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FAMILY SELF-SUFFICIENCY ACT
(Senate - September 07, 1995)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages S12757-S12796] FAMILY SELF-SUFFICIENCY ACT The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the hour of 10:30 a.m. having arrived, the Senate will now resume consideration of H.R. 4, which the clerk will report. The legislative clerk read as follows: A bill (H.R. 4) to restore the American family, reduce illegitimacy, control welfare spending, and reduce welfare dependence. The Senate resumed consideration of the bill. Pending: Dole modified amendment No. 2280, of a perfecting nature. Daschle modified amendment No. 2282 (to Amendment No. 2280), in the nature of a substitute. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the time until 3:30 p.m. shall be equally divided between the managers. Mr. MOYNIHAN addressed the Chair. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York is recognized. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it has been understood with my friend, [[Page S 12758]] the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Finance, that time is equally divided, and that should there be no speaker seeking recognition, we will suggest the absence of a quorum and the time will be charged equally to each side. Mr. PACKWOOD. That has been agreed upon. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank my friend. Mr. President, in auspicious timing, the Washington Post has a splendid editorial this morning entitled ``Welfare: Two Kinds of Compromise.'' It speaks of the compromise that was notably on display when Congress, the Nation's Governors, and President Reagan worked out some of the better provisions of the Family Support Act in 1988, aimed at reforming welfare. The parties all agreed on the sensible principles that the Federal Government should help the poor and that the existing welfare program was not doing enough to move people into jobs. The resulting bill was far from perfect and was not adequately financed--that's why welfare reform is still very much a live issue--but it did result in some successes that could be built upon with a new round of reform. Mr. President, some time later in our debate, I will offer the Family Support Act of 1995, which builds on the 1988 legislation, which passed out of this Chamber 96 to 1. I recall that there was great bipartisan harmony in the Rose Garden when President Reagan signed it. In the Committee on Finance, I offered the Family Support Act of 1995, and it failed to pass, by 12 votes to 8, which is scarcely an overwhelming rejection. It was a party-line vote, I am sorry to say. Seven years ago it was very different. But we will have an opportunity to discuss it. I ask unanimous consent, as we begin this morning, to have this editorial printed in the Record. There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: [From the Washington Post, Sept. 7, 1995] Welfare: Two Kinds of Compromise There are different kinds of political compromise. The best kind happens when the contending parties find that substantive agreement can be reached without a compromise of principles. This sort of accord was notably on display when Congress, the nation's governors and President Reagan worked out some of the better provisions of the Family Support Act in 1988, aimed at reforming welfare. The parties all agreed on the sensible principles that the federal government should help the poor and that the existing welfare program was not doing enough to move people into jobs. The resulting bill was far from perfect and was not adequately financed--that's why welfare reform is still very much a live issue--but it did result in some successes that could be built upon with a new round of reform. But there is a less honorable tradition of compromise involving not a quest for consensus but the artful manipulation of labels and slogans. It is this kind of compromise that is most to be feared as Congress approaches the welfare issue. The debate now seems hopelessly entangled in the rivalry between Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm for the Republican presidential nomination. That was clear when Mr. Dole gave a speech the other day in Chicago promising to fight ``for revolutionary change vote by vote and bill by bill,'' and Mr. Gramm responded rapid-fire at a Washington news conference. ``I see Sen. Dole moving to the right in speeches every day,'' Mr. Gramm said. ``I don't see it reflected in what he's doing in the United States Senate.'' This is a bad context in which to legislate on a problem such as welfare, where the tough issues will not be solved by a resort to doctrine or slogans. Take a particularly hard question: If welfare is turned into a block grant, should states, in exchange for receiving something close to their current levels of federal aid, be required to maintain something like their current level of spending on the poor. Those spending levels, after all, got them their current allotments of aid in the first place. A small group of Senate Republicans who are trying to prevent Mr. Dole from reacting to Mr. Gramm by doing anything he wants, rightly see this as a central issue. But it's easy to include a provision in a bill labeled ``maintenance of effort,'' as Mr. Dole effectively has, and make it essentially meaningless, as Mr. Dole also effectively has, by allowing states to count all sorts of extraneous expenditures as meeting this ``maintenance of effort'' requirement and having the requirement expire in a couple of years. The provision would give Mr. Dole cover with his party's moderates without really giving them much of substance. It's fake compromise. Much more of that sort of thing could become the rule in the coming weeks. Mr. Gramm can make welfare a centerpiece of his campaign against Mr. Dole if he wants to. But the rest of the Senate, not to mention President Clinton, does not need to be complicit in turning a momentous piece of legislation over to the politics of sound bites. Far better no welfare bill than the kind likely to be created in this atmosphere. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I see my distinguished friend, the Senator from North Dakota, on the floor, and I am happy to yield him 20 minutes if that will be sufficient for his purposes. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from North Dakota. Mr. DORGAN. I thank the Senator from New York for yielding me the time to discuss the Daschle amendment on welfare reform. A friend of mine the other day described a circumstance in his small rural hometown. There was a Lutheran minister who did not make very much money ministering to a very small congregation, being paid a very small salary. And because a minister in a small town is paid very little, his wife gave piano lessons in order to make a few dollars to try to make ends meet for him and his wife. These folks were the parents of the friend of mine who was referring them to me. He said they lived in a very meager house provided by the church and lived on a very meager income all of their lives. They contributed to their community by ministering at the church and by his wife giving piano lessons and teaching Sunday school. At the other end of the block, there was a wonderful family, as well. This family started a business, worked very hard, made an enormous amount of money and were very successful. They were well liked and also contributed much to the community. The two families had taken different routes. One chose ministering in a small rural church where they were never to earn any significant amount of money and always lived near subsistence. The other chose to pursue an occupation that would lead them to accumulate a substantial amount of assets. Both were good families and both contributed to their community. My friend said, ``I wonder if my parents contributed less to their community than the folks down the block who made a substantial amount of money.'' I think not. I think they made at least as great a contribution. But they ended up with nothing. I use that story to illustrate that, for some in this country these days, being poor is out of fashion. If you are poor, somehow you just did not make it in America and you chose not to spend all of your time trying to maximize your income. So you end up in circumstances, after age 70 and after having ministered for 40 years in a rural church, where you have nothing. And maybe you end up needing some help from someone. But that is not disgraceful. It was because you chose to contribute in other ways during your lifetime and chose not to spend 50 years trying to maximize your income. The question is, did the minister and his family contribute less to our country? No, they did not. They found themselves in circumstances of some difficulty--without income, without resources, without assets. There are a lot of good people in our country just like them. The people I just described are atypical. The more likely and typical person in need in this country, with respect to welfare, is a young woman in poverty--an increasingly feminine picture these days--who is raising children in a household without two parents present. One morning at about 6 a.m., I went down to a homeless shelter here in Washington, DC, and sat there for a couple of hours talking to the people who were there. I have told my colleagues on one previous occasion about my visit at the shelter with a 23-year-old young woman, whom I believe, had three children, whose husband had left her, who had no skills, no high school education, no job, and no place to live. She and her children, after having spent the night in a temporary shelter, as they did every night, were then put on buses in order to be at this feeding center at 6 a.m. I sat and visited with this young woman, and I discovered with her, as with virtually everyone else on welfare with whom I have ever visited, that what she wanted most in life was a good job. She was not asking me, can you give me a bigger welfare check? Can you find a way to extend your hand with more money, more benefits, more help? That is not what she was asking. [[Page S 12759]] I was asking her what would she really like if this morning she could wave a wand and change her life? Her response was that she desperately wanted to have a job that paid her a sufficient income so that she could save money for a first month's down payment to rent an apartment where she could live with her children. She said to me, I want a place to live. I know in order to get a place to live, I need to get a job. In order to get a job, I have to have some skills. I do look for work almost every day and I do get work. And the minute I get work--it is occasionally frying a hamburger at some franchise place and always at the minimum wage--I lose my health care benefits for my children. The moment I try to save $10 or $20 for the first month's rent on an apartment so I could get rid of this homeless condition for me and my children and find a place to live, the minute I save $10 or $20, I lose my AFDC payment or it is reduced by the same amount. And as I drove back to the office here on Capitol Hill the morning after I visited with her, I thought to myself, I am pretty well educated. I have a couple of college degrees. I have done pretty well. And I wondered how could I think my way through this problem if I were in this young woman's situation? What kind of a solution allows her to get off this treadmill, the treadmill of poverty, helplessness, hopelessness? I honestly, putting myself in her position, could not really think my way out of her problem. She cannot get a job because she does not have the skills. She cannot save money for a down payment on rent because she does not have a job. If she gets a job and starts saving money, she loses AFDC payments for her kids. It is an endless circle of trouble for someone who is literally trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they cannot recover. Now, I mention that story because in order to talk about welfare reform, you have to talk about two truths. One is often used by those of us in public office, regrettably, to talk about welfare. That is, the stereotypical notion of who is a welfare recipient. It is some bloated, overweight, lazy, slovenly, indolent, good-for-nothing person laying in a Lazy Boy recliner with a quart of beer in one hand and a Jack Daniels in another hand, with his hand on the television changer watching a 27-inch color television set and unwilling to get up and get out and get a job and go to work, munching nachos all day long watching Oprah, Geraldo, and Montel. That is the notion of the stereotypical welfare recipient. I suppose that happens. There is, I suppose, a small element among welfare recipients who are inherently lazy, unmotivated, unwilling to work, and have become institutionalized in the welfare system. This small element believes he or she can go on welfare and live on it forever, even if they are able bodied. That does happen. It should not happen. It is a minority of the people on welfare. We must eliminate those people for whom welfare has become an institutionalized way of life. We can and will stop these abusers of the system. The welfare bill that we have offered--Senator Daschle, Senator Moynihan, myself, and others--is a bill that says to those folks, if you believe that in this country you can live on welfare as a routine matter and you are able bodied, then you are wrong. Welfare is temporary assistance. We are willing to give it, we believe we must give it. But welfare is temporary and it is conditional. Our bill says we will offer a temporary hand if you are down and out. But you have a responsibility to take hold of that hand and get out of poverty by getting training to help you get a job. Our plan is intended to move people off the welfare rolls and on to payrolls. That is what our bill says. That is what we say to those folks. The abuser--the able bodied who are lazy, is a minority in the welfare system. The bulk of the welfare recipients are represented by the woman I discussed earlier--the young woman living in poverty, a 23- year-old unskilled woman with three children to raise, and not the means with which to do it. She represents the bulk of the welfare recipients. The question is, What do we do about it? Let me give a couple of other facts. It is also a stereotypical notion of welfare that we have a lot of people in this country who are simply producing large numbers of children in order to get more welfare benefits. It probably does happen, but it is not typical. The average size of the welfare family in America is nearly identical to the average size of the American family. Let me say that again because it is important. In public debate we all too often use stereotypes, and the stereotype is the notion that there is someone out there having 16 babies because producing babies allows them to get a lot of welfare. The average size of the welfare family is nearly identical to the average size of the average family in our country. We spend about 1 percent of the Federal budget on welfare. A substantial amount of money is spent in many ways in our country, but we spend only about 1 percent of the Federal budget. My interest in this issue has to do with two things. First, I would like to engage with people from as far right on the political spectrum as Pat Buchanan and people all the way to the far left and say we all agree on one thing: welfare is temporary. Welfare should not become institutionalized for people who are able bodied and believe they ought to live off of the rest of the taxpayers for the rest of their lives. The temporary nature of welfare assistance is embodied in the Daschle bill. Second, and more important to me, is an understanding of our obligation to America's children. Tens of millions of America's children are growing up in circumstances of poverty. They were born in circumstances of poverty not because they chose to, not because they decided that is what they wanted for their lives, but because of a circumstance of birth. Two-thirds of the people on welfare in America are kids under 16 years of age. No one, no matter how thoughtless they may be in public debate, would say, I hope, to a 4-, 6-, or 8-year-old child we say: ``You do not matter. Your hunger does not count. Your clothing needs are irrelevant.'' I have spent a lot of time working on hunger issues as a Member of Congress and have told my colleagues before about a young man who made an indelible impression with me. I will never forget it. A man named David Bright from New York City, who also lived in a homeless shelter, described to us on the Hunger Committee when I served in the House, his life in the shelter with rats and with danger and so on. He said that no 10-year-old boy like me should have to put his head down on his desk at school in the afternoon because it hurts to be hungry. This from a 10-year-old boy telling us in Congress about stomachs that hurt because they did not have enough to eat. This welfare bill care about our kids in this country. We must decide, whatever else we do about welfare, to take care of America's children in the right way--to give them hope, opportunity and, yes, nutrition, education, and shelter. Now, when I talk about children, there is one inescapable fact that the Senator from New York has talked about at great length that has to be addressed in the context of welfare reform. And that is the epidemic of teenage pregnancies in this country. There will be roughly 4 million babies born this year in America-- roughly. Over 1 million of those babies will be born in circumstances where two parents will not be present at the birth. 