
friendless foundlings, the children that the mothers would take and put 
on the church steps or put on the doorway of someone who had money 
because they knew they could not feed them, or the homeless half 
orphans, the children whose mothers, when the winter came and there was 
no way to support them, would take them to the orphanage and drop them 
off to be cared for during the wintertime.
  It talked about the fact that the various States had various ways of 
dealing with this issue. And, in fact, in some States there were trains 
that would take the babies that they found lying in the gutters and 
lying in the alleys and the streets and ship them out West so they 
could be raised by farm families who could possibly provide them 
subsistence.
  Are we to go back to this? That is what this conference report would 
have us do, Mr. President, and it is absolutely sobering and it is 
absolutely unconscionable, in my mind. Need I remind you of this 
experiment and would it not make sense for us to be reminded of what 
happened then when we did not have a national safety net? Do we want to 
go back to a time of friendless foundlings, homeless half orphans and 
orphan trains? And do we want to go back to the whole idea of State 
flexibility? We have been there. As they say in the community, ``been 
there; done that; hated it.'' We did that in this country. We had 50 
separate welfare systems in this United States and this is what it 
produced. This conference report will send us back to that.
  Mr. President, every child in this country is precious, too precious 
to risk on a poorly designed, shortsighted experiment, and that is what 
this legislation is. It is an experiment. I say to my colleagues, if 
the system is broke, this bill does not fix it but, rather, breaks it 
up even more and then shatters the parts and ships them out to the 
States. I urge my colleagues to think long and hard before they support 
this conference report for that reason.
  In closing, Mr. President, I would like to end with a quote in a 
December 14 editorial from the Journal Star, a Peoria newspaper, 
remember how we used to talk about ``how is it playing in Peoria?'' I 
think the Journal Star has it exactly right. After describing the gory 
details--and I told my colleague on the other side of the aisle I would 
not read this out loud but, rather, would just put it in the Record--
and the numerous negative consequences of this conference report, the 
article concluded by saying, ``We're not opposed to welfare reform. 
We're just opposed 

[[Page S19096]]
to welfare reform that makes no sense.''
  Mr. President, this bill makes no sense. This bill makes no sense. It 
will do more harm than good. And I am just delighted that the President 
has sent a letter saying that he will veto this bill and that he will 
do so quickly so that we can come together and, based on the facts as 
we know them, we can address welfare as we know it and begin to come up 
with responses to this problem that will make us proud as Americans for 
having addressed the condition of those who have the least in our 
community.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished 
Senator from Michigan.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
  Mr. ABRAHAM. I thank you very much, Mr. President.
  Tonight I wish to talk about this bill from what I can see as a very 
different perspective. It is a perspective shared by a lot of people in 
my State and I think by people more broadly across America.
  It may be that there are some in this Chamber who bought into the 
stereotype of people who are in the needy category in our country and 
view them only as freeloaders. I do not come from that perspective. We 
have people in my State--I know them well--who would like very much to 
not be dependent on the Government, people who would like to be earning 
their own income and people who would like to be on the first rung of 
the economic ladder. I know it from my own family's experience. My own 
father was at one time in a CCC camp, so I know a little bit about the 
experiences of people in hard times and the desire that I think exists 
within all of us to not be dependent on Government but, rather, 
dependent on ourselves.
  What I think most people are saying in this country today is very 
simply this, that we have, over 20-plus years at a national level, 
attempted to fight a war on poverty with very little tangible success. 
Those who are below the poverty line today are approximately the same 
percentage of our country as the case when this program began. But in 
the meantime, and contrary I think to some of the things suggested here 
during the earlier debates and these, I think our States have changed 
their philosophy.
  I know certainly that in Michigan the desire is not to have 
flexibility and liberation from Washington to put more people in 
poverty but, rather, to help the people who are below the poverty line 
to be able to take better care of themselves. Indeed, that is why I 
support this legislation, because I wish to really win the war on 
poverty, not just fight a battle that 20 years from now is at the same 
pace and point that we are today.
  We have a broken system, and it should be fixed. I think the 
legislation before us moves us in the direction of fixing it. It 
establishes goals that are long overdue--foremost among them, the 
notion that intact families are a critical ingredient in addressing the 
poverty problem in America today; that the problem of illegitimacy, 
which many of our colleagues have spoken of and spoken more eloquently 
than I and understand in more detail than I can understand, the problem 
of illegitimacy I think has been lost over the years during this 
poverty debate where a check became a substitute often for a parent, a 
check from Washington.
  So I think it is time, as this bill does, to change the goals and to 
put intact families and reducing the illegitimacy at the top of our 
national agenda, and also to put the goal of putting people to work 
rather than being part of a permanent welfare condition at the top of 
the agenda. And most importantly, to put hope and the inspiration 
needed to put people on the economic ladder at the top of the agenda. 
The current system has I think failed us in achieving those objectives.
  What the bill does strategically is this. It gives States, the people 
on the front lines, the kind of flexibility they need to help people 
who are on welfare. It says, let us have less bureaucracy in Washington 
and let us give the people on the front line, the front-line 
caseworkers the chance to really work with people in our country who 
need help to get them on the economic ladder. That is what we need. In 
my State of Michigan, approximately two-thirds of the time of our 
front-line welfare caseworkers is spent basically filling out 
paperwork, most of it for the Federal Government, instead of helping 
the people these programs are intended to help.
  A second objective is to give the States the flexibility to give 
better solutions to the problems, rather than the Washington-knows-best 
solutions that they have labored under for far too long. The States in 
fact, Mr. President, care a lot more about the people who live in them 
than anybody here inside the beltway. And Governors and legislators are 
just as concerned and compassionate as we are, and I happen to think 
are a lot more likely to be creative and inventive in dealing with the 
problems in their own States than we possibly can be trying to 
administer a 50-State program with one set of solutions. So State 
flexibility is a cornerstone of the program. So, too, is the 
consolidation of the programs.
  Instead of having the massive numbers of programs that have grown up 
during the last 25 years, this program, this welfare bill, reduces, 
consolidates programs. It saves us money in terms of bureaucracy but it 
makes the programs comprehensible and workable, instead of far too 
complicated, and oftentimes in conflict with one another.
  Third, it addresses, as I suggested earlier, the illegitimacy problem 
facing our Nation today in a variety of, I think, very effective ways. 
During the original debate on this bill I was on the floor promoting 
part of this legislation which I helped draft, the so-called bonus to 
States who reduce the rate of illegitimacy without simultaneously 
increasing the number of abortions.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has used his 5 minutes.
  Mr. ABRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask the manager if I might have an 
additional 2 minutes?
  Mr. ROTH. I yield 2 additional minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator may continue.
  Mr. ABRAHAM. I thank the Chair and I thank the manager.
  This approach addressing the illegitimacy problems will start finally 
to focus priorities at the State level where they ought to be, on 
keeping families intact, on reducing the number of out-of-wedlock 
births, and as a consequence addressing the problem at its core, the 
child poverty statistics we hear so often about.
  The concern I think we all have for children born in poverty is in no 
small sense a result of the fact that too many children are born out of 
wedlock into families that are not economically strong enough to 
protect them.
  Finally, the strategy in this legislation is to put strong, tough 
work requirements into place and to give States the incentives they 
need to try to get people to work rather than simply administering the 
massive transfer of payment program that does very little to give 
people the kind of dignity, incentive, and encouragement and help they 
need to get onto the economic ladder.

  For those reasons, Mr. President, I think this bill is on target. I 
will support the conference report when we vote tomorrow. I hope that 
the President will reconsider his comments with respect to vetoing the 
legislation because I believe this truly will accomplish something that 
he and many of us have spoken about in the context of our campaigns, 
the notion that we truly would reform welfare and change welfare as we 
know it.
  This legislation ends business as usual. This legislation will 
address the welfare problems effectively. Mr. President, I hope our 
colleagues will support it. I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.
  Mr. BENNETT addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Brown). Who yields time?
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to the distinguished 
Senator from Utah.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah is recognized.
  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I appreciate the willingness of the 
manager to yield me some time. I had the privilege of being in the 
chair and thereby being able to give my full attention to the statement 
of the Senator from New York, and following that the Senator from 
Illinois, two Senators for whom I have enormous respect and personal 
affection. 

[[Page S19097]]

  I am moved by the clear and unalloyed concern they have for the 
children in poverty in our country and for the failure of our present 
system to solve that problem. I can think of no two Senators who have 
better motives and more genuine urges to solve this problem than these 
two.
  I am a supporter of the conference report. And I want to respond to 
the comments that were made so that my support for the conference 
report will not be misunderstood. I think the Senator from New York put 
it in the best context when he described the signing ceremony that took 
place in the Kennedy administration against a backdrop of great 
optimism and unfortunately complete ignorance as to what the future 
would actually be like.
  I think the Senator's point is well taken. We are embarking once 
again on a leap of faith with considerable ignorance as to what the 
future would be like. I would be reluctant to take that leap of faith 
if I thought the present was working. But the present is not working. 
And I am willing to take a leap into the future in the hope that it 
will be better than the present and frankly a fear that things could 
not be much worse than we have in the present, that we are not risking 
that much by dismantling some of the present circumstance.
  Let me share with you an experience from my home State of Utah that 
gives me more hope for the future than perhaps my friends have. In the 
State of Utah we set up--I say we, I had nothing to do with it--the 
Governor and the office of social services set up a program which 
required a whole series of waivers from Federal regulations in order to 
implement.
  These waivers took a great deal of time and effort to put in place. 
Finally the Feds said, ``Well, we will grant you the waivers''--my 
memory tells me that it took 44 such waivers--``We will grant you the 
waivers from the Federal regulations because we think the program you 
will put in place will in fact improve the lot of the poor, who come 
under your program. However, we tell you that based on our analysis, 
the program will cost 20 percent more than is being expended right now. 
And we do not think you can afford it, but we will give you the 
opportunity to spend that extra money.''

