[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 112 (Friday, July 26, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H8588-H8589]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                EFFECT OF WELFARE SYSTEM ON OUR CHILDREN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Gutknecht] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. I thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I would like to pursue 
the discussion that my freshman colleague from Washington [Mr. White] 
has been talking about. His daughter Emily reminds me a lot of my 
daughter Emily, who is now 16 years old, and we are having driving 
lessons. But I want to talk about children in America as well, and I 
want to talk about the welfare system and what we are doing to 
children.
  Is there anything more cruel to children than consigning them to a 
lifetime of poverty and dependency? Cannot we do better than the 
welfare system we have in place now?
  Almost everyone agrees that the welfare system has failed. It needs 
to be replaced. That is why I am encouraged that the House and the 
Senate have passed welfare reform legislation in the last couple of 
weeks on a bipartisan basis. This legislation will soon go to the 
President for his signature.
  The war on poverty was begun in the mid-1960's with good intentions. 
President Lyndon Johnson and others argued that America needed to 
provide a nationwide safety net to catch those who had fallen on hard 
time. Some have said that the safety net has become a hammock, but that 
is not quite fair. In some respects it is more like a gill net, 
trapping and inflicting damage upon generations of Americans, and one 
does not have to look far to see its victims.
  Out inner cities have become war zones. Out-of-wedlock births have 
quadrupled in the last 30 years, spawning a generation of fatherless 
young men and women perpetuating a cycle of illegitimacy, violence, 
dependency, and despair.

                              {time}  1345

  Most Americans now see that the basic flaw with our war on poverty is 
that it has created a culture of entitlement to benefits through a 
Washington-dictated, one-size-fits-all system. It set up the wrong 
kinds of incentives, paying people not to work and penalizing them if 
they do. It hurts the very people it was designed to help. We are 
literally killing people with kindness.
  Almost no one disagrees that we need fundamental change in our 
welfare policy. The administration boasts that it has approved a record 
number of waivers of Federal regulations to allow States to experiment 
with welfare reform. But that just shows how excessively bureaucratic 
and tangled the current system is.
  For example, the President went out to Wisconsin and he praised the 
Wisconsin Works welfare reform plan, but the United States Department 
of Health and Human Services has not yet approved the waivers that 
would let the plan go forward.
  Any reform plan must emphasize work and personal responsibility. The 
House-passed welfare reform plan will greatly increase States' 
abilities to design their own solutions aimed at moving people from 
dependency to work. It combines four Federal poverty programs, 
including Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the WIC nutrition 
program and child care, into block grants that give States flexibility 
to use scarce resources more efficiently. The House bill limits able-
bodied adults to 2 years of assistance without work. With a lifetime 
maximum of 5 years of benefits, States could still grant hardship 
exceptions to 20 percent of their case load.
  It requires people that bring immigrants into our country to live up 
to their sponsorship support commitments instead of passing them off to 
the taxpayers. And speaking of living up to their responsibilities, it 
also creates a nationwide tracking system for enforcing child support 
payments from deadbeat dads. It only makes common sense to require 
people to develop habits for working to support themselves. Work is 
more than the way you earn a living. It helps to define your very life. 
The great majority of Americans do it every day.
  This is common sense. It is a consensus about both the need and the 
direction we should take in terms of welfare reform and has moved us to 
a truly historic opportunity to replace the faulty foundation of the 
welfare state.
  The Senate bill, which passed on a bipartisan basis of 74 to 24, had 
almost all of the Republicans supporting it and over half of the 
Democrats. The House and Senate are resolving differences between the 
two bills, and we are hopeful that we can have a bill on the 
President's desk for his signature

[[Page H8589]]

early in August. The President promised to end welfare as we know it 
but has vetoes two previous welfare reform bills.
  We have accommodated his objections by separating Medicaid reform 
from the welfare reform. Now it is time to seize the opportunity to 
replace the welfare system with work, to replace dependency with 
responsibility. We are not simply trying to save money here, we are 
trying to save people, especially kids, from a lifetime of poverty.
  Carpe diem, Mr. President. Seize the day.

                          ____________________