900,000 of children born this year will never in their lifetime learn the identity of their father. Think of the circumstances of that, what it means to a society. Nearly 1 million babies born this year will never in their lifetime learn the identity of their father. The Democratic alternative we are considering today addresses the issue of teenage pregnancy and the epidemic that is occurring in this country. We address the circumstances where children are growing up in homes where the parents are children themselves, and they have no information or experience to do adequate parenting. What we do in the Daschle amendment is that we want a national crusade against teenage pregnancy; we say that teenage pregnancy is not something that is acceptable to this country. It is not something we should promote or encourage; it is something we should discourage. People should have [[Page S 12760]] children only when they are able to care for them. What this amendment says to a child who is going to have a child, a 16- or 17-year-old child who is going to have a baby--which is happening all too often in this country--is you are not going to be able to live in a separate residence if that happens. You are not going to be able to leave school and get public assistance. We say there are going to be conditions for receiving assistance. Every teenage mother who has a baby out of wedlock has to understand this. If you do not stay in school, you will lose all benefits--nothing. Benefits are terminated. And you are not going to be able to collect money to set up a separate living arrangement for yourself and your baby. Our proposal establishes some adult-supervised living homes, where teenage mothers will have to live in supervised circumstances and stay in school as a condition for receiving benefits. We are saying this matters in our country. There is teenage pregnancy epidemic that this country must deal with. It is also an epidemic that eats up a substantial amount of our welfare benefits to respond to it. Our proposal says we can and should do something about it. As I indicated, the Senator from New York has done an enormous amount of work on this issue. I commend him for it. He was the impetus in our Democratic caucus for saying: This is wrong. This is going to hurt our country. This is going to disintegrate our society unless we address it in the right way. This amendment, the Daschle initiative, addresses teenage pregnancy, in my judgment, in a very significant way. I am very proud to say this is the right way to do it. It is the right way to go about it. We also say something else. We say to a young woman who has a child out of wedlock, ``If you are going to get benefits, you have a responsibility to help us identify who the father is. You have that responsibility. If you do not do that, you do not get benefits.'' We are going to find out who the father is, and we are going to go after deadbeat dads. Deadbeat dads have a responsibility to help provide for those children. Not just taxpayers, but the people who fathered those children have a responsibility to provide some resources to help those children. They each have a responsibility to be a parent. But in the event they will not do that, we are going to make sure that they own up to the responsibility of providing resources for those children. Our bill is tough on absent parents who are delinquent in child support. Our bill is tough on this issue. When a child is born out of wedlock and when a mother says ``I now want benefits,'' we insist that mother help us identify the father, and that father help pay for and contribute to the well-being of that child. I would like to mention two other points about this legislation. I have not done this in any necessary order. I guess I could have prioritized this welfare discussion a bit more, but I wanted to talk about a couple of component parts of it that are important to me. First, there is an assumption that if we reform the welfare system, there will be enormous savings. Savings of $100 billion over 7 years, as I believe was estimated in the budget resolution, are not going to happen. The fact is, if we do what is necessary to reform the welfare system, to make it really work, we are not going to save money in the next 7 years. But we can build a better country and make people more responsible and give people opportunity and get people off the welfare rolls and onto payrolls. The woman in the homeless shelter that I talked about earlier is the reason we are not going to save money. In order for her to work and get a job, she has two requirements. She has to get some training to get a good job. And then, in order to work at the job, she has to have some child care. If she does not get the training, she will not get the job. And if she does not have child care, she cannot work. Then, when those two requirements are met, one other element has to be present. If the job that person gets does not provide health care, then we have to have some Medicaid transition benefits as well. If we do not do those three things, welfare reform will fail. All three things cost money in the short term. In the long term, they will save money. But there is no way on God's green Earth to believe someone who says, if we reform this welfare system--and we should and we will-- and do it the right way, that we will save $100 billion in the next 7 years. We can put the country on the right track. We can do the right thing. We can end dependency on welfare by able-bodied people, but we will not save $100 billion and it is time for everyone in this Chamber to understand that. The second point I would like to make about the financing of welfare is the notion embodied in the Republican proposal, that we can solve this problem quickly and easily if only we simply aggregate all of this money into a block grant and ship it off somewhere and thereby create some nirvana by which the welfare problem is solved. By and large, block grants are blockheaded. They will, in my judgment, if used routinely and repeatedly, as some have suggested, on virtually every issue coming before the Congress, result in the most egregious abuse and waste of the taxpayers' money we will have ever seen. Do you want to describe how to promote waste in Government? I will tell you how. You have one level of Government raise the money and then send it to somebody else and say, ``You spend it. No strings attached. We will not watch.'' If you want to promote irresponsible, reckless, wasteful, wild, abusive spending, I guarantee you this blockheaded approach to block grants is the quickest and most effective way to do it. So, those who come to us with these simple little placebos, who say take this and you can believe it is medicine, whether it is block grants or $100 billion savings, it is pretty unimpressive to me. What we Democrats have done is put together an alternative. It is an alternative that says welfare cannot be permanent. Welfare is going to be temporary. Welfare is not unconditional. Welfare is going to be conditional. You need help? We are going to give you some help. But you have a responsibility in accepting that help. It is your responsibility to step up and out and off of the welfare system and become a productive member of our society on a payroll somewhere. The second element of our alternative piece of legislation that is critically important is that we say we are going to protect America's children. Yes, we are going to reform the welfare system, but we are going to do it the right way, with the right incentives that require responsibility for oneself. That is the foundation of our approach. But, at the same time, we are also going to protect America's children. Our plan leaves no questions unanswered about whether America's children will be protected. That is why I am delighted to be here to support the Daschle initiative. I was part of a large group of people who helped construct it. I was not the major architect. I know the Senator from New York and others support it as well. I have taken slightly more time than I intended, but I appreciate the generosity of the Senator from New York. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from New York. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, may I thank the Senator from North Dakota, Senator Dorgan, for beginning today's debate, today's critical debate, in an open, thoughtful, fair-minded manner. Could I comment on just one particular point? The Senator raised the question of the children born out of wedlock, and he is quite right. In 1992, 1,224,876 children were born out of wedlock--in some census tracts, 80 percent of all children born. Happily, North Dakota has been spared--or spared itself. This is something altogether new to our experience. And 30 years ago, you could not have discussed it on the Senate floor. There is a maturity coming to our debates. This was a subject-- the ratio, in 1992, reached 30.1 percent. It is probably almost 33 now. It has gone up every year since 1970. In 1970, it was 10.6 percent. So it has tripled, the ratio, and the number of children have tripled. We could not talk about this. We were not sure it was happening. Was it [[Page S 12761]] an aberration, just the weather, something like that? There used to be theories that when there would be blackouts there would be more children conceived. That turned out not to be so. We have a social crisis of a new order--not a recession, not a drought, not a collapse of farm prices, nor an increase in mortgages, the things that have come with some periodicity and consequence to us, and which we have learned to understand pretty much and manage. We have never had this before, and we have never talked about it before; not in the calm, thoughtful way the Senator from North Dakota has done. I want to thank him most sincerely for setting a tone which I think and I hope will continue throughout this debate. Mr. President, I look to my friend on the Republican side. Does he wish to speak? Mr. PACKWOOD. I do. Mr. MOYNIHAN. If I may observe, the Senator from Florida is here. Mr. PACKWOOD. I apologize. I can wait. I am going to be on the floor. The Senator may go right ahead. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield to the distinguished Senator from Florida 15 minutes. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Campbell). The Senator from Florida is recognized to speak for 15 minutes. Mr. GRAHAM. Thank you very much, Mr. President and my distinguished colleagues. I appreciate the courtesy. I want to talk some about the structure of the welfare reform proposal that is before us and some concerns I have as to whether we are building a foundation on reality with steel and concrete, or a foundation of sand based on theory, hope, and avoidance of responsibility. I am going to be talking from basically two sources. First, I will talk from some statistics that are generic and analytical of the legislation before us. I will also be talking from some anecdotes which are personal and specific. For the last 21 years, I have had a practice of taking an occasional job in a different area of interest within my State. In July, I took a job with one of the two welfare-to-work programs in Florida, this one in Pensacola. This is a program which is very similar to the objectives of both the underlying bill and the amendment that is before us. It is mandatory; that is, participation is required. It has the goal of placing a high percentage of those persons who are currently on welfare into employment. It is exploring what are the pragmatic requirements of accomplishing that objective, and it is doing so in the community of Pensacola, which is very representative of the kind of communities across America in which this type of program will be applied. I am going to be using some of the information and observations from that experience also as the basis of my comments on the plan which is before us today. Mr. President, I strongly support a serious effort to move people from the dependency of welfare to the independence of and self- sufficiency through employment. That is a fundamentally important objective. As we start this, I want us to understand almost the moral dimension of what we are doing, and I will place that in the context of eight women with whom I spent a considerable amount of time in Pensacola who are part of this process of making the transition. Just to describe these eight women, they were six white and two African American women. They were somewhat older than I had anticipated. The youngest was in the early twenties, up to the early forties. All of them had two or more children. Three of the eight women had a child with a serious medical disability. I was initially surprised that there would be that high an incidence of medical disability. But on reflection, given the fact that these women typically had no or very limited prenatal care with their children and had limited access to primary care since their children were born, it is not surprising that there would be that incidence of medical disability. These are women who are very committed to a better life for their children through the achievement of independence for themselves. Many of these women have limited educational backgrounds and, therefore, the kind of job training in which they are now engaged in Pensacola, the Welfare to Work program, is difficult for them. But they are making a maximum effort to be successful. In the course of attending one of the programs in which they are learning some of the basic skills that will be necessary, one of the women broke down and cried. She said: ``This is so difficult for me, but I understand the importance of this opportunity that I am being given and, if I do not succeed, not only will this likely be my last chance but it will fundamentally change the future for my children. I want to succeed.'' Our moral responsibility as a society, Mr. President, is we are telling these women that you have 2, maybe 3 years to be successful in preparing yourself and securing employment, and securing employment at a level that will allow you to support your children. We are making a commitment to them that not only are we going to provide them with what would be required to do so, but there will be a job there that they can secure upon the completion of their preparation. And the consequences of their failing to get that job is that they and their children will have the level of support that they are currently receiving terminated or substantially altered and reduced. So there is a commitment on both sides. And it is from that point that I would like to draw some observations about the underlying bill