  We wanted to have--in response to the kinds of concerns the Senator 
from New York raised about ``understanding''--a proper kind of control 
of this circumstance, so even though some centers were set up for the 
pilot program, in the one center where the most people would come for 
the pilot program, they established a truly random control group; that 
is, one would come in and be put in the present Federal programs, the 
next person through the door would be put in the State pilot program, 
the next person through the door in the Federal program, the next 
person in the State pilot program, and so on, so that you had exactly 
the same kind of people, from exactly the same neighborhood, serviced 
by exactly the same social workers to see what happened.
  Under the program devised by the State, which was completely 
flexible, the question asked was, ``What do you need? Tell us your 
circumstance. And what do you need?''
  ``Oh, all right, if this is what you need, I have control over all of 
the Federal programs, all of the money, and I can give you so much for 
food stamps, I can give you so much for this, I can give you so much 
for that. By the way, before you receive this, we have to have an 
understanding that this is temporary and you are looking for work.''
  Under those that came in under the Federal program, the question was 
not ``What do you need?'' the question was, ``For what are you 
eligible?'' The whole focus was on eligibility. ``You may need this 
program, but you don't happen to be eligible, and, therefore, I'm not 
empowered to give it to you. So I will give you only what you're 
eligible for.''
  And by the way, no one really brings up the issue of work. Very 
interesting results. First the financial results. The program managed 
by the State was not 20 percent more expensive, it was 5 percent 
cheaper. We saved money. That was not the purpose of the program. The 
purpose of the program was to do something better for the people who 
were poor, but the byproduct of doing it the way we did it is that we 
saved money. People who came in who had never had an experience with 
the welfare system before, when asked ``Are you willing to go to 
work?'' responded instantly, ``Of course. That's what I want. I am only 
here because I can't get work.''
  ``We'll help you find a job. That is part of the reason we're here 
for. We'll help you find employment.''
  People who came in who had experience with the Federal welfare 
program before said, ``Wait a minute. Nobody ever asked me about work 
before. And I don't want to talk to you about that. I'm here to get 
that to which I am entitled. And I'm going to fight you if you say I 
have to do anything other than show up.'' Admittedly, those are people 
who had previous experience with the Federal welfare program.
  The people who had not had the previous experience did not have that 
attitude. But among the new folk who were coming in for the first 
time--automatic--``We want to do something to get a job.''
  These are the statistics, as I remember them. The folks under the 
State pilot program, 95 percent of them are ultimately employed. 
Admittedly, they may not be employed in the kinds of jobs you and I 
would like, Mr. President. There are many of them employed in what are 
sometimes derisively called leaf raking jobs, but there are things for 
them to do somewhere, someplace that the office involved with their 
lives helps them find. And 95 percent of them have some kind of income 
as a result of their work.
  Mr. President, I cite this example as justification for my support of 
this conference report. The State devised this program, and it is 
better than the Federal program. The State devised this program, and it 
is cheaper than the Federal program. Then the final blow here, that 
says to me we must do what we can to get this out of the hands of the 
Federal control.
  Donna Shalala came to Utah and saw this program, and she was 
entranced. She said, ``This is what we should be doing nationwide.'' 
That was 3 years ago, Mr. President, and nothing has happened at the 
Federal level.
  The Federal bureaucracy is so cumbersome and so difficult that even 
the Secretary, with all of her good will and desire to solve these 
problems--and I grant her all of that--has been unable to move the 
bureaucracy under her control in the direction that she herself said it 
ought to go. Governors move more rapidly than that. Federal 
bureaucrats, if I may use an old cliche, and I know that it is not 
entirely fair, but it makes the point. When I entered the Federal 
bureaucracy, I was told, we think in 40-year periods because that's how 
long it takes us to get our pension.
  Governors get reelected in 4-year periods, so perhaps they think 10 
times as rapidly. But the Governor who put in place the program I have 
just described already knew at the time he was doing that that he was 
going to face the electorate 4 years later and he had to have a success 
and he had to have it quickly. The bureaucrats who are in the Civil 
Service who think in 40-year periods think perhaps some day we might.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield 5 minutes to my friend from Utah. He makes 
great sense.
  Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Senator for his courtesy. I had not intended 
to go on this long. But it is this experience that has said to me: we 
ought to try this. We ought to turn this over to the States and see 
what happens.
  When people say to me, ``But you're playing with children's lives 
here''--and the Senator from Illinois was tremendously moving in her 
comments in that regard, and that is one of the reasons I take the 
floor, because I want to make it clear I am aware of the fact that we 
are playing with children's lives here, and I do not take that 
responsibility lightly--but I look at the results of the present system 
and I say, ``What are we risking if we try something else?'' I look at 
the disasters that have occurred under the present system and 
ultimately decide we are not risking that much.
  Mr. President, I am not announcing for reelection at this point, but 
I expect to be in the Senate longer than my present term. I assure the 
Senator from New York and anyone else, if we 

[[Page S19098]]
find out, as a result of the passing of this kind of torch from the 
Federal level to the State level, that we do, indeed, get a race to the 
bottom, we do, indeed, see greater disasters than what we have right 
now, I will be one of the first Senators to come here and say, ``Let us 
not let the future roll continue'' for however many years it has been 
since President Kennedy signed that bill that I think had a major, 
significant impact on the rise of homelessness. I will be one of the 
first Senators to be here and say, ``OK, we tried it, it is clearly not 
working, the race to the bottom is happening, let's stop it, let's stop 
it now.''

  But I am not content to let the present circumstances go on without 
this kind of experimentation, because the human tragedy that the 
present circumstances created is so significant that we must do what we 
can.
  I thank the Senator for his courtesy. That is my response to 
listening to the comments that were made. I appreciate the Senators 
letting me get it out while it is still fresh in my mind. I yield the 
floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself 5 minutes, briefly to 
respond to my distinguished friend from Utah to say that I believe 
every word he says is true for him. I do not think this will lead to a 
race to the bottom in Utah. It will in New York, I am sorry to say. The 
proportions are so much vaster.
  In New York City, we have 1.1 million people on welfare at this 
moment. These are overwhelmed systems, and you do what is easiest: You 
send out checks. That is the cheapest, easiest, and most destructive 
thing to do. We are learning the kinds of things you describe in Utah. 
The Manpower Development Research Corp., which is the principal 
evaluator of studies like this, said of some study results in Atlanta, 
Riverside, CA, Grand Rapids, MI, that they had an effect on bringing 
down AFDC rolls to the point where they said this exceeds the savings 
achieved by experimentally evaluated programs in the last 15 years.
  We are beginning to get a hold, maybe. I begin with the thought that 
things are so much worse than we know.
  In the fine State of Utah in 1970, the illegitimacy ratio was 3.6 
percent. It is now 15.5. That is half the national average, but the 
trend line is the same. This is something so deep in our society, we 
have not found an answer. I simply want to maintain a national 
commitment, but I am sure that Secretary Shalala said just what she 
did, and I am sure she tried to move the Department of Health and Human 
Services.
  That is our dilemma. The easiest thing to do is what we now do and it 
is the most destructive, but it need not be that way. President Reagan 
thought it would change, and it is changing, because the Utah program 
proceeds under the Family Support Act.
  I can say no more but thanks for the candor and the quality of the 
Senator's statement.
  Mr. President, the Senator from New Jersey was to be next. I am sorry 
if I seem to be stammering here, but it is because I am stammering.
  The Senator from New Jersey is here now, and I would like to yield 
him such time as he may desire for the purpose of speaking. The Senator 
was one of 11 Members on this side who voted against this bill when it 
first came forward.

  Mr. LAUTENBERG. Thank you very much, Mr. President. I thank my friend 
and colleague from New York not only for allotting me some of the time 
to respond to this conference report, but also for his long-time work, 
scholarly review of the problems of families, welfare, and balance in 
our society. Few have paid as much attention to the issue as has the 
distinguished Senator from New York.
  Oddly enough, however, whenever I am doing something with the Senator 
from New York, whether I sit on the Environment Committee or another 
committee, he always has more knowledge than anyone else. I am still 
trying to figure out how he does it, but he does it very well. This is 
just one example of many.
  Mr. President, I rise in strong opposition to the conference report. 
I think it is a terrible Christmas present to give the children in our 
country. If this bill becomes law, many children in this Nation will 
wake up on Christmas day with no safety net and hardly any prospect of 
anything pleasant in the Christmas stocking.
  This piece of legislation represents the worst, I think, of Speaker 
Gingrich's agenda. It rips at the safety net, tears it to shreds. These 
poor children fend for themselves, and it violates the most basic 
values of our country.
  Mr. President, all of us here constantly extoll the justified virtues 
of this Nation of ours, the greatest country on God's Earth. But what a 
paradox. Here we are, the wealthiest country in the world, no 
exceptions, and despite our prosperity, 9 million children are so poor 
that their families are on AFDC assistance.
  Mr. President, there is no question that the current welfare system 
needs reform. I think there are many avenues of reform that are not 
fully explored. I think we want to encourage family structuring. I 
think we have to think in terms of letting someone who is on welfare--
typically a woman with children--who perhaps meets someone that she 
would like to share her life with and provide her own family network, 
we immediately say to her, ``Well, you are off the welfare assistance, 
you are out of the health care program.''
  What you do is you cut off your opportunities when you form this 
union, and you are in far worse shape than you otherwise would be. That 
does not encourage family togetherness. What it does do is it 
encourages a kind of deception and says, ``OK, you maintain your 
address; I maintain my address; and we will cohabitate, but we will not 
violate the rules.'' I think we ought to be looking at that kind of 
program. We ought to help welfare recipients find productive work. I am 
all for that. I do not think we ought to punish the poor kids who are 
on AFDC.
  Mr. President, this bill is not a serious policy document. It is a 
budget document. It is a downpayment on the Republican tax break that 
targets the benefits for the millionaires and other wealthy Americans. 
We found out what the thinking is when I proposed an amendment one 
night that said, tell you what we will do, friends in the U.S. Senate. 
We will limit any tax break to those who earn under $1 million. Well, 
the outcome of the vote is in the Record. We did not get any Republican 
votes on that one. They said that even if you earn over $1 million, if 
a tax break comes along, you have to get your share. We know what we 
face.
  I had the opportunity yesterday morning to be on one of the early-
morning local shows with a freshman Republican Congressman from the 
other body, and we start our discussion and the first thing he says is, 
``We are committed to providing that tax break.'' That overrides almost 
every other consideration. That is why we are here, wringing our hands, 
pleading the plight of those who face Christmas without an income, with 
a great deal of uncertainty, 280,000, roughly, Federal employees who 
give their all whenever they are asked, but now suddenly we have 
decided that they are good pawns to play in this chess game. Why? So 
they can force this reconciliation bill down the throat of the 
administration. It is a terrible game to play, I think.