which is before us today, because I believe it is based on some unrealistic assessments of the world in which this proposal will actually operate and creates the potential of some serious unfairness and a violation of that moral commitment that we are making to these Americans. First, I believe that the goal of the welfare plan, which is to have 25 percent of the current welfare beneficiaries employed in year 1 of this plan and 50 percent employed in year 5, is unrealistic. In year 1, the definition of reaching that 25 percent is a month-by- month evaluation of how many persons who were on welfare had been moved into a work position. And if at the end of the first 12 months of the fiscal year, you do not have an average of 25 percent, then your State is subject to sanctions. I believe it is going to be virtually if not absolutely impossible to reach that 25 percent goal. There is a necessary startup period in terms of developing the job placement programs, the job training programs, and the support services such as transportation, as well as securing child care for the young dependents of these women, which makes reaching the goal of a 25-percent objective in year 1 highly unlikely. Equally as difficult will be to reach the 50-percent level in year 5. That is in large part because of whether the jobs are going to actually be available. Pensacola, FL, happens to be an area that has a relatively growing economy, an economy which is creating a substantial number of jobs. But even there the administrators of the program stated that it will be very difficult to reach a 50 percent placement level within a 5-year period. That would be true because of the competition for those jobs from all the other people in the community who will be seeking that employment--the issue of will there be jobs that will be not just at the barest minimum wage but at a level high enough or at least offering a sufficient potential to raise a sufficient amount of money to be able to support a family of a single mother and two children, which is the typical family in Pensacola. There are 6,600 welfare families in Pensacola, so the goal is to place 3,300 of those in work by the year 2000. That will be a challenge for Pensacola. But, Mr. President, let us put that in the context of another American city, a substantially larger city, and that is Philadelphia. Philadelphia has not 6,600 people on welfare; it has 500,000 people who are receiving some form of public assistance. In Philadelphia, using the statistics provided by DRI McGraw-Hill on U.S. Market Review, in 1994 there were 2,149,000 jobs in Philadelphia. In the last year of their survey, which is 1997, the projection is there will be 2,206,000 jobs in the Philadelphia area, or an increase of approximately 47,000 jobs over that period from 1994 to 1997. We do not have the statistics to the year 2000, but assuming that that rate of increase [[Page S 12762]] continues, we could expect maybe another 20,000 or 30,000 jobs to the year 2000, so well under a 100,000-job growth and yet we are saying that by the year 2000, half of this population of 500,000 people is supposed to be placed in jobs in Philadelphia. How is that going to happen? I think we have a level of unreality in terms of the scale of the population that we are saying has to be trained and placed and their children supported and the number of jobs which are going to be created, particularly in those areas of the country that are not experiencing the kind of robust economic growth that a community such as Pensacola, FL, has experienced. My first point is that I think we have a statistical unreality in terms of what we are saying has to happen and what, in fact, is likely to occur. And for that reason, independent groups such as the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office that have looked at this plan, have stated that 44 out of the 50 States will not be able to meet the expectations of this legislation--that 44 out of the 50 States are going to fall into the category of those that are nonperformers and therefore subject to a 5-percent penalty. I would suggest that these numbers are so unrealistic in terms of the kind of commitments that we are prepared to make that the 5 percent penalty will be accepted as a fact of life for many States and that any serious effort to meet these unrealistic goals is likely to be abandoned. It is interesting to me the difference in which we are treating those programs that we are about to ship off to the States and say, ``You run them,'' such as welfare reform and Medicaid, where we are setting these theoretical goals, and then essentially abandoning any effort to do those things that will be necessary to make those goals attainable, and how we are treating the one big program we are responsible for running and that at least as of today no one has suggested be sent to the States to run, which is Medicare. There we are saying that Medicare has to be treated above politics; that we have to be very, very careful it is structured properly because we know we are going to be held responsible for how that one is administered. With welfare and Medicaid, we essentially are saying we can abandon all responsibilities for the pragmatic implementation. That is going to be somebody else's responsibility. A second level of unreality is in the funding levels and specifically in the area of unfunded mandates to the States. It is interesting, when we came here back in January with a very expansive and aggressive agenda of domestic issues, which issue received primacy, which received that special recognition of being Senate bill No. 1. Well, that honor was assigned to the legislation that dealt with reducing unfunded mandates, that as our No. 1 domestic objective we were going to cease the process of having the Federal Government meet its responsibilities by telling somebody else, generally a State or local government, what to do and requiring them to use their resources in order to achieve that national objective. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Can the Senator use another 5 minutes? We want to be fair to all Senators. Mr. GRAHAM. If I could. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I would be happy to do it. I am listening to what he has to say. Mr. GRAHAM. The reality is that this bill which we are about to pass will be the grandfather of all unfunded mandates. We are going to be imposing significant new responsibilities on the States, without the resources to fund those responsibilities, and that as we impose that grandfather of all unfunded mandates, we are going to be creating a whole series of stepchildren as its consequence. Let me just use the example of my State, a family of three typically, and in the case of all eight of the women I mentioned earlier, this is the case, a single mother with two children. The State of Florida provides $303 a month in economic support, cash assistance to that mother and two children. That $303 is roughly half Federal money and half State money. Under this proposal, it is going to take 75 percent of the Federal money that we have been providing for the support of that family of three in order to pay for the job training and related support activities and the child care of that mother and her family while she is preparing to work. There is no proposal to act to fund those additional activities. In fact, the level of funding at the Federal level will be declining over the period of this program. So instead of that family having $303, it will see that reduced to approximately $185 a month which will be available for economic support because the remainder of the money, approximately $135, will be used to pay for these other mandated services. So we are saying that this family, which has been living on $303 a month, is now going to have to start living on $180 a month while the remainder of the money is used to prepare the mother for a future job and to provide child care for her dependent children. Mr. President, I think that is an unrealistic economic scenario. And it becomes even more draconian since we are no longer going to be requiring States, at least after 2 years, and even in a very soft way during the first 2 years, to provide any continuing match. So potentially not $85. If the State of Florida were to decide to abandon its local match and not provide any State funds, we could have this family living on $35 a month, just that portion of the Federal money that is left over after you have met your mandates. I think that is highly unrealistic and would defeat not only the goal of moving people from welfare to work, but would also undermine our basic American humanitarian and compassionate sense of responsibility to all of our citizens. And finally, the reality of this proposal is in the extreme disparities that will exist from State to State under this plan. I mention unfunded mandates. In the case of Florida, about 75 percent of our Federal funds would be required to meet the unfunded mandates. We are better off than Mississippi, where it will take 88 percent of Mississippi's Federal money to meet their unfunded mandates, which compares to the District of Columbia, that can meet their unfunded mandates with only 46 percent of the Federal money. Why is there such a great disparity? Because we start off with a tremendous disparity in how much Federal money per child is available under the proposal that has been submitted by the majority leader. A stark difference is right within a mile of where we stand. A poor child in the District of Columbia will get three times as much money under this proposal of the majority leader as will a poor child across the Potomac River in Virginia. I think that is not only indefensible and unfair, but undermines the basic credibility of this proposal as a means of moving people from welfare to work. So, Mr. President, in those areas, I think we have a house that is being built on a foundation of sand. Mr. President, we need to guard against passing legislation which has rhetorical mandates and aspirations, but without the practical understanding of what it would mean in the lives of people and, therefore, virtually assuring that we will have a failure of accomplishing our objectives and will have more decades of exactly the kind of welfare issue, exactly the kind of continuing dependence that we are trying to ameliorate through this effort. Mr. President, I urge the adoption of the more pragmatic amendment which has been offered by Senator Daschle and his colleagues as the starting point for serious, meaningful welfare reform. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself 5 minutes, if I need that much, to thank the Senator from Florida, the former Governor of Florida, who knows precisely of what he speaks when Federal formulas are involved. You heard the striking differences between the jurisdictions of Florida, Mississippi, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. I hope you also heard the Senator's comment about the city of Philadelphia, the number of jobs in the city, the numbers created in recent years. I have been trying to make a point, as I said yesterday--I do not know that I can persuade anyone, but I can try to make it and I can argue-- which is the point that 30 years ago, we might have considered turning this subject back to the States, giving them [[Page S 12763]] block grants of some kind, saying, ``You handle it. Cities, you handle it. It makes some sense since local governments are closer to the problem. It is not that big a problem.'' It is today, in one after another jurisdiction, a problem that has overwhelmed the capacity of the city and the State. The Senator mentioned Philadelphia. In 1993, 57 percent of the children living in the city of Philadelphia were on AFDC, welfare, at one point in the course of the year. At any given moment, 44 percent-- these are numbers never contemplated. Nothing like that happened in the Great Depression. And these children are paupers. They are not from unemployed families, where there is a house, an automobile, some insurance. One of the few regulations the Federal Government does have--the rest are all intended you have to waiver for--if you have less than $1,000 in assets, you are a pauper. The cities cannot handle it. And they will not. Just as when we began the deinstitutionalization of our mental institutions in the early 1960's--at the last public bill-signing ceremony President Kennedy had, on October 31, 1963, he signed the Community Mental Health Construction Act of 1963. I was present. He gave me a pen. I had been involved with this in New York, where it began. Transfer license. We were going to build 2,000 community mental health centers by the year 1980, and one per 100,000 thereafter. We built about 400. We kind of overlapped and folded the program in and forgot about the program. We emptied out the mental institutions. And we have been hearing about homeless shelters all day. I said yesterday, and I will repeat again, in 10 years' time, with this legislation in place, with these time limits in place, children will be in the streets. Seventy-six percent of the children on welfare are on welfare for more than 5 years. The Senator from Connecticut, I hope, will keep that in mind--76 percent. About 40 percent--the remainder come and go quickly and are never a problem. But if we do this, we will have in my city of New York half a million people on the streets in New York. We wonder about homeless people. They used to be in mental institutions. Now these children are in houses. They are in households. We will wonder where they came from. We say, ``Why are these children sleeping on grates? Why are they being picked up in the morning frozen? Why are they horrible to each other, a menace to all, and more importantly to themselves? Whatever happened?'' When the homeless appeared in New York, we right away diagnosed it as a lack of affordable housing. That is not what it was. It was Federal policy in its most perverse mode. Make a great change and do not follow through. Make changes you do not fully understand. Those tranquilizers were not as good as we thought. Here are some other cities. In Detroit, 67 percent of children were on welfare at one point or another in the year of 1993; in Baltimore, 56 percent. My time has expired. But I will return to this subject. Now I am going to suggest the absence of a quorum for 1 minute to see whether the Senator from Oregon wishes to speak--I do not see him on the floor--after which it is the turn of the Senator from Connecticut. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The absence of a quorum has been suggested. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. MOYNIHAN. 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. MOYNIHAN. I am happy to yield to my friend. Is 15 minutes sufficient for his purposes? Mr. DODD. Why do we not try 15. I may need 20. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Twenty, it is. Mr. DODD. I thank the Senator. Mr. MOYNIHAN. May I record, Mr. President, the Senator from Oregon does not wish to speak at this moment. So if the speakers are all on our side, it is because we are talking, I suppose, about our bill. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Dodd, is recognized for 20 minutes. Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from New York. Before beginning, our colleague from Florida asked me to yield to him for a minute to raise a question to the distinguished Senator from New York. Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut very much. I appreciate his courtesy. I want to commend the Senator from New York for the excellent statement, and particularly that he brings us back to reality, just what are the circumstances of the people that are going to be affected by our actions. I would like to inject, briefly, for the Senator's information and possibly further comment, some good news. I mentioned that in Pensacola, there were 6,600 welfare families. I am pleased to say that in the first 18 months of the transition program, which is a program based on the 1988 legislation that the Senator from New York sponsored, that almost 600 of those 6,600 have, in fact, been placed in employment, that having occurred because there was a willingness to put the resources required to provide the kind of training and support, including child care, to those families to allow it to happen. It can happen. This is not just a doom-and-gloom scenario. We are not consigned to have to deal with this problem in its current form forever. But it is not going to be easy, it is not going to be quick, and it is not going to be inexpensive if we are going to achieve real results. I appreciate the constant reminder of the Senator from New York of those realities. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank my friend from Florida, and I do particularly appreciate his reference to the Family Support Act, which never promised a rose garden. We said if you try hard, you will have something to show for it. Pensacola does. Thank you, Mr. President. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut is recognized for 20 minutes. Mr. DODD. Mr. President, before my colleague from New York departs the floor and my colleague from Florida continues, I want to commend my colleague from Florida for an excellent statement. And, let me just say, the distinguished Senator from New York has contributed more to the collective wisdom in this body on the subject of welfare reform than anyone. I say that with all due respect to the other 99 of us in this Chamber, but the Senator from New York has dedicated virtually a lifetime of service focused on this complex issue. She is no longer with us, but Barbara Tuchman wrote a wonderful book called the ``March of Folly.'' It was related to foreign policy failures throughout history. What made her book unique is that she talked about failures where those responsible for conducting foreign policy--from the Trojan Wars to the Vietnam war--knew when they were about to do something that, in fact, it was wrong and that there were better alternatives. But, they refused to recognize them. She described several historical events beginning with Troy, including the American Revolution, and several others. Were she alive today and were she to write a domestic version of the ``March of Folly,'' I suspect our current debate on welfare reform might be a chapter in that book. My fear is, and I heard my colleague from New York express this over and over again, we are missing each other in the night as we discuss this subject matter. The Senator from New York has said repeatedly we are not engaged in reform here at all. What we are engaged in is a dismantling, total dismantling of a system with a faint hope that what we are about to put in place is somehow going to serve the public in a better way. What we are talking about here is reducing our Federal commitment to welfare by roughly $70 billion, passing the cost on to the States and localities of this country and asking them to assume the responsibility and burden of picking up this chore with little likelihood that we are going to achieve the desired goals expressed, with all due respect to the majority leader's bill. I just want to take a moment, before getting into the substance of my remarks, and urge my colleagues to [[Page S 12764]] please listen --listen--to our colleague from New York. There is a lot of wisdom in what he says. He knows this issue well. Historically, we have paid attention to our colleagues, regardless of party, regardless of ideology, who brought a special knowledge and experience to a subject matter. The Senator from New York is that individual in our midst. We ought to be listening to him on this subject. So I hope in the coming days, we can get away from a bit of the politics of this issue and think about what we are doing and what a mess we are likely to create in this country, costing the middle-class taxpayers billions of dollars before we are through, all in the name of some political debate about who is going to deal with the welfare recipient more harshly than the next. That ought not to be what this debate is about. It ought to be about how we reform our current system to make it work better in a realistic, thoughtful, prudent manner. Unfortunately, I do not think that this has been the case. I know my colleague from New York has other business to attend to, but I just felt very strongly when I came over here to address this matter. This is one of those rare occasions when the ``March of Folly'' seems to be upon us once again. Mr. President, I hope we will pay some close attention to the proposals that are being offered by the distinguished Democratic leader and hope that somehow in the next few days we may come to our senses and find some common ground on this issue. I read the other day that the distinguished majority leader announced in Chicago that there will be no compromises this fall. How does this institution function when the leader of our body says there will be no compromise on a subject matter that will have a profound effect on our country for years to come? We need to seek some common ground and thoughtful analysis to deal intelligently and effectively with the issue of welfare reform. There is no debate about what we are trying to achieve: How do we move people from dependency to self-sufficiency? We are now looking at grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who have been dependent on welfare without the ability or the fortune of work. How do we move people to work in an intelligent way? How do we make it possible for them to get there and stay there, so that they have at least the basic protection of health care and some safe place to put their children? This is not a concept that is terribly difficult to grasp, I hope. Every single family in this country ought to be able to relate to this. They do. When you go to work, where is your child? Who is watching your child? Every single person, from the highest paid chief executive officer down to the lowest wage earner in this country, understands that critical issue: if you are going to go to work, you need to have access to safe, affordable, and quality child care. It ought not to be difficult for us to try and come up with some ways to do achieve this. The benefit of all of this is not just fiscal, it also has to do with the fabric of our country. It has to do with helping to provide people opportunities to have a sense of self-worth as we build our neighborhoods and communities. It is a critical element. And trying to find the ways and the means to accomplish that goal ought to be the subject of our discussions. We should not, as I said earlier, outdo each other in our rhetoric to indict people, in most cases, who, through no fault of their own, are in this situation. I left this chart here, Mr. President, because it ought to be in everyone's mind. As our colleague from New York has pointed out, two- thirds of the people we are talking about in this bill are children; they are not adults, they are kids. Two-thirds of the recipients are America's children. In Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, there are staggering numbers of children who are recipients or dependents of families where there is this dependency on public assistance of one kind or another. I hope, again, we can have an honest and thoughtful debate about how we can improve this situation, rather than worsening it by creating a race to the bottom. The Washington Post the other day--I do not have it here with me today--had a lengthy article about what will happen as States race to cut benefits. As some States cut benefits, their actions will put great pressure on neighboring States to follow suit, or else risk becoming a magnet for families searching for ways to end their slide further down the economic ladder. As the race proceeds, it will cause great damage to our national commitment to address these problems. Maybe I am wrong, but I honestly believe when there is a child in Pennsylvania, or a child in Colorado, or a child in New York that is in trouble, I have an obligation as a Senator to help them. I am a U.S. Senator from the State of Connecticut, but my interest and concern about children is not limited to the geography that I represent. It is the country that I represent. And so when there is a child who is hurting in a Western State, an Eastern State, or my own State, I believe that, through the constitutional process which creates this institution, I ought to bring a concern to this national body to grapple with these problems in a way that makes sense for all of us. I should not just assume that these problems are Colorado's problem, or New York's problem, or Pennsylvania's problem alone. That belief would run contrary to our sense of nationhood. So the goals of work and independence and self-sufficiency and family unity are all things that we ought to be striving for. We are going to miss that mark substantially if we do not try and find ways to achieve those goals in a realistic way, and make the kinds of investments that will need to be made if we are going to be successful. The tendency to blame and punish is certainly tempting. I understand the politics of it. But in the long-term it is not going to help us resolve the kind of difficulties that I think we have been asked to assume by our election to this body as national representatives--not just our own States' representatives but national representatives. There is strong evidence that the rise of poverty is, in large part, attributable to declining wages. There has been a tremendous amount of evidence that over the past 2\1/2\ decades wages have declined, and anxiety and fear has grown among our people as a result of that trend. I hope we will keep this evidence in mind as we consider this debate on welfare reform. If we take the view that the only purpose of welfare reform is to punish people--as I said a moment ago, those who have been getting something for nothing--then we are going to ignore the fact that welfare is an unwelcome fate for most recipients. More important, we will miss the opportunity, in my view, for any kind of real, meaningful reform, because we will ignore what we must do to move people from the dependency of welfare to work: First, to provide them with education and training. Again, we all know we are entering a sophisticated age. There are fewer and fewer jobs where little or no education or training is needed. As it is right now, less than 1 percent of the jobs in this country are going to be available to people with less than a high school diploma. In a few years, it will be a college diploma. You are going to have to have those skills if you are going to move people to work. The jobs will not exist for people in this category without the training. Second, you have to ensure that States are partners with the Federal government, lest they engage in a race to the bottom that rewards States for spending less on moving their people from welfare rolls to payrolls. I do not think anyone believes that is a wise course to follow. Third, and I think most important in this debate, and I have referenced it already--is to ensure that parents have the child care that they need in order to keep a job in the first place. Child care, I happen to believe, is the linchpin of welfare reform. No matter what else we do, if a parent cannot find a safe and affordable place for their young children during the working day, that parent is not going to be able to hold down a job. I do not care how you look at that issue or analyze it. That is a fact. In my view, the alternative proposal offered by the majority leader, Senator Dole, fails to meet this three-part standard. It represents, I think, a retreat from the problem and not reform of it. It does not even, in my view, deserve to be called reform. All it would [[Page S 12765]] do is package up Federal programs for poor families, cut the funding by $70 billion, and ship the whole problem to the 50 States. Is somebody going to tell me that is reform? That is just passing the buck and asking the middle-class taxpayer to have their property taxes and sales taxes skyrocket at the local level--as we wash our hands of it. We have reformed the problem. Mr. President, we will have done nothing of the kind. The acid test of any welfare reform proposal is its impact on children, in my view, because they are the majority of the recipients. Is a reform proposal going to punish the children for the mistakes or bad luck of their parents? It bears repeating time and time again that two-thirds of the AFDC recipients are children. More than 9 million children received cash assistance in 1993. The Republican welfare reform proposal, as it is called, would single these children out for extraordinarily harsh treatment. I do not care what your ideology or politics are, I do not know of anybody that wants to see that happen. Yet, Mr. President, as a matter of fact, that is just what happens under this proposal. In my view, the Republican plan packages up punitive policies that aim for the parent, but will hit the child instead. Children should not be penalized because of the happenstance into which they have been born. I do not think we want to see that be the case. We promise the elderly and veterans a minimum level of support in our society. Why can we not do the same for children? We need a national commitment to see that children are not abused, that they do not go hungry, and that their basic needs are being met. The Republican proposal, however, fails to provide even the most basic minimum standards for our Nation's children. Mr. President, I want to stress that these children, I believe, are our Nation's r

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FAMILY SELF-SUFFICIENCY ACT
(Senate - September 07, 1995)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages S12757-S12796] FAMILY SELF-SUFFICIENCY ACT The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the hour of 10:30 a.m. having arrived, the Senate will now resume consideration of H.R. 4, which the clerk will report. The legislative clerk read as follows: A bill (H.R. 4) to restore the American family, reduce illegitimacy, control welfare spending, and reduce welfare dependence. The Senate resumed consideration of the bill. Pending: Dole modified amendment No. 2280, of a perfecting nature. Daschle modified amendment No. 2282 (to Amendment No. 2280), in the nature of a substitute. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the time until 3:30 p.m. shall be equally divided between the managers. Mr. MOYNIHAN addressed the Chair. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York is recognized. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it has been understood with my friend, [[Page S 12758]] the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Finance, that time is equally divided, and that should there be no speaker seeking recognition, we will suggest the absence of a quorum and the time will be charged equally to each side. Mr. PACKWOOD. That has been agreed upon. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank my friend. Mr. President, in auspicious timing, the Washington Post has a splendid editorial this morning entitled ``Welfare: Two Kinds of Compromise.'' It speaks of the compromise that was notably on display when Congress, the Nation's Governors, and President Reagan worked out some of the better provisions of the Family Support Act in 1988, aimed at reforming welfare. The parties all agreed on the sensible principles that the Federal Government should help the poor and that the existing welfare program was not doing enough to move people into jobs. The resulting bill was far from perfect and was not adequately financed--that's why welfare reform is still very much a live issue--but it did result in some successes that could be built upon with a new round of reform. Mr. President, some time later in our debate, I will offer the Family Support Act of 1995, which builds on the 1988 legislation, which passed out of this Chamber 96 to 1. I recall that there was great bipartisan harmony in the Rose Garden when President Reagan signed it. In the Committee on Finance, I offered the Family Support Act of 1995, and it failed to pass, by 12 votes to 8, which is scarcely an overwhelming rejection. It was a party-line vote, I am sorry to say. Seven years ago it was very different. But we will have an opportunity to discuss it. I ask unanimous consent, as we begin this morning, to have this editorial printed in the Record. There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: [From the Washington Post, Sept. 7, 1995] Welfare: Two Kinds of Compromise There are different kinds of political compromise. The best kind happens when the contending parties find that substantive agreement can be reached without a compromise of principles. This sort of accord was notably on display when Congress, the nation's governors and President Reagan worked out some of the better provisions of the Family Support Act in 1988, aimed at reforming welfare. The parties all agreed on the sensible principles that the federal government should help the poor and that the existing welfare program was not doing enough to move people into jobs. The resulting bill was far from perfect and was not adequately financed--that's why welfare reform is still very much a live issue--but it did result in some successes that could be built upon with a new round of reform. But there is a less honorable tradition of compromise involving not a quest for consensus but the artful manipulation of labels and slogans. It is this kind of compromise that is most to be feared as Congress approaches the welfare issue. The debate now seems hopelessly entangled in the rivalry between Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm for the Republican presidential nomination. That was clear when Mr. Dole gave a speech the other day in Chicago promising to fight ``for revolutionary change vote by vote and bill by bill,'' and Mr. Gramm responded rapid-fire at a Washington news conference. ``I see Sen. Dole moving to the right in speeches every day,'' Mr. Gramm said. ``I don't see it reflected in what he's doing in the United States Senate.'' This is a bad context in which to legislate on a problem such as welfare, where the tough issues will not be solved by a resort to doctrine or slogans. Take a particularly hard question: If welfare is turned into a block grant, should states, in exchange for receiving something close to their current levels of federal aid, be required to maintain something like their current level of spending on the poor. Those spending levels, after all, got them their current allotments of aid in the first place. A small group of Senate Republicans who are trying to prevent Mr. Dole from reacting to Mr. Gramm by doing anything he wants, rightly see this as a central issue. But it's easy to include a provision in a bill labeled ``maintenance of effort,'' as Mr. Dole effectively has, and make it essentially meaningless, as Mr. Dole also effectively has, by allowing states to count all sorts of extraneous expenditures as meeting this ``maintenance of effort'' requirement and having the requirement expire in a couple of years. The provision would give Mr. Dole cover with his party's moderates without really giving them much of substance. It's fake compromise. Much more of that sort of thing could become the rule in the coming weeks. Mr. Gramm can make welfare a centerpiece of his campaign against Mr. Dole if he wants to. But the rest of the Senate, not to mention President Clinton, does not need to be complicit in turning a momentous piece of legislation over to the politics of sound bites. Far better no welfare bill than the kind likely to be created in this atmosphere. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I see my distinguished friend, the Senator from North Dakota, on the floor, and I am happy to yield him 20 minutes if that will be sufficient for his purposes. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from North Dakota. Mr. DORGAN. I thank the Senator from New York for yielding me the time to discuss the Daschle amendment on welfare reform. A friend of mine the other day described a circumstance in his small rural hometown. There was a Lutheran minister who did not make very much money ministering to a very small congregation, being paid a very small salary. And because a minister in a small town is paid very little, his wife gave piano lessons in order to make a few dollars to try to make ends meet for him and his wife. These folks were the parents of the friend of mine who was referring them to me. He said they lived in a very meager house provided by the church and lived on a very meager income all of their lives. They contributed to their community by ministering at the church and by his wife giving piano lessons and teaching Sunday school. At the other end of the block, there was a wonderful family, as well. This family started a business, worked very hard, made an enormous amount of money and were very successful. They were well liked and also contributed much to the community. The two families had taken different routes. One chose ministering in a small rural church where they were never to earn any significant amount of money and always lived near subsistence. The other chose to pursue an occupation that would lead them to accumulate a substantial amount of assets. Both were good families and both contributed to their community. My friend said, ``I wonder if my parents contributed less to their community than the folks down the block who made a substantial amount of money.'' I think not. I think they made at least as great a contribution. But they ended up with nothing. I use that story to illustrate that, for some in this country these days, being poor is out of fashion. If you are poor, somehow you just did not make it in America and you chose not to spend all of your time trying to maximize your income. So you end up in circumstances, after age 70 and after having ministered for 40 years in a rural church, where you have nothing. And maybe you end up needing some help from someone. But that is not disgraceful. It was because you chose to contribute in other ways during your lifetime and chose not to spend 50 years trying to maximize your income. The question is, did the minister and his family contribute less to our country? No, they did not. They found themselves in circumstances of some difficulty--without income, without resources, without assets. There are a lot of good people in our country just like them. The people I just described are atypical. The more likely and typical person in need in this country, with respect to welfare, is a young woman in poverty--an increasingly feminine picture these days--who is raising children in a household without two parents present. One morning at about 6 a.m., I went down to a homeless shelter here in Washington, DC, and sat there for a couple of hours talking to the people who were there. I have told my colleagues on one previous occasion about my visit at the shelter with a 23-year-old young woman, whom I believe, had three children, whose husband had left her, who had no skills, no high school education, no job, and no place to live. She and her children, after having spent the night in a temporary shelter, as they did every night, were then put on buses in order to be at this feeding center at 6 a.m. I sat and visited with this young woman, and I discovered with her, as with virtually everyone else on welfare with whom I have ever visited, that what she wanted most in life was a good job. She was not asking me, can you give me a bigger welfare check? Can you find a way to extend your hand with more money, more benefits, more help? That is not what she was asking. [[Page S 12759]] I was asking her what would she really like if this morning she could wave a wand and change her life? Her response was that she desperately wanted to have a job that paid her a sufficient income so that she could save money for a first month's down payment to rent an apartment where she could live with her children. She said to me, I want a place to live. I know in order to get a place to live, I need to get a job. In order to get a job, I have to have some skills. I do look for work almost every day and I do get work. And the minute I get work--it is occasionally frying a hamburger at some franchise place and always at the minimum wage--I lose my health care benefits for my children. The moment I try to save $10 or $20 for the first month's rent on an apartment so I could get rid of this homeless condition for me and my children and find a place to live, the minute I save $10 or $20, I lose my AFDC payment or it is reduced by the same amount. And as I drove back to the office here on Capitol Hill the morning after I visited with her, I thought to myself, I am pretty well educated. I have a couple of college degrees. I have done pretty well. And I wondered how could I think my way through this problem if I were in this young woman's situation? What kind of a solution allows her to get off this treadmill, the treadmill of poverty, helplessness, hopelessness? I honestly, putting myself in her position, could not really think my way out of her problem. She cannot get a job because she does not have the skills. She cannot save money for a down payment on rent because she does not have a job. If she gets a job and starts saving money, she loses AFDC payments for her kids. It is an endless circle of trouble for someone who is literally trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they cannot recover. Now, I mention that story because in order to talk about welfare reform, you have to talk about two truths. One is often used by those of us in public office, regrettably, to talk about welfare. That is, the stereotypical notion of who is a welfare recipient. It is some bloated, overweight, lazy, slovenly, indolent, good-for-nothing person laying in a Lazy Boy recliner with a quart of beer in one hand and a Jack Daniels in another hand, with his hand on the television changer watching a 27-inch color television set and unwilling to get up and get out and get a job and go to work, munching nachos all day long watching Oprah, Geraldo, and Montel. That is the notion of the stereotypical welfare recipient. I suppose that happens. There is, I suppose, a small element among welfare recipients who are inherently lazy, unmotivated, unwilling to work, and have become institutionalized in the welfare system. This small element believes he or she can go on welfare and live on it forever, even if they are able bodied. That does happen. It should not happen. It is a minority of the people on welfare. We must eliminate those people for whom welfare has become an institutionalized way of life. We can and will stop these abusers of the system. The welfare bill that we have offered--Senator Daschle, Senator Moynihan, myself, and others--is a bill that says to those folks, if you believe that in this country you can live on welfare as a routine matter and you are able bodied, then you are wrong. Welfare is temporary assistance. We are willing to give it, we believe we must give it. But welfare is temporary and it is conditional. Our bill says we will offer a temporary hand if you are down and out. But you have a responsibility to take hold of that hand and get out of poverty by getting training to help you get a job. Our plan is intended to move people off the welfare rolls and on to payrolls. That is what our bill says. That is what we say to those folks. The abuser--the able bodied who are lazy, is a minority in the welfare system. The bulk of the welfare recipients are represented by the woman I discussed earlier--the young woman living in poverty, a 23- year-old unskilled woman with three children to raise, and not the means with which to do it. She represents the bulk of the welfare recipients. The question is, What do we do about it? Let me give a couple of other facts. It is also a stereotypical notion of welfare that we have a lot of people in this country who are simply producing large numbers of children in order to get more welfare benefits. It probably does happen, but it is not typical. The average size of the welfare family in America is nearly identical to the average size of the American family. Let me say that again because it is important. In public debate we all too often use stereotypes, and the stereotype is the notion that there is someone out there having 16 babies because producing babies allows them to get a lot of welfare. The average size of the welfare family is nearly identical to the average size of the average family in our country. We spend about 1 percent of the Federal budget on welfare. A substantial amount of money is spent in many ways in our country, but we spend only about 1 percent of the Federal budget. My interest in this issue has to do with two things. First, I would like to engage with people from as far right on the political spectrum as Pat Buchanan and people all the way to the far left and say we all agree on one thing: welfare is temporary. Welfare should not become institutionalized for people who are able bodied and believe they ought to live off of the rest of the taxpayers for the rest of their lives. The temporary nature of welfare assistance is embodied in the Daschle bill. Second, and more important to me, is an understanding of our obligation to America's children. Tens of millions of America's children are growing up in circumstances of poverty. They were born in circumstances of poverty not because they chose to, not because they decided that is what they wanted for their lives, but because of a circumstance of birth. Two-thirds of the people on welfare in America are kids under 16 years of age. No one, no matter how thoughtless they may be in public debate, would say, I hope, to a 4-, 6-, or 8-year-old child we say: ``You do not matter. Your hunger does not count. Your clothing needs are irrelevant.'' I have spent a lot of time working on hunger issues as a Member of Congress and have told my colleagues before about a young man who made an indelible impression with me. I will never forget it. A man named David Bright from New York City, who also lived in a homeless shelter, described to us on the Hunger Committee when I served in the House, his life in the shelter with rats and with danger and so on. He said that no 10-year-old boy like me should have to put his head down on his desk at school in the afternoon because it hurts to be hungry. This from a 10-year-old boy telling us in Congress about stomachs that hurt because they did not have enough to eat. This welfare bill care about our kids in this country. We must decide, whatever else we do about welfare, to take care of America's children in the right way--to give them hope, opportunity and, yes, nutrition, education, and shelter. Now, when I talk about children, there is one inescapable fact that the Senator from New York has talked about at great length that has to be addressed in the context of welfare reform. And that is the epidemic of teenage pregnancies in this country. There will be roughly 4 million babies born this year in America-- roughly. Over 1 million of those babies will be born in circumstances where two parents will not be present at the birth. 