  The focus is on the tax break. Included in that will be those who are 
dependent on welfare who will suffer significantly if the program, as 
prescribed now, through the conference committee, goes through.
  If you make $350,000 a year, the GOP reconciliation bill includes an 
$8,500 tax break. It is nice but certainly not necessary. I think it is 
painful because it comes from other people who do not have the means to 
get by on a day-to-day basis.
  I want to talk for a moment about some of the facts with this 
legislation. The proponents talk about philosophy, giving States 
flexibility. It sounds good, but I found out there is kind of a catch-
all situation here that says it is the bureaucracy--they do not say it 
is the bureaucracy, stupid; sometimes they say that--but it is the 
bureaucracy. That is the evil force that commands everything here. It 
may be a bureaucracy, but I do not know how you conduct a business or a 
structure of any kind without having people who work there--in this 
case, we are talking about people who are told to carry on policy in a 
particular fashion--and 

[[Page S19099]]
perhaps they need more training, perhaps we have to alter the policy.
  To conceal the fact that we are going to be shortchanging the 
recipients, the dependents on the welfare assistance, by calling it a 
block grant is, I believe, hypocrisy. The fact is that an HHS study 
shows this legislation--I was reminded about it in a letter I have 
included among my precious papers, a letter from the Senator from New 
York, just a short paragraph, talking about the children that will pay 
a price for the legislation that passed this body the first time with 
11 Democrats and one Republican voting the other way.
  Mr. President, 1.2 million to 2 million children will be facing 
hunger in roughly 7 years. That is hardly a way to design a program--
punish the children, move 1 million to 2 million of them into poverty, 
into hunger. This is based on conservative assumptions. In all 
likelihood, the figure will be somewhat higher. I wish all Senators 
would fully appreciate what we are doing. Living below the poverty line 
is not a particularly pleasant experience. Having tried it myself as a 
child, I did not like it. My parents did not like it. The poverty level 
for a family of three, a woman and two children in this country, is 
$11,800 a year. How many people here believe that they could properly 
raise two children on $11,800 a year? It is not possible.

  This bill also cuts food stamp funding by over $32 billion. These 
cuts, literally, as I said earlier, will take the food out of the 
mouths of our children.
  Unfortunately, this bill is not the end of the pain for our Nation's 
children. The budget reconciliation is yet another assault on our 
children. The Republican budget bill ends the guarantee of health care 
for poor children. The bill's Medicaid cuts will mean that about 4 
million kids--to use the expression--will be denied health care 
coverage. The cuts in the earned-income tax credit will mean that the 
parents of 14.5 million children, parents making under $30,000 a year, 
will get a tax increase on average of $332 a year.
  Mr. President, $332 does not seem like a lot of money. But to a poor 
family it is an enormous sum. Working parents could use this money to 
buy the basic food, books, clothing, and pay for rent. I think it is 
unconscionable that our friends in the Republican majority are asking 
this of our children while providing a $8,500 tax break for people who 
make over $350,000 a year.
  Republicans say they are making these deep cuts to help the children, 
the next generation. If I were the children I would say to them, 
``Thanks; no thanks. Do not do us any favors. Just kind of keep us in 
balance now. Make sure we get the appropriate nutrition so we can learn 
and be productive citizens.''
  The one thing I think that is really fallacious in what I hear going 
around here is that, somehow or other, those who are poor, those who 
are, perhaps, different, are another group. They do not belong to us.
  One does not have to be a genius to know that we all have a stake in 
their well-being. It is our responsibility to protect them and help 
lift them out of poverty as if they were our own children, because we 
will pay the price--in many cases personally--for the lack of 
development that these children suffer.
  I do not know how many have been to Brazil, to Rio de Janiero, one of 
the most beautiful cities in the world, where poverty fills every sight 
that you see, whether it is the mountains or the sea or what have you. 
Little kids, abandoned by their families, who will steal from open 
tables in the restaurant. I saw it happen. Because they are so hungry, 
they do not know any bounds, by virtue of appropriate conduct. Hunger, 
cunning takes over at all levels.
  There was a shocking program the other night on ``Nightline'' about 
children who beg in the streets of Rio, who, when they get to be just a 
little more than 8 or 9 or 10 years old, they realize that their appeal 
for this baby face no longer has a salutary effect on the cups that 
they hold out for coins. Do you know what they do? They turn to 
prostitution at 9, 10, 11 years old. And they turn HIV positive in a 
hurry. And there is an epidemic of AIDS among little kids in Brazil, 
because they sell themselves. They do not know any other way to stay 
alive.
  That is hardly a picture that we ought to aspire to and I am sure we 
do not. Those who are against this, I am not suggesting in any way, are 
for that kind of condition. But that is the reality when you cut off 
food and shelter and some caring concern. These little people find ways 
to exist, ways that we do not like, ways that we do not approve of, 
especially when they get a weapon in their hands, and especially when 
they gang up on someone who they think has the means to help them out.

  That is why they are our responsibility, as well as some compassion 
in the hearts and souls of Americans. We have that as a people.
  So, Mr. President, I hope we will reconsider. I hope my colleagues 
will reject this legislation. Once again, I commend our colleague from 
New York for his distinguished leadership in so many things, but 
particularly with this piece of legislation on welfare. I commend the 
President, also, for his veto statement, and I hope we will be able to 
sustain it.
  Mr. President, this piece of legislation represents the worst of 
Speaker Gingrich's radical agenda. It tears the safety net to threads. 
It leaves poor children to fend for themselves. It violates the most 
basic values of our Nation.
  Mr. President, we live in the greatest nation on Earth. We are the 
wealthiest country in the world. But it is clear that some in our 
society do not share in this wealth. They are poor. They are jobless 
and in some cases homeless. And they must rely on public assistance to 
survive. In America, this is unacceptable. And we should be committed 
to improving their lives.
  Mr. President, there in no question that the current welfare system 
needs reform. But the central goal for any welfare reform bill should 
be to move welfare recipients into productive work.
  This will only happen if we provide welfare recipients with education 
and job training to prepare them for employment. It will only happen if 
we provide families with affordable child care. It will only happen if 
we can place them into jobs, preferably in the private sector or--as a 
last resort--in community service.
  But this welfare bill is not designed to help welfare recipients get 
on their feet and go to work. It is only designed to cut programs--pure 
and simple.
  It is designed to take money from the poor so that Republicans can 
provide huge tax cuts for the rich. That is what is really going on 
here.
  Unfortunately, Mr. President, the radical experiment proposed in this 
legislation will inflict additional problems on our society while 
producing defenseless victims.
  Those victims are not represented in the Senate offices. They are not 
here lobbying against this bill. They do not even know they are at 
risk.
  The victims will be America's children. And there will be millions of 
them.
  Mr. President, the AFDC Program provides a safety net for 9 million 
children. These young people are innocent. They did not ask to be born 
into poverty. And they don't deserve to be punished.
  These children are African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and white. They 
live in urban areas and rural areas. But, most importantly, they are 
American children. And we as a nation have a responsibility to provide 
them with a safety net.
  The children we are talking about are desperately poor, Mr. 
President. They are not living high off the hog. These kids live in 
very poor conditions.
  Mr. President, it is hard for many of us to appreciate what life is 
like for the 9 million children who are poor and who benefit from AFDC.
  I grew up to a working class family in Paterson, NJ, in the heart of 
the Depression. Times were tough. And I learned all too well what it 
meant to struggle economically.
  But as bad as things were for my own family, they still were not as 
bad as for millions of today's children.
  These are children who are not always sure whether they will get 
their next meal. Not always sure that they will have a roof over their 
heads. Not always sure they will get the health care they need.
  Mr. President, these children are vulnerable. They are living on the 
edge of homelessness and hunger. And they did not do anything to 
deserve this fate. 