900,000 of children born this year will never in their lifetime learn the identity of their father. Think of the circumstances of that, what it means to a society. Nearly 1 million babies born this year will never in their lifetime learn the identity of their father. The Democratic alternative we are considering today addresses the issue of teenage pregnancy and the epidemic that is occurring in this country. We address the circumstances where children are growing up in homes where the parents are children themselves, and they have no information or experience to do adequate parenting. What we do in the Daschle amendment is that we want a national crusade against teenage pregnancy; we say that teenage pregnancy is not something that is acceptable to this country. It is not something we should promote or encourage; it is something we should discourage. People should have [[Page S 12760]] children only when they are able to care for them. What this amendment says to a child who is going to have a child, a 16- or 17-year-old child who is going to have a baby--which is happening all too often in this country--is you are not going to be able to live in a separate residence if that happens. You are not going to be able to leave school and get public assistance. We say there are going to be conditions for receiving assistance. Every teenage mother who has a baby out of wedlock has to understand this. If you do not stay in school, you will lose all benefits--nothing. Benefits are terminated. And you are not going to be able to collect money to set up a separate living arrangement for yourself and your baby. Our proposal establishes some adult-supervised living homes, where teenage mothers will have to live in supervised circumstances and stay in school as a condition for receiving benefits. We are saying this matters in our country. There is teenage pregnancy epidemic that this country must deal with. It is also an epidemic that eats up a substantial amount of our welfare benefits to respond to it. Our proposal says we can and should do something about it. As I indicated, the Senator from New York has done an enormous amount of work on this issue. I commend him for it. He was the impetus in our Democratic caucus for saying: This is wrong. This is going to hurt our country. This is going to disintegrate our society unless we address it in the right way. This amendment, the Daschle initiative, addresses teenage pregnancy, in my judgment, in a very significant way. I am very proud to say this is the right way to do it. It is the right way to go about it. We also say something else. We say to a young woman who has a child out of wedlock, ``If you are going to get benefits, you have a responsibility to help us identify who the father is. You have that responsibility. If you do not do that, you do not get benefits.'' We are going to find out who the father is, and we are going to go after deadbeat dads. Deadbeat dads have a responsibility to help provide for those children. Not just taxpayers, but the people who fathered those children have a responsibility to provide some resources to help those children. They each have a responsibility to be a parent. But in the event they will not do that, we are going to make sure that they own up to the responsibility of providing resources for those children. Our bill is tough on absent parents who are delinquent in child support. Our bill is tough on this issue. When a child is born out of wedlock and when a mother says ``I now want benefits,'' we insist that mother help us identify the father, and that father help pay for and contribute to the well-being of that child. I would like to mention two other points about this legislation. I have not done this in any necessary order. I guess I could have prioritized this welfare discussion a bit more, but I wanted to talk about a couple of component parts of it that are important to me. First, there is an assumption that if we reform the welfare system, there will be enormous savings. Savings of $100 billion over 7 years, as I believe was estimated in the budget resolution, are not going to happen. The fact is, if we do what is necessary to reform the welfare system, to make it really work, we are not going to save money in the next 7 years. But we can build a better country and make people more responsible and give people opportunity and get people off the welfare rolls and onto payrolls. The woman in the homeless shelter that I talked about earlier is the reason we are not going to save money. In order for her to work and get a job, she has two requirements. She has to get some training to get a good job. And then, in order to work at the job, she has to have some child care. If she does not get the training, she will not get the job. And if she does not have child care, she cannot work. Then, when those two requirements are met, one other element has to be present. If the job that person gets does not provide health care, then we have to have some Medicaid transition benefits as well. If we do not do those three things, welfare reform will fail. All three things cost money in the short term. In the long term, they will save money. But there is no way on God's green Earth to believe someone who says, if we reform this welfare system--and we should and we will-- and do it the right way, that we will save $100 billion in the next 7 years. We can put the country on the right track. We can do the right thing. We can end dependency on welfare by able-bodied people, but we will not save $100 billion and it is time for everyone in this Chamber to understand that. The second point I would like to make about the financing of welfare is the notion embodied in the Republican proposal, that we can solve this problem quickly and easily if only we simply aggregate all of this money into a block grant and ship it off somewhere and thereby create some nirvana by which the welfare problem is solved. By and large, block grants are blockheaded. They will, in my judgment, if used routinely and repeatedly, as some have suggested, on virtually every issue coming before the Congress, result in the most egregious abuse and waste of the taxpayers' money we will have ever seen. Do you want to describe how to promote waste in Government? I will tell you how. You have one level of Government raise the money and then send it to somebody else and say, ``You spend it. No strings attached. We will not watch.'' If you want to promote irresponsible, reckless, wasteful, wild, abusive spending, I guarantee you this blockheaded approach to block grants is the quickest and most effective way to do it. So, those who come to us with these simple little placebos, who say take this and you can believe it is medicine, whether it is block grants or $100 billion savings, it is pretty unimpressive to me. What we Democrats have done is put together an alternative. It is an alternative that says welfare cannot be permanent. Welfare is going to be temporary. Welfare is not unconditional. Welfare is going to be conditional. You need help? We are going to give you some help. But you have a responsibility in accepting that help. It is your responsibility to step up and out and off of the welfare system and become a productive member of our society on a payroll somewhere. The second element of our alternative piece of legislation that is critically important is that we say we are going to protect America's children. Yes, we are going to reform the welfare system, but we are going to do it the right way, with the right incentives that require responsibility for oneself. That is the foundation of our approach. But, at the same time, we are also going to protect America's children. Our plan leaves no questions unanswered about whether America's children will be protected. That is why I am delighted to be here to support the Daschle initiative. I was part of a large group of people who helped construct it. I was not the major architect. I know the Senator from New York and others support it as well. I have taken slightly more time than I intended, but I appreciate the generosity of the Senator from New York. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from New York. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, may I thank the Senator from North Dakota, Senator Dorgan, for beginning today's debate, today's critical debate, in an open, thoughtful, fair-minded manner. Could I comment on just one particular point? The Senator raised the question of the children born out of wedlock, and he is quite right. In 1992, 1,224,876 children were born out of wedlock--in some census tracts, 80 percent of all children born. Happily, North Dakota has been spared--or spared itself. This is something altogether new to our experience. And 30 years ago, you could not have discussed it on the Senate floor. There is a maturity coming to our debates. This was a subject-- the ratio, in 1992, reached 30.1 percent. It is probably almost 33 now. It has gone up every year since 1970. In 1970, it was 10.6 percent. So it has tripled, the ratio, and the number of children have tripled. We could not talk about this. We were not sure it was happening. Was it [[Page S 12761]] an aberration, just the weather, something like that? There used to be theories that when there would be blackouts there would be more children conceived. That turned out not to be so. We have a social crisis of a new order--not a recession, not a drought, not a collapse of farm prices, nor an increase in mortgages, the things that have come with some periodicity and consequence to us, and which we have learned to understand pretty much and manage. We have never had this before, and we have never talked about it before; not in the calm, thoughtful way the Senator from North Dakota has done. I want to thank him most sincerely for setting a tone which I think and I hope will continue throughout this debate. Mr. President, I look to my friend on the Republican side. Does he wish to speak? Mr. PACKWOOD. I do. Mr. MOYNIHAN. If I may observe, the Senator from Florida is here. Mr. PACKWOOD. I apologize. I can wait. I am going to be on the floor. The Senator may go right ahead. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield to the distinguished Senator from Florida 15 minutes. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Campbell). The Senator from Florida is recognized to speak for 15 minutes. Mr. GRAHAM. Thank you very much, Mr. President and my distinguished colleagues. I appreciate the courtesy. I want to talk some about the structure of the welfare reform proposal that is before us and some concerns I have as to whether we are building a foundation on reality with steel and concrete, or a foundation of sand based on theory, hope, and avoidance of responsibility. I am going to be talking from basically two sources. First, I will talk from some statistics that are generic and analytical of the legislation before us. I will also be talking from some anecdotes which are personal and specific. For the last 21 years, I have had a practice of taking an occasional job in a different area of interest within my State. In July, I took a job with one of the two welfare-to-work programs in Florida, this one in Pensacola. This is a program which is very similar to the objectives of both the underlying bill and the amendment that is before us. It is mandatory; that is, participation is required. It has the goal of placing a high percentage of those persons who are currently on welfare into employment. It is exploring what are the pragmatic requirements of accomplishing that objective, and it is doing so in the community of Pensacola, which is very representative of the kind of communities across America in which this type of program will be applied. I am going to be using some of the information and observations from that experience also as the basis of my comments on the plan which is before us today. Mr. President, I strongly support a serious effort to move people from the dependency of welfare to the independence of and self- sufficiency through employment. That is a fundamentally important objective. As we start this, I want us to understand almost the moral dimension of what we are doing, and I will place that in the context of eight women with whom I spent a considerable amount of time in Pensacola who are part of this process of making the transition. Just to describe these eight women, they were six white and two African American women. They were somewhat older than I had anticipated. The youngest was in the early twenties, up to the early forties. All of them had two or more children. Three of the eight women had a child with a serious medical disability. I was initially surprised that there would be that high an incidence of medical disability. But on reflection, given the fact that these women typically had no or very limited prenatal care with their children and had limited access to primary care since their children were born, it is not surprising that there would be that incidence of medical disability. These are women who are very committed to a better life for their children through the achievement of independence for themselves. Many of these women have limited educational backgrounds and, therefore, the kind of job training in which they are now engaged in Pensacola, the Welfare to Work program, is difficult for them. But they are making a maximum effort to be successful. In the course of attending one of the programs in which they are learning some of the basic skills that will be necessary, one of the women broke down and cried. She said: ``This is so difficult for me, but I understand the importance of this opportunity that I am being given and, if I do not succeed, not only will this likely be my last chance but it will fundamentally change the future for my children. I want to succeed.'' Our moral responsibility as a society, Mr. President, is we are telling these women that you have 2, maybe 3 years to be successful in preparing yourself and securing employment, and securing employment at a level that will allow you to support your children. We are making a commitment to them that not only are we going to provide them with what would be required to do so, but there will be a job there that they can secure upon the completion of their preparation. And the consequences of their failing to get that job is that they and their children will have the level of support that they are currently receiving terminated or substantially altered and reduced. So there is a commitment on both sides. And it is from that point that I would like to draw some observations about the underlying bill which is before us today, because I believe it is based on some unrealistic assessments of the world in which this proposal will actually operate and creates the potential of some serious unfairness and a violation of that moral commitment that we are making to these Americans. First, I believe that the goal of the welfare plan, which is to have 25 percent of the current welfare beneficiaries employed in year 1 of this plan and 50 percent employed in year 5, is unrealistic. In year 1, the definition of reaching that 25 percent is a month-by- month evaluation of how many persons who were on welfare had been moved into a work position. And if at the end of the first 12 months of the fiscal year, you do not have an average of 25 percent, then your State is subject to sanctions. I believe it is going to be virtually if not absolutely impossible to reach that 25 percent goal. There is a necessary startup period in terms of developing the job placement programs, the job training programs, and the support services such as transportation, as well as securing child care for the young dependents of these women, which makes reaching the goal of a 25-percent objective in year 1 highly unlikely. Equally as difficult will be to reach the 50-percent level in year 5. That is in large part because of whether the jobs are going to actually be available. Pensacola, FL, happens to be an area that has a relatively growing economy, an economy which is creating a substantial number of jobs. But even there the administrators of the program stated that it will be very difficult to reach a 50 percent placement level within a 5-year period. That would be true because of the competition for those jobs from all the other people in the community who will be seeking that employment--the issue of will there be jobs that will be not just at the barest minimum wage but at a level high enough or at least offering a sufficient potential to raise a sufficient amount of money to be able to support a family of a single mother and two children, which is the typical family in Pensacola. There are 6,600 welfare families in Pensacola, so the goal is to place 3,300 of those in work by the year 2000. That will be a challenge for Pensacola. But, Mr. President, let us put that in the context of another American city, a substantially larger city, and that is Philadelphia. Philadelphia has not 6,600 people on welfare; it has 500,000 people who are receiving some form of public assistance. In Philadelphia, using the statistics provided by DRI McGraw-Hill on U.S. Market Review, in 1994 there were 2,149,000 jobs in Philadelphia. In the last year of