[[Page S19100]]

  Mr. President, if we are serious about reforming a program that keeps 
these children afloat, we will not adopt a radical proposal like this 
bill. We will not put millions of American children at risk. And we 
will not simply give a blank check to States and throw up our hands.
  Mr. President, this Republican bill isn't a serious policy document. 
It is a budget document. It is a downpayment on a Republican tax break 
that targets huge benefits for millionaires and other wealthy 
Americans. For those who make $350,000 per year, the GOP reconciliation 
bill includes an $8,500 tax break.
  Mr. President, if the Republicans were serious about improving 
opportunities for those on welfare, they would be talking about 
increasing our commitment to education and job training. In fact, only 
last year, the House Republican welfare reform bill, authored in part 
by Senator Santorum, would have increased spending on education and 
training by $10 billion.
  This year, by contrast, this welfare bill actually cuts $82 billion, 
including huge reductions in education and training.
  So what has changed? The answer is simple. This year, the Republicans 
need the money for their tax breaks for the rich.
  Mr. President, shifting our welfare system to 50 State bureaucracies 
may give Congress more money to provide tax breaks. But it is not going 
to solve the serious problems facing our welfare system, or the people 
it serves.
  To really reform welfare, Mr. President, we first must emphasize a 
very basic American value: the value of work.
  We should expect recipients to work. In fact, we should demand that 
they work, if they can.
  Of course, Mr. President, that kind of emphasis on work is important. 
But it is not enough. We also have to help people get the skills they 
need to get a job in the private sector. I am not talking about 
handouts.
  I am talking about teaching people to read. Teaching people how to 
run a cash register or a computer. Teaching people what it takes to be 
self-sufficient in today's economy.
  We also have to provide child care.
  Mr. President, How is a woman with several young children supposed to 
find a job if she cannot find someone to take care of her kids? It is 
simply impossible. There is just no point in pretending otherwise.
  Unfortunately, this bill does not address these kind of needs. It 
does not even try to promote work. It does not even try to give people 
job training. It does little to provide child care.
  All it does is throw up its hands and ship the program to the States. 
That is it.
  Mr. President, that is not real welfare reform. It is simply passing 
the buck to save a buck. And who is going to get the buck that is 
saved? The people the Republicans really care about: those who are well 
off.
  Mr. President, I would like to take a moment now to talk about some 
of the facts about this legislation. The proponents of this legislation 
talk about philosophy and giving States flexibility, but I would like 
to talk about the facts.
  The fact is that an HHS study showed that this legislation will force 
1.2 to 2.1 million children into poverty.
  And this is based on conservative assumptions. In all likelihood, the 
figure will be much higher.
  Mr. President, I wish that all Senators would fully appreciate this. 
Living below the poverty rate is no fun. As I said, the poverty level 
for a family of three, a woman with two children, is $11,821 per year.
  Mr. President, How many people here think that they could raise two 
children well on $11,821 per year?
  Mr. President, not only does this analysis contain conservative 
assumptions, it also does not document what will happen to those 
children who already live in poverty. It is clear that they will also 
be harmed by this legislation because AFDC spending will be frozen at 
1994 levels under this bill even though the cost of living for the poor 
will rise during the next 7 years.
  This bill also includes a mandatory 5-year cap for the receipt of 
benefits. Once this time period is completed, there is nothing left for 
a poor family. No job, no education, no income support--nothing.
  Mr. President, this seems like a benign provision but it will have 
harsh consequences for our children.
  The cap will mean that 3.3 to 4.3 million children will get no help 
after 5 years. They will have no income support. They could be 
homeless.
  Mr. President, I would like to point out that the 5-year cap is a 
maximum. It is an outer barrier. States can enact 1-, 2-, or 3-year 
caps and that will mean that even more children will have to go without 
assistance.
  Mr. President, this bill also cuts Supplemental Security Income [SSI] 
benefits for disabled children. Under this conference report, 300,000 
disabled children will be denied benefits in the year 2002.
  Furthermore, approximately 500,000 children with disabilities, such 
as cerebral palsy, Down's syndrome, muscular dystrophy and cystic 
fibrosis, would have their benefits cut in the year 2002.
  Mr. President, this bill also cuts food stamp funding by $36 billion. 
These cuts will literally take food right out of the mouths of our 
children.
  Mr. President, the children of this country belong to all of us. We 
all have a stake in their well being. It is our responsibility to 
protect them, as if they were our own children.
  And, Mr. President, I would point out that we don't take risks with 
our own children's well being. We do not say to them--you better shape 
up or we will put you out on the street without food.
  We protect our own children. And we want to do more to help them. 
Parents across this country work hard to make sure that their children 
will have a better life. This is the same philosophy we should take 
towards reforming our welfare system. We must protect our children and 
we must help them become better off.
  We can not do this by cutting millions of children off and forcing 
them into poverty. This will make them worse off--not better off.
  Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to reject this legislation and I 
urge the President to issue an emphatic veto.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may 
require to thank my colleague and neighbor and friend from New Jersey 
for his statement, and particularly for raising a point, absolutely 
central to the legislation before us, which has not been raised until 
this moment in the debate, which is that this measure would repeal the 
eligibility of families who are now on Aid to Families with Dependent 
Children for Medicaid. This was not in the bill that passed the House. 
It was not in H.R. 4. It was not in the Senate bill. It is in the 
conference bill, which we have never seen. We never saw it. The 
conference never met.
  I am sorry, we met once, October 24, for opening statements. And it 
never met again and the bill has come out. It was handed to us, the 
conference report was handed to us this afternoon. We found out what 
the Senator from New Jersey has said. That is the degree of the 
destructiveness of this measure.
  I find it hard to comprehend, but I am not in the least surprised 
that every major religious group in the country, save one alone, pleads 
with us ``Don't do this.'' Catholic bishops, the Lutheran Conference, 
on and on, UJA: ``Don't do this to children.''
  I am increasingly confident, Mr. President, that we will not.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who seeks recognition? The Senator from 
Delaware.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to the distinguished 
Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Thank you, Senator Roth, and thank you for being a good 
chairman of this committee and shepherding through a very important 
piece of legislation.
  I have to acknowledge that it is with mixed emotions that I speak 
tonight on this conference report before us. I am very pleased to join 
my colleagues in support of a sweeping welfare reform proposal, 
probably the most sweeping in recent history. But I am angry at the 
President for saying that he will veto this.
  I suppose you would say I should not be surprised that the President 
would veto this. I suppose you would look at his complaining about the 
Government being shut down and understand that he vetoed four bills 
this week, that if 

[[Page S19101]]
he had not vetoed them, Government would be functioning. Yet he wants 
to point the finger at us.
  This is the President who, in 1992, said we are going to change, 
reform welfare as we know it. He said that as a candidate. He said that 
as President of the United States. And considering the fact that he is 
always for a balanced budget on television but never negotiating for a 
balanced budget when he sits down to do it, or his people sit down to 
do it, and you cannot even get numbers on a sheet of paper, we maybe 
should not be surprised that the President said he is for reforming 
welfare as we know it and all of a sudden does not want to reform 
welfare as we know it, because he has a record of changing his mind on 
the very most critical issues before our country. He kind of has a real 
problem with making up his mind.

  Mr. President, I have made up my mind. I am supporting this 
conference agreement. The House passed this conference by a vote of 245 
to 178. That is a bipartisan vote. We should pass this bill more 
overwhelmingly than the House did. Remember, this passed the Senate 88 
to 11. As I have said many times on this floor, States have been very 
successful in their efforts to reform welfare under waivers that are 
begrudgingly given to them by some faceless bureaucrat from time to 
time down at HHS. My own State of Iowa has a very successful effort at 
moving people from welfare to work, saving the taxpayers money, moving 
people off of welfare completely and trying to change the atmosphere in 
welfare of dependence to one of independence, where there is a sense of 
pride and esteem once again. The way my State of Iowa is doing this is 
by having the highest percentage of any State in the Nation of welfare 
recipients who are on private-sector jobs.
  We have raised that percentage in 3 years of our reform from 18 
percent to 34 percent. This is the kind of success that we at the 
Federal level have failed to achieve. Even in our best attempts in the 
1988 Family Support Act we failed. That bill passed 96 to 1. That vote 
means that it was the best of intent to reform welfare. But we have 
three and a quarter million more people on welfare now than we did 
then. And it is costing billions of dollars more, which means we have 
failed to reform welfare.
  We have seen States in the meantime succeed at welfare reform. That 
is the premise of this legislation. Moving out of the Washington 
bureaucracy the responsibility for welfare, moving it to our State and 
local governments to accomplish what we could not accomplish--moving 
people from welfare to work, moving people from dependence to 
independence, and saving the taxpayers' money.
  I am pleased that we are making this move. We are acknowledging that 
we in Congress do not have a lock on wisdom or compassion. We are 
saying that we trust Governors and State legislatures to take care of 
citizens in need, and to do it with a community-based approach and to 
reform welfare thus doing.
  When we started this process 10 months ago now, I set four goals that 
I wanted to accomplish in welfare reform.
  First, to provide a system that will meet the short-term needs of 
low-income Americans as they prepare for independence.
  Second, to provide States a great deal of flexibility.
  Third, to reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock births.
  And, finally to save the taxpayers some of their hard-earned money.
  I am pleased that Senator Roth has led a conference that has given us 
a report that substantially addresses each of these goals.
  The conference report provides for a block grant of the AFDC program 
to the States so that the States can meet the needs of low-income 
Americans in the most community-oriented, cost-efficient manner. It 
accepts a fact of life--that you cannot pour one mold here in 
Washington, DC, and expect to spend the taxpayers' money wisely solving 
the problems the same in New York City as you do in Waterloo, IA. This 
will let New York do the best with the taxpayers' money they can to 
accomplish the goals that they know should be accomplished, and the 
people in Iowa will do it according to their best way.
  In doing so, this gives the States the great flexibility they need to 
design their programs to meet the needs of their individual citizens. 
Iowa has demonstrated a great benefit of the program designed with its 
citizens in mind, its very own program. Over 2 years ago, the Iowa 
State Legislature passed a bill that totally overhauls our welfare 
system. State leaders came to us at the Congress at the Federal level 
for that waiver necessary to implement their ideas. The waiver was 
finally approved, and the State plan was implemented in October 1993.
  As I mentioned before, in the last 2 years, we have moved from 18 
percent to 34 percent the number of our welfare recipients in jobs. 
This dramatic increase shows the ingenuity of the Iowa State plan to 
move people from welfare to work. It also shows the importance of 
giving much greater flexibility to State leaders.
  Another positive portion of the final report is that it protects 
States which are under waiver agreements like my State of Iowa.
  When Iowa came to the Federal Government for their waiver, they were 
required to have a cost neutrality clause in their contract agreement 
with the Federal Government. If my State wanted to try new ideas, then 
they were told by the Federal Government that they would have to bear 
the burden of any additional cost incurred. Being sensitive to the 
Federal deficit, I understood the need for that agreement.
  But since we are now changing the rules of the game midstream, it was 
critical that we not hold the States liable under those waiver 
agreements. Since we are going to change our end of the deal--we at the 
Federal level by this legislation--States should not be required to 
live up to their end of the deal. This issue was addressed in the 
conference agreement by allowing States to cancel their waiver 
agreements while addressing the up-front costs that States have 
invested in their welfare programs.
  My next goal was to take steps to address the seemingly intractable 
problem of out-of-wedlock births. The conference report requires that 
teenage mothers live at home, or in a supervised setting. If there is 
anything that we should all be able to agree upon, it is that young 
teenage mothers should not be left alone in raising children. They need 
support.
  Witness after witness who came before Senator Roth's committee agreed 
that teenage moms should not be left to fend for themselves and their 
children.
  The conference also keeps the family cap but allows States to opt out 
if they desire. This compromise between the original House and Senate 
language is reasonable because it keeps the States from ignoring the 
issue but leaves the final determination to each State legislature.
  My last goal--to save the taxpayers some of their hard-earned money--
is really more of a result of reform than a goal itself. If we take 
steps to move people from welfare to work, give greater flexibility to 
the States, and reduce illegitimacy, we will--in the long run--save 
some taxpayer money. This would be a positive result.
  I urge my colleagues to recognize this conference agreement as a good 
compromise between the House and Senate bills. It accomplishes the 
President's goal to end welfare as we know it.
  We should send the President this conference report in the hopes that 
he will reconsider his recent comments and sign this bill into law. I 
urge adoption of the conference agreement.
  Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, as I understand it, we have been rotating 
back and forth. I know that Senator Grams has been here. I do not 
intend to take very long. But I would like to address the Senate on 
this issue.
  I yield myself 12 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, there is a right way and a wrong way to 
reform welfare. Punishing children is the wrong way. Denying realistic 
job training and work opportunities is the wrong way. Leaving States 
holding the bag is the wrong way. While we all want to reform welfare, 
this conference report is simply the wrong way. It takes a bad Senate 
bill and makes it worse.

[[Page S19102]]

  Mr. President, I know all of our Members are familiar with the 
excellent work that has been done by our friend, the Senator from New 
York, Senator Moynihan, both in his presentations earlier this evening 
and his very considerable contribution to this debate over the years. I 
hope all of our Members will read carefully, prior to the time that we 
vote, the presentation of our good friend and colleague, Senator 
Moynihan.
  The Senate bill eliminated a 60-year old good faith national 
commitment to protect all needy children, and for that reason, in my 
opinion, it was fatally flawed. The Office of Management and Budget 
documented that the Senate bill would have pushed an additional 1.2 
million children into poverty--hardly the goal of real reform. This 
conference report simply adds insult to injury. It will undoubtedly 
result in increased suffering for millions of American children and 
families. It continues to be legislative child abuse--and it should be 
defeated.
  The Senate bill cut food stamps for 14 million children, SSI benefits 
for 225,000 disabled children, essential protections for 100,000 abused 
children, and minimal assistance for 4 million children left with no 
safety net after the time limit. This conference report slashes each of 
these survival programs even further--with nutrition services, 
disability benefits, and child protection efforts footing most of the 
bill.
  If the conference report becomes law, children born to parents on 
welfare will be punished in every State. Victims of domestic violence 
will lose their special protections. Food stamps for the working poor 
and the unemployed will be further restricted. Women and children on 
AFDC will lose their Medicaid guarantee. Family preservation programs, 
child abuse programs, and child nutrition programs will be block 
granted. Family hardship exemptions and State investment requirements 
will be further reduced. All this pain is inflicted above and beyond 
the Senate bill.
  And even the modest child care provisions added to the Republican 
Home Alone bill on the Senate floor have been rolled back. The 
Republican welfare agreement not only falls far short of providing 
essential child care funding but guts essential protections for 
children in child care.
  During consideration of the Senate bill, the Congressional Budget 
Office said most States were likely to simply throw up their hands and 
ignore the new work requirements. Unfortunately, nothing on that front 
has changed for the better. CBO continues to believe that under this 
conference agreement, States will accept the sanctions for failing to 
comply, rather than try to reach the goals without the resources needed 
to make it possible.
  This conference report more than doubles the child care short fall 
found in the final Senate bill. According to the Congressional Budget 
Office, the conference report is more than $6 billion short of 
providing States with enough child care funding to make the work 
requirements work. Once again, this is not welfare reform; it is 
welfare fraud.
  What we know is that there are certain ingredients which are 
necessary to make any real welfare reform effort work. First of all, 
you have to provide some degree of job training and education for the 
individual. There has to be a job market out there so that the 
individual is able to gain employment and hopefully earn a decent wage. 
And there has to be health insurance coverage, particularly for small 
children, and there has to be child care.
  Those are the effective ingredients and without these effective 
ingredients we are not going to have the kind of welfare reform which 
is so important and necessary. We will not be able to move people out 
of dependency into some degree of hope and opportunity for themselves 
and for their children.
  What we have seen here is, even after the debate held on the floor of 
the Senate, even after the amendment of Senator Dodd, myself and others 
was accepted, it goes to the conference and is rolled back from that 
position. Not only is the total amount of funds inadequate, but the 
protections for children in child care are gone.
  Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator from Massachusetts yield for a 
question?
  Mr. KENNEDY. If any Member of this Senate wants to see the best child 
care in this country, go to a military base. Go to any military camp 
across this country and you see child care programs at their very best. 
That is what has happened, Mr. President. Military child care 
represents the kind of high quality care that was fought for by our 
friend and colleague, Senator Dodd, and also that was eventually worked 
out in a bipartisan way with Senator Hatch and Senator Dodd and signed 
into law by President Bush--bipartisan support.
  Now we read that these important child care protections have been 
stripped away in this conference report. It is absolutely untenable. 
And you and I know what is going to happen. With inadequate funding and 
protections for child care, we are going to hear in another 2 or 3 
years about how child care is being bungled in the various States, and 
this is going to be used as an excuse to further reduce it. That is 
what is going to happen. And that I think is unfair, unjustified, and 
unwarranted.
  Mr. SANTORUM. Will the Senator from Massachusetts yield for a 
question?
  Mr. KENNEDY. I would like to just finish. I do not intend to speak 
for long. And then I will be glad to yield.
  Mr. President, further, the conference agreement will undoubtedly 
ensure that those struggling to stay off welfare will lose their 
support to those seeking to get off welfare. But low-income working 
families need help, too. The average cost of a child in child care is 
almost $5,000 a year, yet the take-home pay from a minimum wage job is 
stuck at $8,500 a year. This is not manageable. It is not acceptable.
  The conference agreement pulls the rug out from under these families 
just as they are getting on their feet. Such an approach is callous and 
counterproductive. In Massachusetts, of mothers who left welfare for 
work and then returned to welfare, 35 percent cited child care problems 
as the reason that they do not get enough of it. And the principal 
reason is we have three different child care programs that existed 
under the Finance Committee, all repealed. We also had a block grant 
program that was out there dealing with children of working parents. 
You had about 760,000 in one, about 650,000 in the other programs. And 
those programs have been combined and the entitlement status 
eliminated. At the same time, the need has been dramatically increased. 
In the Republican welfare conference, the total amount that is now 
being provided is even more inadequate than before. And even though we 
made some adjustment in this Chamber, that child care program has been 
very much emasculated.
  The Republicans have cut by more than 50 percent the funds set aside 
to improve the quality of child care. This is true despite the fact 
that report after report documents the shockingly poor quality of child 
care in far too many child care centers and home-based child care 
settings. These Federal quality funds are making a measurable 
difference in the growth and development of low-income children.
  The changes in this bill reduce child safety, parental choice, and 
parental opportunity. They do not promote work or protect children. 
This bill is not about moving American families from welfare to work. 
It is about taking assistance away from millions of poor, homeless and 
disabled children--and passing it out in tax breaks to the rich. It is 
about starving small children and feeding corporate fat cats. It is 
Robin Hood in reverse.
  My Republican colleagues are correct when they say that this is a 
historic moment. If this bill passes, it will go down in history as the 
day the Congress turned its back on needy children, on poor mothers 
struggling to make ends meet, on millions of fellow citizens who need 
our help the most.
  Some may wonder why the Republicans want to jam through a welfare 
conference report that they just managed to twist enough arms to get 
signed last night? The Republicans put a premium on speed. They hope 
that no one will find out exactly what their plan means until it is too 
late. They want to hide the harsh reality. When you strip away their 
rhetoric, their overall budget plan is to punish children and to 
protect corporate loopholes.

[[Page S19103]]

  Republican priorities are clear. For millionaires, they will move 
mountains.
  We passed in the Senate under the leadership of Senator Moynihan and 
others by over 90 votes a repeal of the billionaire's tax cut. This is 
the provision that allows you to make $4, $5, $6 billion, trade in your 
citizenship, and get a tax break to take up residency in another 
country while the rest of Americans are working hard and paying their 
fair share. We voted overwhelmingly to eliminate it. Only four Members 
actually voted against it. But as soon as they went to conference and 
closed the door, they put it right back in here. While they are cutting 
child protection and child nutrition programs, they are protecting the 
billionaire's tax cut. And that is untenable, Mr. President.
  Poor children, there is not a finger lifted for them.
  Some of the Nation's corporate executives purchased full page ads in 
the Washington Post and the New York Times calling on Congress to 
produce a budget deal stating that every form of spending should be on 
the table. I couldn't agree more. It is high time that we had shared 
sacrifice.
  We all want to balance the budget. But it cannot and should not be 
done on the backs of America's children. Enough is enough. Enough of 
backroom deal with high paid corporate lobbyists. Enough of dismantling 
commitments made to our children and families who need our help.
  In the end, it is a battle for the heart and soul of this Nation. It 
is a simple question of priorities. Are we going to leave millions of 
American low-income children behind in order to give huge tax breaks to 
the rich? Are we going to put disabled children back in institutions in 
order to allow corporations to ship their profits overseas.
  A ``survival of the richest'' plan is not what makes America America.
  President Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address: ``If a free society 
cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are 
rich.''
  And in defense of the national safety net--President Reagan said in 
1984: ``We can promote economic viability, while showing the 
disadvantaged genuine compassion.''
  We have learned from experience that some cuts never heal--and I 
caution my colleagues that this conference report is full of them.
  I am proud to join President Clinton and my Democratic colleagues in 
the House and the Senate vigorously opposing this conference report. 
Clearly, we can do better, and now is the time to start trying.
  For the children who are too young to vote and who cannot speak for 
themselves--we must be their voice. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' 
on this conference report.
  I will be glad to yield.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mr. KENNEDY. I yield myself 6 minutes to be able to respond, if the 
Senator from Pennsylvania had a question.
  Mr. SANTORUM. I thank the Senator from Massachusetts. I just want to 
clear----
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York yields time?
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. To the Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. KENNEDY. The Senator from Pennsylvania had inquired earlier, and 
I indicated I wanted to complete my statement, and I have. And the 
Senator from New York has granted I think 2 more minutes--
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. As much time as the Senator likes.
  Mr. KENNEDY. To respond to the Senator who wanted to ask questions. 
Otherwise, I yield the floor.
  Mr. SANTORUM. I would like to ask a question of the Senator from 
Massachusetts. The Senator from Massachusetts made the statement that 
child care funding under this bill is rolled back, has declined. I 
would just refer him to--he said we had a premium on speed, and I think 
in this case the premium on speed has been to our detriment because I 
am not sure the Senator has the most current figures on child care. Let 
me review for the Senator what is in the bill.
  Like the Senate bill that passed, there is a $1 billion per year 
block grant to the States, identical to what we passed here. There is a 
difference in the mandatory child care category. We in the Senate-
passed bill spent $10 billion over 7 years for child care. In the 
conference report it is $11 billion, $1 billion more than the Senate 
bill overall. And in addition, it is over $1.8 billion more than the 
current CBO baseline. So it is more than the Senate bill, and it is 
substantially more than what would be under current law.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Well, Mr. President, just to respond, I understand that 
it provides $11 billion over 7 years for child care as opposed to $8 
billion over 5 years in the Senate bill. I think I am correct on that. 
I see my friend from New York nodding his head. And CBO says that this 
amount is $6 billion short of the funding needed to make the work 
requirements work. In addition, the conference report caps the child 
care block grant for working poor families at $1 billion--is that 
correct? --rather than such sums as in the Senate bill. So I think I 
stand by the earlier statement. I see the Senator from New York----
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. The Senator can have as much time as remains to us, if 
he wishes.
  Mr. SANTORUM. If I can say to the Senator from Massachusetts that the 
5-year number is correct, $8 billion over 5 years in the Senate-passed 
bill, but $10 billion over 7 years in the conference report. The 
Senator is correct it is not $8 billion in 5 years; it is $7.8 billion. 
So you trade off in a sense $200 million in the first 5 years for an 
additional $1 billion in the final 2 years, which many would see as a 
pretty good trade-off and an increase in the overall allocation of $1 
billion.
  So I do not think it is fair to say that it is a decrease in chapter 
funding when you are spending $1 billion over a year covered by the 
bill.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Well, I say to the Senator, I will put in the Record my 
understanding on the child care provisions, as I indicated earlier, the 
$11 billion over 7 years, still far short of what CBO says is needed, 
and also that the cap of the child care block grant. This bill also 
rejects the Senate provisions preserving the funding entitlement for 
all protective services, including essential foster care and adoption 
programs.
  As the Senator from Pennsylvania knows, the conference agreement 
maintains the entitlement for room and board costs associated with 
foster care and adoption, but block grant the funds used to keep 
children safe by removing them from dangerous situations and finding 
and monitoring alternative placements.
  That is one of the most important aspects of the program. I am 
extremely familiar with the excellent program that is taking place in 
Los Angeles, one of the most effective family preservation programs 
around. With outreach and support efforts, children are being kept safe 
and experiencing good care and attention.
  The Senate bill emphasized prevention and family preservation. But by 
block granting these special efforts with crisis intervention programs, 
these particular provisions have been effectively eliminated. 
Independent living programs are also repealed. And at a time when the 
needs will increase in terms of the children protection, the report 
cuts essential services by $1.3 billion more than the Senate bill.
  We have not even talked about the disabled children, what has 
happened to them. We have not talked about the food stamp programs that 
are going to affect children. We have not talked about child nutrition. 
You nearly double the size of the cuts in the Senate bill from $3.4 to 
$5 billion. There are 32 million needy children currently in this 
program. And the list goes on.
  I know the Senator will want to address this. This is a listing of my 
understanding of it. I know the Senator from Pennsylvania will do 
likewise. But I welcome the opportunity to identify the impact of this 
legislation on children. And what exists at the present time, what was 
in the Senate bill, and what has come out of this conference. I think 
it should be listed, and attention should be drawn to it, hopefully 
prior to the time we vote. I know the Senator will put in his 
interpretation, as I do mine.
  I thank the Senator from New York. I yield myself 30 more seconds to 
say how much all of us appreciate his leadership, not only this evening 
and the work on the conference report, but the 

[[Page S19104]]
brilliance of his leadership during the consideration earlier in the 
debate and for all the good work that he has done over the years. In 
1988, his true reform program provided the child care, provided jobs 
training and education, and provided for transitional support in terms 
of the health care.
  That still is, when the final chapter is written, the way to go. All 
of us, all Americans are in his debt for the leadership that he has 
provided. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, may I yield myself 30 seconds to thank 
my friend from Massachusetts, who is, as ever, at the fore in these 
matters.
  The President in his statement that he will veto this bill says that 
he looks forward to bipartisan efforts to pursue the directions we took 
in 1988 and on which we should continue. But it is not cheaper. Mr. 
President, the cheapest thing to do is what we do now, what we are 
going to do in this bill. And it is ruinous to children. We would look 
back at this as a day without precedent in the history of this body, an 
idea that a year ago would have been, I think, unthinkable.
  I think now we will at long last, when we have come to our senses, as 
I said earlier, in a bipartisan effort accomplish what we need to as 
soon as this particular one is behind us. I thank the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who seeks recognition?
  Mr. ROTH. I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Minnesota.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized.
  Mr. GRAMS. I ask the manager of the bill if I could have up to 10 
minutes?
  Mr. ROTH. I am sorry, just 5.
  Mr. GRAMS. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the conference 
report to H.R. 4, the Work Opportunity Act of 1995, and I commend the 
majority leader and my colleagues for the months of concentrated effort 
it took to bring us to this point. And I appreciate the opportunity to 
speak on this bill tonight.
  Mr. President, since the beginning of the 104th Congress, we have 
been debating the state of this Nation's welfare system. Both sides of 
the aisle recognize that the system is broken.
  It encourages illegitimacy.
  It does not recognize the importance of marriage and family. It 
offers no hope or opportunity for those Americans who are trapped 
within its layers of bureaucracy.
  And it was not supposed to be this way.
  After signing the 1964 Welfare Act, President Lyndon Johnson 
proclaimed, ``We are not content to accept the endless growth of relief 
rolls or welfare rolls,'' and he promised the American people that 
``the days of the dole in our country are numbered.''
  The New York Times predicted the legislation would lead to ``the 
restoration of individual dignity and the long-run reduction of the 
need for government help.''
  In 1964, America's taxpayers invested $947 million to support welfare 
recipients--an investment which President Johnson declared would 
eventually ``result in savings to the country and especially to the 
local taxpayers'' through reductions in welfare caseloads, health care 
costs, and the crime rate.
  But yet, 30 years later, none of those predictions have materialized, 
and the failure of the welfare system continues to devastate millions 
of Americans every day--both the families who receive welfare benefits 
and the taxpayers who subsidize them.
  Despite a $5.4 trillion investment in welfare programs since 1964, at 
an average annual cost that had risen to $3,357 per taxpaying household 
by 1993:
  One in three children in the U.S. today is born out-of-wedlock;
  One child in seven is being raised on welfare through the Aid to 
Families with Dependent Children program; and
  Our crime rate has increased 280 percent.
   Mr. President, those are the kinds of devastating statistics which 
until recently have been ignored by the bureaucratic establishment in 
Washington, but those are the statistics H.R. 4 will finally address.
  By rewriting Federal policies and working in close partnership with 
the States, we can create a welfare system which will effectively 
respond to the needs of those who depend on it--at the same time to 
protect the taxpayers.
  This bipartisan welfare conference report sets in place the framework 
for meeting those needs by offering individuals who are down on their 
luck some opportunity, self-respect and most importantly, the ability 
to take control of their own lives.
  And yes, we will ask something of them in return.
  The most significant change in our welfare system will be the 
requirement that able-bodied individuals put in 20 hours of work every 
week before they receive assistance from America's taxpayers.
  Mr. President, my colleagues and I have come to the floor repeatedly 
this session to suggest that our present welfare system promotes 
dependency by discouraging recipients from working, but nothing sums up 
the problem more perfectly than a story which appeared just last month 
in the Baltimore Sun.
  It seems that the Baltimore regional office of the Salvation Army is 
having trouble this year recruiting volunteer bell ringers to staff the 
red kettles that have become a symbol of the holiday season.
  So they decided to pay for the help--$5 an hour, thinking it would 
give people on public assistance the opportunity to earn some money. 
Here is where the Baltimore Sun picks up the story:

       The Frederick chapter ran a help-wanted ad for bell ringers 
     in the local paper for a week but received only four 
     applications. It then approached an agency that provides 
     temporary workers.
       The agency interviewed 25 people for the bell ringing job, 
     but no one wanted to do it. One person accepted the job at a 
     second temporary help agency.
       ``I'm beating my head against the wall,'' Captain Mallard 
     said.

  That is Butch Mallard, commander of the Salvation Army in Frederick, 
MD:

       I don't know if people don't want to work outside, or that 
     they just don't want to work for $5 an hour when they can 
     stay home and get that much from the government.

  Mr. President, the Salvation Army has found out what we have been 
saying all along: the government makes it so easy for a welfare 
recipient to skip the work and continue collecting a federal check that 
there is absolutely no incentive to ever get out of the house and find 
a job.
  And if someone actually takes the initiative to take a job--perhaps 
as a bell ringer--they risk forfeiting their welfare benefits entirely.
  During Senate consideration of the Work Opportunity Act, Senator 
Shelby and I joined forces with the majority leader to ensure that 
welfare recipients receive benefits only after they work.
  We believe welfare recipients should be held to the same standards, 
the same work ethic, to which America's taxpayers are held.
  American taxpayers are putting in at least 40 hours on the job each 
week--and are sometimes forced to take on an additional job or work 
overtime hours just to make ends meet.
  And all the while, they have been generously providing welfare 
recipients with cash and benefit assistance, while the only thing we 
ask of welfare recipients is to provide an address where we can mail 
their checks.
  Under the Grams-Shelby pay-for-performance amendment which was 
adopted earlier this year, this practice will end. Welfare recipients 
will be required to work before they receive any cash assistance.
  Simply put, our amendment stipulates that welfare recipients will 
receive financial assistance from the taxpayers only for the number of 
hours they are actually engaged in a work activity.
  A work activity includes: a private sector job, on-the-job-training, 
a subsidized job, workfare, community service, job search limited to 4 
weeks, and vocational education limited to 1 year.
  A welfare recipient is required to required to work 20 hours a week--
if they only put in 15 hours in a particular week, they will only 
receive cash assistance for those 15 hours of work.
  Many of my colleagues have expressed their support for these tough 
work requirements and the need for the pay-for-performance amendment.
  But some Members believe our original bill did not include adequate 
funding to provide child care while parents were working.
  These concerns were raised despite the fact that the Senate bill 
dedicated $8 billion toward child care services. 

[[Page S19105]]

  But in order to address the concerns that $8 billion is still not 
enough, the conference report increases child care funding to $18 
billion.
  As it has in the past, safeguarding the well-being of children will 
continue to remain a primary concern of the re-focused welfare system 
our bill will create.
  I am proud that we have taken additional steps through this 
conference report to ensure our children's readiness, and ability, to 
learn.
  Throughout the last year, I have been meeting with parents, 
educators, nutrition experts and pediatricians who are concerned about 
the future of Federal nutrition standards.
  Many of them have pointed out that unless children receive and 
maintain a proper level of nutrition, they will perform significantly 
lower than their learning potential.
  And so I have worked to ensure that medically devised Federal 
nutrition standards, established by the National Advisory Council on 
Maternal, Infant and Fetal Nutrition, are maintained under this 
legislation.
  I am pleased that my colleagues have joined me in recognizing the 
need for these uniform standards by including them in this bill.
  Mr. President, our bill also recognizes that officials elected 
locally--our state legislators and governors--are more capable than 
their representatives in far-away Washington to administer effective 
programs on the State and local level.
  And so this welfare reform legislation will give States like 
Minnesota the flexibility they need to develop innovative programs to 
assist those who need help most.
  States will no longer have to ask Washington for permission to 
establish successful programs like the Minnesota family investment 
plan. States will finally be able to save money and use it wisely, 
rather than being forced to spend it on the wasteful paperwork 
Washington requires them to fill out.
  Mr. President, the bipartisan legislation before us today to overhaul 
our failed welfare system is the first positive step away from a system 
which has held nearly three generations hostage with little hope of 
escape.
  Only be enacting this legislation can we offer these Americans a way 
out and a way up.
  I challenge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and the 
President, and the American people themselves, to take this message to 
heart: Government cannot solve all our problems.
  As Americans, we need to look within ourselves rather than continuing 
to look to Washington for solutions.
  Does anybody really believe the Federal Government embodies 
compassion, that it has a heart?
  Of course not--those are qualities found only outside Washington, in 
America's communities.
  Mr. President, there is no one I can think of who better exemplifies 
heart and compassion than Corla Wilson-Hawkins, and I was so fortunate 
to have had the opportunity to meet her recently.
  She was one of 21 recipients of the 1995 National Caring Awards for 
her outstanding volunteer service to her community.
  Corla is known as ``Mama Hawk'' because, more than anything else, she 
has become a second mother to hundreds of schoolchildren in her west-
side Chicago community, children who, without her guidance, might go 
without meals, or homes, or a loving hug.
  Mama Hawk gives them all that and more, and she and the many, many 
other caring Americans just like her represent the good we can 
accomplish when ordinary folks look inward, not to the government--and 
follow their hearts, not the trail of tax dollars to Washington.
  Mama Hawk tells a story that illustrates better than I ever could how 
the present welfare system has permeated our culture and become as 
ingrained as the very problems it was originally created to solve.
  These are her words.

       When I first started teaching, I asked my kids, what did 
     they want to be when they grew up? What kind of job they 
     wanted. Most of them said they wanted to be on public aid. I 
     was a little stunned.
       I said, ``Public aid--I didn't realize that was a form of 
     employment.'' They said, ``Well, our mom's on public aid. 
     They make a lot of money and, if you have a baby, they get a 
     raise.''

  Mr. President, that is the perception, maybe even the reality, we're 
fighting to change with our vote today on this historic conference 
report. While there is more work to accomplish, this bill is a good 
first step toward truly ending welfare as we know it.
  I look forward to working with my colleagues in the future to finish 
the good work we have started today.
  Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I oppose this conference report. We 
should reject this bill. We should return to the bargaining table to 
negotiate real welfare reform which moves people from welfare to work 
and provides a safety net for kids.
  Nearly 3 months ago, I joined 34 of my Democratic colleagues in 
reaching across the aisle to pass a bipartisan welfare reform bill by a 
vote of 87-12.
  We did so because our deliberations had produced a bill that began to 
move the welfare reform debate away from the harsh rhetoric of the 
House bill.
  I had hoped that our initial success at compromise in the Senate 
could lead to true compromise with the House. Regrettably, it did not.
  During Senate action last September, Senate Republicans and Democrats 
worked together to find common ground and the sensible center. In 
contrast, the House-Senate welfare conference was shaped by Republican 
back room deals. Democrats were shut out.
  This Conference Report is punitive. It's tough on kids, and it does 
not give people the tools they need to get and keep a job.
  This bill moves us in the wrong direction.
  First, this bill is part of the Republican assault on needy families. 
This bill cuts $82 billion from child care, food stamps, child 
nutrition, child protection, welfare and other programs over 7 years--
drastically more than the Senate welfare reform bill. These cuts are 
draconian.
  They are coupled with other budget cuts critical to working families, 
such as the earned income tax credit. The EITC helps keep working 
families out of poverty. The Republicans welfare plan says go to work. 
The Republican budget says, once you get to work, we're going to make 
you pay more in taxes.
  Second, the conference report snatches away the safety net for kids. 
It weakens the Senate effort to provide child care to working families 
by cutting $1.2 billion. These drastic cuts mean that parents will have 
to choose between taking care of their kids and going to work. Today, 
34 percent of women on welfare say they are not working because they 
cannot find or afford child care.
  Children will go hungry under this conference report. It jeopardizes 
the nutrition and health of millions of children, working families, and 
the elderly. It cuts food stamps and school lunches. And, if there is a 
recession, there is no guarantee those in need can get either. At least 
14 million kids will suffer from this cut.
  Third, neglected and abandoned children, and children in foster and 
adoptive care, will suffer further under this conference report. It 
slashes protective services to these kids by 23 percent or $4.6 billion 
over the next 7 years. The bill also cuts funding to investigate 
reports of abuse and neglect, to train potential foster and adoptive 
parents, to help place children in foster and adoptive homes and to 
monitor State child protection programs. These cuts come at a time when 
resources can't meet current needs to protect children from abuse and 
neglect.
  Fourth, the conference agreement is punitive to disabled children. We 
all agree Supplemental Security Income needs to be reformed. But, this 
goes too far. It too narrowly defines who qualifies. So, only the most 
severely disabled children will get SSI, stranding many disabled kids 
and their families.
  Fifth, the conference report allows States to cut back on their 
financial commitment to poor families. It weakens the State maintenance 
of effort provisions the Senate fought so hard for. Under this bill 
States could cut their contributions to poor families by 25 percent 
each year. The net effect--less child care, fewer tools to help get 
people to work, and more children falling into poverty.
  And sixth, the bill fails to recognize that when there is an economic 
downturn, people lose their jobs and need a helping hand. There is not 
an adequate contingency fund for use during times 

[[Page S19106]]
of natural disasters, changes in child poverty, and population shifts.
  This bill fails to move people from welfare to work. And it is a bill 
that will force more than a million additional children into poverty.
  The welfare package of the President's 7-year balanced budget plan is 
a good place to start. It takes a significant page from the Work First 
proposal that Senators Daschle, Breaux, and I wrote earlier this year. 
It requires welfare recipients to go to work by providing them with the 
tools to get a job and keep it. It cuts $49 billion in welfare 
programs, but does so responsibly--not in the reckless and punitive 
fashion of this conference report.
  The best social program in America is a job. Unfortunately, the 
Republicans welfare bill now before the Senate is a con job when it 
comes to Americans' desire to get welfare recipients back to work. Vote 
no on this conference report.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield myself 3 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, we are truly at the end of our debate 
this evening, toward the end. I ask unanimous consent that statement by 
the presidents of the National League of Cities, the National 
Association of Counties, and the United States Conference of Mayors 
urging the defeat of this measure be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

         National League of Cities, National Association of 
           Counties, The United States Conference of Mayors, 
           December 20, 1995.
       Dear Senator: On behalf of the nation's local elected 
     officials, we are writing to urge you to oppose H.R. 4, the 
     conference agreement on the Personal Responsibility Act. 
     Although the conferees agreed to some changes in the areas of 
     foster care consultation with local governments, we cannot 
     support the Final conference agreement which fails to address 
     many of the other significant concerns of local governments. 
     In particular, we object to the following provisions:
       The bill ends the entitlement of Aid to Families with 
     Depend Children, thereby dismantling the critical safety net 
     for children and their families.
       The bill places foster care administration and training 
     into a block grant. These funds provide basic services to our 
     most vulnerable children. If administration and training do 
     not remain an individual entitlement, our agencies will not 
     have sufficient funds to provide the necessary child 
     protective services, thereby placing more children at risk.
       The eligibility restrictions for legal immigrants go too 
     far and will shift substantial cost into local governments. 
     The most objectionable provisions include denying 
     Supplemental Security Income and Food Stamps, particularly to 
     older immigrants. Local governments cannot and should not be 
     the safety net for federal policy decisions regarding 
     immigration.
       The work participation requirements are unrealistic, and 
     funding for child care and job training is not sufficient to 
     meet these requirements, One example of the impracticality of 
     these provisions is the removal of Senate language that would 
     have allowed states to require lower hours of partition for 
     parents with children under age six.
       We remain very concerned with the possibility of any block 
     granting of child nutrition programs. A strong federal role 
     in child nutrition would continue to ensure an adequate level 
     of nutrition assistance to children and their families. 
     School lunch programs are necessary to ensure that children 
     receive the nutrition they need to succeed in school. 
     Children's educational success is essential to the economic 
     well being of our nation's local communities.
       The implementation dates and transition periods are 
     inadequate to make the changes necessary to comply with the 
     legislation. We suggest delaying them until the next fiscal 
     year.
       As the level of government closets to the people, local 
     elected officials understand the importance of reforming the 
     welfare system. However, the welfare reform conference 
     agreement would shift costs and liabilities and create new 
     unfunded mandates for local governments, as well as penalize 
     low income families. Such a bill, in combination with federal 
     cuts and increased demands for services, will leave local 
     governments with two options: cut other essential services, 
     such as law enforcement, or raise revenues. We, therefore, 
     urge you to vote against the conference agreement on H.R. 4.
           Sincerely,
     Gregory S. Lashutka,
       President, National League of Cities, Mayor, Columbus, 
     Ohio.
     Douglas R. Bovin,
       President, National Association of Counties, Commissioner, 
     Delta County, Michigan.
     Norman B. Rice,
       President, The United States Conference on Mayors, Mayor, 
     Seattle, Washington.

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, they make a number of points, but the 
first one being:

       The bill ends the entitlement of Aid to Families with 
     Dependent Children, thereby dismantling the critical safety 
     net for children and their families.

  This is the central point. We do not have welfare reform before us, 
we have welfare repeal, a repeal of a commitment made in the 1930's in 
the middle of the Depression. To be abandoned now would be unthinkable, 
and I am increasingly confident it will not occur.
  Also, I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record a joint 
statement by Catholic Charities USA, the Lutheran Social Ministry 
Organizations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the 
Salvation Army, and the Young Women's Christian Association on these 
and other matters.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

 Joint Statement of Large Nonprofit Social Service Providers, October 
                                19, 1995

       Catholic Charities USA, the Lutheran Social Ministry 
     Organizations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 
     (ELCA), The Salvation Army, and the Young Women's Christian 
     Association (YWCA) are the nonprofit organizations who 
     together do more for low-income families and poor people in 
     the United States than anyone else. We are greatly concerned 
     about the consequences that deep cuts in programs that serve 
     poor and low-income people will likely create. The very 
     fabric of our society is at risk. We believe that such cuts 
     will exacerbate the despair already felt among many and turn 
     it into hopelessness. As we go about our business of serving 
     both the physical and spiritual needs of people, we see the 
     desperation in many of their eyes.
       The chasm between the rich and poor in our country appears 
     to be growing. While children born to families in the upper 
     twenty percent of the income scale in the United States 
     experience the highest standard of living in the 
     industrialized world, the children born to families in the 
     lowest twenty percent receive one of the lowest. We should be 
     developing policy that narrows that gap rather than policy 
     that widens it. The reduction in the support for programs 
     serving low-income people such as Aid to Families with 
     Dependent Children, food and nutrition, Medicaid, housing, 
     the Legal Services Corporation, Supplemental Security Income, 
     and the Earned Income Tax Credit, when combined, will have a 
     devastating effect on families that have few options. Even if 
     these families are able to work, that work is often at or 
     near minimum wage with no benefits leaving families still 
     living in terrible deprivation. Elderly people as well will 
     experience increased poverty and all that it brings.
       In addition to the hopelessness of spirit, we believe the 
     proposed policy changes will increase hunger, homelessness, 
     and abuse and neglect within families.
       Historically, we have worked quite successfully in 
     partnership with government to provide services to persons 
     with special needs. On every front we have received 
     commendation for the great work we have done. However, we do 
     not have either the financial or physical capacity to serve 
     the increased need we expect to occur because of these policy 
     changes. In fact some of the changes may force us to 
     terminate some programs and even close our doors in some 
     ares. We are deeply concerned that the partnership between 
     government and religious institutions, which has worked so 
     well in the past, is now being broken.
       We will do our part to alleviate as much suffering as 
     possible by our acts of mercy. However, we believe that all 
     have a responsibility for the needs of the people, the 
     general welfare, the common good--church members and non-
     church members alike. Because not all seek what is just and 
     good, dependence on charity for the basic needs of life is 
     inadequate. Charity can supplement, but it will never be able 
     to replace ``justice.'' It is not just the responsibility of 
     faith group members who choose to give generously of both 
     their time and resources to ensure that people's needs are 
     met. Society as a whole must be committed to the well being 
     of all. We believe that government, as a means by which 
     Americans act corporately, has a major role in establishing 
     justice, protecting and advancing human rights, and providing 
     for the general welfare of all. This is not a time for 
     government to deny their role and reduce their portion of the 
     partnership.
       We believe that Congress and the President should be 
     cautious when making sweeping changes in policy and not 
     reverse the present working relationship with nonprofit 
     providers which has worked so well in the past.
     Rev. Charles Miller,
       Executive Director, Lutheran Social Ministry Organizations 
     of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
     
[[Page S19107]]

     Rev. Fred Kammer, S.J.,
       President, Catholic Charities USA.
     Commissioner Kenneth L. Hodder,
       National Commander, The Salvation Army.
     Preme Mathai-Davis,
       Executive Director, YWCA of the U.S.A.

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I reserve the remainder of my time as I believe we are 
going to try to go to a concluding measure here.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, first, I yield 5 minutes to the 
distinguished Senator from Texas.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas is recognized.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Thank you, Mr. President. I thank the distinguished 
chairman of the committee for the wonderful job that he has done. It is 
never easy to make such changes as we are making in this bill. But it 
is one of the most important decisions that we will make, because it is 
one of the key elements to change the direction of this country as it 
relates to welfare and to allow us to balance the budget.
  We have heard a lot of talk this afternoon and this evening about 
helping children. Mr. President, if we are going to help the children 
of this country, the most important thing we can do is balance the 
budget. We cannot balance the budget unless we put welfare on a budget. 
If we do not put welfare on a budget, we will not be able to do what is 
right for this country.
  I am voting yes on this conference report for two reasons: We must 
take welfare off entitlement status and, Mr. President, we have talked 
all day and all night about the President saying he is going to veto 
this bill. There is one reason he is going to veto this bill. It is 
because we are taking welfare off entitlement status and putting it on 
a budget. That is the fundamental difference between the President and 
those of us who are going to support this bill.
  This bill does not cut welfare spending. This bill slows the rate of 
growth of welfare spending from 5.8 percent to 4.02 percent, less than 
2 percentage points of difference in the rate of growth. We are going 
to spend more on welfare. But the difference is we are going to put 
some parameters around it. We are going to give the States the right to 
have a welfare program that fits the needs of their States.
  Mr. President, my Governor, George Bush, says, ``What are they 
talking about, hurting the children? Do they think I am going to have 
starving children in my home State?"
  My Governor is a graduate of Yale. I mean, it is not the University 
of Texas, but it is OK. I think he is enlightened. I think he can 
handle the job, and I think every other Governor in the United States 
of America knows best what will fit their State's needs.
  This is going to make some monumental changes in the priorities we 
have. We have heard tonight Senators saying, ``What are the priorities 
of this country?'' We are going to decide.
  The priorities of this country are that we want to help people who 
need a transition for a temporary period, and that is what this bill 
does. Can people stay on welfare if they are able-bodied and do not 
have young children under 6? They cannot do it forever. No, they 
cannot. They cannot stay on it generation to generation. They have to 
work after 2 years and they have a lifetime limitation of 5 years.
  What does that tell working people of this country, especially the 
working poor? It says there is an incentive for you to do what is 
right. No longer are you going to have to support people who can work 
but will not. If you can work and do, if you consider it a privilege to 
work and contribute to the economy of this country, you will not be 
subsidizing people who can work and do not.
  We have talked about what is a block grant and what is not a block 
grant. We are going to put AFDC on a block grant with growth. There is 
a formula that allows for the growth States to have a fair allocation. 
But there still is a safety net, Mr. President. There is a safety net 
in food stamps, in child nutrition. Those will not be block granted. 
Those are going to be based on need. So food and nutrition programs are 
a safety net, and they are kept in the bill as a safety net.
  Mr. President, we are going to set the priorities of our country with 
this bill. We are going to say to the working people of this country 
that it is worth something to work, it is a privilege in this country 
to have a job and to contribute to the economy and you are not going to 
be competing with someone who refuses to work even if they can. The 
working people of this country are going to know that we have a budget 
and that this is not going to be unlimited spending.
  Mr. President, I know that my time is up, and I will just say that we 
are making decisions that will determine the priorities of our country 
and we are going to get this country back on track and we are going to 
bring back what made this country great.
  It was the strong families, it was the spirit of entrepreneurship and 
the working relationships that have built this country. We are going to 
bring it back and make this country strong again.
  Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor and thank the chairman.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my time to the 
distinguished Senator from Pennsylvania.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania is recognized 
for 18 minutes, 52 seconds.
  Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I want to thank the distinguished 
chairman of the committee who has done an absolutely superb job with 
this piece of legislation in shepherding it through the conference. It 
has been a pleasure to work with him in the time we have worked on the 
welfare bill since he has become chairman.
  For the benefit of the staff here, I am going to do the wrap-up and 
then proceed with my remarks after the wrap-up.

                          ____________________