their survey, which is 1997, the projection is there will be 2,206,000 jobs in the Philadelphia area, or an increase of approximately 47,000 jobs over that period from 1994 to 1997. We do not have the statistics to the year 2000, but assuming that that rate of increase [[Page S 12762]] continues, we could expect maybe another 20,000 or 30,000 jobs to the year 2000, so well under a 100,000-job growth and yet we are saying that by the year 2000, half of this population of 500,000 people is supposed to be placed in jobs in Philadelphia. How is that going to happen? I think we have a level of unreality in terms of the scale of the population that we are saying has to be trained and placed and their children supported and the number of jobs which are going to be created, particularly in those areas of the country that are not experiencing the kind of robust economic growth that a community such as Pensacola, FL, has experienced. My first point is that I think we have a statistical unreality in terms of what we are saying has to happen and what, in fact, is likely to occur. And for that reason, independent groups such as the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office that have looked at this plan, have stated that 44 out of the 50 States will not be able to meet the expectations of this legislation--that 44 out of the 50 States are going to fall into the category of those that are nonperformers and therefore subject to a 5-percent penalty. I would suggest that these numbers are so unrealistic in terms of the kind of commitments that we are prepared to make that the 5 percent penalty will be accepted as a fact of life for many States and that any serious effort to meet these unrealistic goals is likely to be abandoned. It is interesting to me the difference in which we are treating those programs that we are about to ship off to the States and say, ``You run them,'' such as welfare reform and Medicaid, where we are setting these theoretical goals, and then essentially abandoning any effort to do those things that will be necessary to make those goals attainable, and how we are treating the one big program we are responsible for running and that at least as of today no one has suggested be sent to the States to run, which is Medicare. There we are saying that Medicare has to be treated above politics; that we have to be very, very careful it is structured properly because we know we are going to be held responsible for how that one is administered. With welfare and Medicaid, we essentially are saying we can abandon all responsibilities for the pragmatic implementation. That is going to be somebody else's responsibility. A second level of unreality is in the funding levels and specifically in the area of unfunded mandates to the States. It is interesting, when we came here back in January with a very expansive and aggressive agenda of domestic issues, which issue received primacy, which received that special recognition of being Senate bill No. 1. Well, that honor was assigned to the legislation that dealt with reducing unfunded mandates, that as our No. 1 domestic objective we were going to cease the process of having the Federal Government meet its responsibilities by telling somebody else, generally a State or local government, what to do and requiring them to use their resources in order to achieve that national objective. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Can the Senator use another 5 minutes? We want to be fair to all Senators. Mr. GRAHAM. If I could. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I would be happy to do it. I am listening to what he has to say. Mr. GRAHAM. The reality is that this bill which we are about to pass will be the grandfather of all unfunded mandates. We are going to be imposing significant new responsibilities on the States, without the resources to fund those responsibilities, and that as we impose that grandfather of all unfunded mandates, we are going to be creating a whole series of stepchildren as its consequence. Let me just use the example of my State, a family of three typically, and in the case of all eight of the women I mentioned earlier, this is the case, a single mother with two children. The State of Florida provides $303 a month in economic support, cash assistance to that mother and two children. That $303 is roughly half Federal money and half State money. Under this proposal, it is going to take 75 percent of the Federal money that we have been providing for the support of that family of three in order to pay for the job training and related support activities and the child care of that mother and her family while she is preparing to work. There is no proposal to act to fund those additional activities. In fact, the level of funding at the Federal level will be declining over the period of this program. So instead of that family having $303, it will see that reduced to approximately $185 a month which will be available for economic support because the remainder of the money, approximately $135, will be used to pay for these other mandated services. So we are saying that this family, which has been living on $303 a month, is now going to have to start living on $180 a month while the remainder of the money is used to prepare the mother for a future job and to provide child care for her dependent children. Mr. President, I think that is an unrealistic economic scenario. And it becomes even more draconian since we are no longer going to be requiring States, at least after 2 years, and even in a very soft way during the first 2 years, to provide any continuing match. So potentially not $85. If the State of Florida were to decide to abandon its local match and not provide any State funds, we could have this family living on $35 a month, just that portion of the Federal money that is left over after you have met your mandates. I think that is highly unrealistic and would defeat not only the goal of moving people from welfare to work, but would also undermine our basic American humanitarian and compassionate sense of responsibility to all of our citizens. And finally, the reality of this proposal is in the extreme disparities that will exist from State to State under this plan. I mention unfunded mandates. In the case of Florida, about 75 percent of our Federal funds would be required to meet the unfunded mandates. We are better off than Mississippi, where it will take 88 percent of Mississippi's Federal money to meet their unfunded mandates, which compares to the District of Columbia, that can meet their unfunded mandates with only 46 percent of the Federal money. Why is there such a great disparity? Because we start off with a tremendous disparity in how much Federal money per child is available under the proposal that has been submitted by the majority leader. A stark difference is right within a mile of where we stand. A poor child in the District of Columbia will get three times as much money under this proposal of the majority leader as will a poor child across the Potomac River in Virginia. I think that is not only indefensible and unfair, but undermines the basic credibility of this proposal as a means of moving people from welfare to work. So, Mr. President, in those areas, I think we have a house that is being built on a foundation of sand. Mr. President, we need to guard against passing legislation which has rhetorical mandates and aspirations, but without the practical understanding of what it would mean in the lives of people and, therefore, virtually assuring that we will have a failure of accomplishing our objectives and will have more decades of exactly the kind of welfare issue, exactly the kind of continuing dependence that we are trying to ameliorate through this effort. Mr. President, I urge the adoption of the more pragmatic amendment which has been offered by Senator Daschle and his colleagues as the starting point for serious, meaningful welfare reform. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself 5 minutes, if I need that much, to thank the Senator from Florida, the former Governor of Florida, who knows precisely of what he speaks when Federal formulas are involved. You heard the striking differences between the jurisdictions of Florida, Mississippi, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. I hope you also heard the Senator's comment about the city of Philadelphia, the number of jobs in the city, the numbers created in recent years. I have been trying to make a point, as I said yesterday--I do not know that I can persuade anyone, but I can try to make it and I can argue-- which is the point that 30 years ago, we might have considered turning this subject back to the States, giving them [[Page S 12763]] block grants of some kind, saying, ``You handle it. Cities, you handle it. It makes some sense since local governments are closer to the problem. It is not that big a problem.'' It is today, in one after another jurisdiction, a problem that has overwhelmed the capacity of the city and the State. The Senator mentioned Philadelphia. In 1993, 57 percent of the children living in the city of Philadelphia were on AFDC, welfare, at one point in the course of the year. At any given moment, 44 percent-- these are numbers never contemplated. Nothing like that happened in the Great Depression. And these children are paupers. They are not from unemployed families, where there is a house, an automobile, some insurance. One of the few regulations the Federal Government does have--the rest are all intended you have to waiver for--if you have less than $1,000 in assets, you are a pauper. The cities cannot handle it. And they will not. Just as when we began the deinstitutionalization of our mental institutions in the early 1960's--at the last public bill-signing ceremony President Kennedy had, on October 31, 1963, he signed the Community Mental Health Construction Act of 1963. I was present. He gave me a pen. I had been involved with this in New York, where it began. Transfer license. We were going to build 2,000 community mental health centers by the year 1980, and one per 100,000 thereafter. We built about 400. We kind of overlapped and folded the program in and forgot about the program. We emptied out the mental institutions. And we have been hearing about homeless shelters all day. I said yesterday, and I will repeat again, in 10 years' time, with this legislation in place, with these time limits in place, children will be in the streets. Seventy-six percent of the children on welfare are on welfare for more than 5 years. The Senator from Connecticut, I hope, will keep that in mind--76 percent. About 40 percent--the remainder come and go quickly and are never a problem. But if we do this, we will have in my city of New York half a million people on the streets in New York. We wonder about homeless people. They used to be in mental institutions. Now these children are in houses. They are in households. We will wonder where they came from. We say, ``Why are these children sleeping on grates? Why are they being picked up in the morning frozen? Why are they horrible to each other, a menace to all, and more importantly to themselves? Whatever happened?'' When the homeless appeared in New York, we right away diagnosed it as a lack of affordable housing. That is not what it was. It was Federal policy in its most perverse mode. Make a great change and do not follow through. Make changes you do not fully understand. Those tranquilizers were not as good as we thought. Here are some other cities. In Detroit, 67 percent of children were on welfare at one point or another in the year of 1993; in Baltimore, 56 percent. My time has expired. But I will return to this subject. Now I am going to suggest the absence of a quorum for 1 minute to see whether the Senator from Oregon wishes to speak--I do not see him on the floor--after which it is the turn of the Senator from Connecticut. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The absence of a quorum has been suggested. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. MOYNIHAN. 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. MOYNIHAN. I am happy to yield to my friend. Is 15 minutes sufficient for his purposes? Mr. DODD. Why do we not try 15. I may need 20. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Twenty, it is. Mr. DODD. I thank the Senator. Mr. MOYNIHAN. May I record, Mr. President, the Senator from Oregon does not wish to speak at this moment. So if the speakers are all on our side, it is because we are talking, I suppose, about our bill. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Dodd, is recognized for 20 minutes. Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from New York. Before beginning, our colleague from Florida asked me to yield to him for a minute to raise a question to the distinguished Senator from New York. Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut very much. I appreciate his courtesy. I want to commend the Senator from New York for the excellent statement, and particularly that he brings us back to reality, just what are the circumstances of the people that are going to be affected by our actions. I would like to inject, briefly, for the Senator's information and possibly further comment, some good news. I mentioned that in Pensacola, there were 6,600 welfare families. I am pleased to say that in the first 18 months of the transition program, which is a program based on the 1988 legislation that the Senator from New York sponsored, that almost 600 of those 6,600 have, in fact, been placed in employment, that having occurred because there was a willingness to put the resources required to provide the kind of training and support, including child care, to those families to allow it to happen. It can happen. This is not just a doom-and-gloom scenario. We are not consigned to have to deal with this problem in its current form forever. But it is not going to be easy, it is not going to be quick, and it is not going to be inexpensive if we are going to achieve real results. I appreciate the constant reminder of the Senator from New York of those realities. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank my friend from Florida, and I do particularly appreciate his reference to the Family Support Act, which never promised a rose garden. We said if you try hard, you will have something to show for it. Pensacola does. Thank you, Mr. President. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut is recognized for 20 minutes. Mr. DODD. Mr. President, before my colleague from New York departs the floor and my colleague from Florida continues, I want to commend my colleague from Florida for an excellent statement. And, let me just say, the distinguished Senator from New York has contributed more to the collective wisdom in this body on the subject of welfare reform than anyone. I say that with all due respect to the other 99 of us in this Chamber, but the Senator from New York has dedicated virtually a lifetime of service focused on this complex issue. She is no longer with us, but Barbara Tuchman wrote a wonderful book called the ``March of Folly.'' It was related to foreign policy failures throughout history. What made her book unique is that she talked about failures where those responsible for conducting foreign policy--from the Trojan Wars to the Vietnam war--knew when they were about to do something that, in fact, it was wrong and that there were better alternatives. But, they refused to recognize them. She described several historical events beginning with Troy, including the American Revolution, and several others. Were she alive today and were she to write a domestic version of the ``March of Folly,'' I suspect our current debate on welfare reform might be a chapter in that book. My fear is, and I heard my colleague from New York express this over and over again, we are missing each other in the night as we discuss this subject matter. The Senator from New York has said repeatedly we are not engaged in reform here at all. What we are engaged in is a dismantling, total dismantling of a system with a faint hope that what we are about to put in place is somehow going to serve the public in a better way. What we are talking about here is reducing our Federal commitment to welfare by roughly $70 billion, passing the cost on to the States and localities of this country and asking them to assume the responsibility and burden of picking up this chore with little likelihood that we are going to achieve the desired goals expressed, with all due respect to the majority leader's bill. I just want to take a moment, before getting into the substance of my remarks, and urge my colleagues to [[Page S 12764]] please listen --listen--to our colleague from New York. There is a lot of wisdom in what he says. He knows this issue well. Historically, we have paid attention to our colleagues, regardless of party, regardless of ideology, who brought a special knowledge and experience to a subject matter. The Senator from New York is that individual in our midst. We ought to be listening to him on this subject. So I hope in the coming days, we can get away from a bit of the politics of this issue and think about what we are doing and what a mess we are likely to create in this country, costing the middle-class taxpayers billions of dollars before we are through, all in the name of some political debate about who is going to deal with the welfare recipient more harshly than the next. That ought not to be what this debate is about. It ought to be about how we reform our current system to make it work better in a realistic, thoughtful, prudent manner. Unfortunately, I do not think that this has been the case. I know my colleague from New York has other business to attend to, but I just felt very strongly when I came over here to address this matter. This is one of those rare occasions when the ``March of Folly'' seems to be upon us once again. Mr. President, I hope we will pay some close attention to the proposals that are being offered by the distinguished Democratic leader and hope that somehow in the next few days we may come to our senses and find some common ground on this issue. I read the other day that the distinguished majority leader announced in Chicago that there will be no compromises this fall. How does this institution function when the leader of our body says there will be no compromise on a subject matter that will have a profound effect on our country for years to come? We need to seek some common ground and thoughtful analysis to deal intelligently and effectively with the issue of welfare reform. There is no debate about what we are trying to achieve: How do we move people from dependency to self-sufficiency? We are now looking at grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who have been dependent on welfare without the ability or the fortune of work. How do we move people to work in an intelligent way? How do we make it possible for them to get there and stay there, so that they have at least the basic protection of health care and some safe place to put their children? This is not a concept that is terribly difficult to grasp, I hope. Every single family in this country ought to be able to relate to this. They do. When you go to work, where is your child? Who is watching your child? Every single person, from the highest paid chief executive officer down to the lowest wage earner in this country, understands that critical issue: if you are going to go to work, you need to have access to safe, affordable, and quality child care. It ought not to be difficult for us to try and come up with some ways to do achieve this. The benefit of all of this is not just fiscal, it also has to do with the fabric of our country. It has to do with helping to provide people opportunities to have a sense of self-worth as we build our neighborhoods and communities. It is a critical element. And trying to find the ways and the means to accomplish that goal ought to be the subject of our discussions. We should not, as I said earlier, outdo each other in our rhetoric to indict people, in most cases, who, through no fault of their own, are in this situation. I left this chart here, Mr. President, because it ought to be in everyone's mind. As our colleague from New York has pointed out, two- thirds of the people we are talking about in this bill are children; they are not adults, they are kids. Two-thirds of the recipients are America's children. In Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, there are staggering numbers of children who are recipients or dependents of families where there is this dependency on public assistance of one kind or another. I hope, again, we can have an honest and thoughtful debate about how we can improve this situation, rather than worsening it by creating a race to the bottom. The Washington Post the other day--I do not have it here with me today--had a lengthy article about what will happen as States race to cut benefits. As some States cut benefits, their actions will put great pressure on neighboring States to follow suit, or else risk becoming a magnet for families searching for ways to end their slide further down the economic ladder. As the race proceeds, it will cause great damage to our national commitment to address these problems. Maybe I am wrong, but I honestly believe when there is a child in Pennsylvania, or a child in Colorado, or a child in New York that is in trouble, I have an obligation as a Senator to help them. I am a U.S. Senator from the State of Connecticut, but my interest and concern about children is not limited to the geography that I represent. It is the country that I represent. And so when there is a child who is hurting in a Western State, an Eastern State, or my own State, I believe that, through the constitutional process which creates this institution, I ought to bring a concern to this national body to grapple with these problems in a way that makes sense for all of us. I should not just assume that these problems are Colorado's problem, or New York's problem, or Pennsylvania's problem alone. That belief would run contrary to our sense of nationhood. So the goals of work and independence and self-sufficiency and family unity are all things that we ought to be striving for. We are going to miss that mark substantially if we do not try and find ways to achieve those goals in a realistic way, and make the kinds of investments that will need to be made if we are going to be successful. The tendency to blame and punish is certainly tempting. I understand the politics of it. But in the long-term it is not going to help us resolve the kind of difficulties that I think we have been asked to assume by our election to this body as national representatives--not just our own States' representatives but national representatives. There is strong evidence that the rise of poverty is, in large part, attributable to declining wages. There has been a tremendous amount of evidence that over the past 2\1/2\ decades wages have declined, and anxiety and fear has grown among our people as a result of that trend. I hope we will keep this evidence in mind as we consider this debate on welfare reform. If we take the view that the only purpose of welfare reform is to punish people--as I said a moment ago, those who have been getting something for nothing--then we are going to ignore the fact that welfare is an unwelcome fate for most recipients. More important, we will miss the opportunity, in my view, for any kind of real, meaningful reform, because we will ignore what we must do to move people from the dependency of welfare to work: First, to provide them with education and training. Again, we all know we are entering a sophisticated age. There are fewer and fewer jobs where little or no education or training is needed. As it is right now, less than 1 percent of the jobs in this country are going to be available to people with less than a high school diploma. In a few years, it will be a college diploma. You are going to have to have those skills if you are going to move people to work. The jobs will not exist for people in this category without the training. Second, you have to ensure that States are partners with the Federal government, lest they engage in a race to the bottom that rewards States for spending less on moving their people from welfare rolls to payrolls. I do not think anyone believes that is a wise course to follow. Third, and I think most important in this debate, and I have referenced it already--is to ensure that parents have the child care that they need in order to keep a job in the first place. Child care, I happen to believe, is the linchpin of welfare reform. No matter what else we do, if a parent cannot find a safe and affordable place for their young children during the working day, that parent is not going to be able to hold down a job. I do not care how you look at that issue or analyze it. That is a fact. In my view, the alternative proposal offered by the majority leader, Senator Dole, fails to meet this three-part standard. It represents, I think, a retreat from the problem and not reform of it. It does not even, in my view, deserve to be called reform. All it would [[Page S 12765]] do is package up Federal programs for poor families, cut the funding by $70 billion, and ship the whole problem to the 50 States. Is somebody going to tell me that is reform? That is just passing the buck and asking the middle-class taxpayer to have their property taxes and sales taxes skyrocket at the local level--as we wash our hands of it. We have reformed the problem. Mr. President, we will have done nothing of the kind. The acid test of any welfare reform proposal is its impact on children, in my view, because they are the majority of the recipients. Is a reform proposal going to punish the children for the mistakes or bad luck of their parents? It bears repeating time and time again that two-thirds of the AFDC recipients are children. More than 9 million children received cash assistance in 1993. The Republican welfare reform proposal, as it is called, would single these children out for extraordinarily harsh treatment. I do not care what your ideology or politics are, I do not know of anybody that wants to see that happen. Yet, Mr. President, as a matter of fact, that is just what happens under this proposal. In my view, the Republican plan packages up punitive policies that aim for the parent, but will hit the child instead. Children should not be penalized because of the happenstance into which they have been born. I do not think we want to see that be the case. We promise the elderly and veterans a minimum level of support in our society. Why can we not do the same for children? We need a national commitment to see that children are not abused, that they do not go hungry, and that their basic needs are being met. The Republican proposal, however, fails to provide even the most basic minimum standards for our Nation's children. Mr. President, I want to stress that these children, I believe, are our N

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FAMILY SELF-SUFFICIENCY ACT
(Senate - September 07, 1995)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages S12757-S12796] FAMILY SELF-SUFFICIENCY ACT The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the hour of 10:30 a.m. having arrived, the Senate will now resume consideration of H.R. 4, which the clerk will report. The legislative clerk read as follows: A bill (H.R. 4) to restore the American family, reduce illegitimacy, control welfare spending, and reduce welfare dependence. The Senate resumed consideration of the bill. Pending: Dole modified amendment No. 2280, of a perfecting nature. Daschle modified amendment No. 2282 (to Amendment No. 2280), in the nature of a substitute. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the time until 3:30 p.m. shall be equally divided between the managers. Mr. MOYNIHAN addressed the Chair. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York is recognized. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it has been understood with my friend, [[Page S 12758]] the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Finance, that time is equally divided, and that should there be no speaker seeking recognition, we will suggest the absence of a quorum and the time will be charged equally to each side. Mr. PACKWOOD. That has been agreed upon. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank my friend. Mr. President, in auspicious timing, the Washington Post has a splendid editorial this morning entitled ``Welfare: Two Kinds of Compromise.'' It speaks of the compromise that was notably on display when Congress, the Nation's Governors, and President Reagan worked out some of the better provisions of the Family Support Act in 1988, aimed at reforming welfare. The parties all agreed on the sensible principles that the Federal Government should help the poor and that the existing welfare program was not doing enough to move people into jobs. The resulting bill was far from perfect and was not adequately financed--that's why welfare reform is still very much a live issue--but it did result in some successes that could be built upon with a new round of reform. Mr. President, some time later in our debate, I will offer the Family Support Act of 1995, which builds on the 1988 legislation, which passed out of this Chamber 96 to 1. I recall that there was great bipartisan harmony in the Rose Garden when President Reagan signed it. In the Committee on Finance, I offered the Family Support Act of 1995, and it failed to pass, by 12 votes to 8, which is scarcely an overwhelming rejection. It was a party-line vote, I am sorry to say. Seven years ago it was very different. But we will have an opportunity to discuss it. I ask unanimous consent, as we begin this morning, to have this editorial printed in the Record. There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: [From the Washington Post, Sept. 7, 1995] Welfare: Two Kinds of Compromise There are different kinds of political compromise. The best kind happens when the contending parties find that substantive agreement can be reached without a compromise of principles. This sort of accord was notably on display when Congress, the nation's governors and President Reagan worked out some of the better provisions of the Family Support Act in 1988, aimed at reforming welfare. The parties all agreed on the sensible principles that the federal government should help the poor and that the existing welfare program was not doing enough to move people into jobs. The resulting bill was far from perfect and was not adequately financed--that's why welfare reform is still very much a live issue--but it did result in some successes that could be built upon with a new round of reform. But there is a less honorable tradition of compromise involving not a quest for consensus but the artful manipulation of labels and slogans. It is this kind of compromise that is most to be feared as Congress approaches the welfare issue. The debate now seems hopelessly entangled in the rivalry between Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm for the Republican presidential nomination. That was clear when Mr. Dole gave a speech the other day in Chicago promising to fight ``for revolutionary change vote by vote and bill by bill,'' and Mr. Gramm responded rapid-fire at a Washington news conference. ``I see Sen. Dole moving to the right in speeches every day,'' Mr. Gramm said. ``I don't see it reflected in what he's doing in the United States Senate.'' This is a bad context in which to legislate on a problem such as welfare, where the tough issues will not be solved by a resort to doctrine or slogans. Take a particularly hard question: If welfare is turned into a block grant, should states, in exchange for receiving something close to their current levels of federal aid, be required to maintain something like their current level of spending on the poor. Those spending levels, after all, got them their current allotments of aid in the first place. A small group of Senate Republicans who are trying to prevent Mr. Dole from reacting to Mr. Gramm by doing anything he wants, rightly see this as a central issue. But it's easy to include a provision in a bill labeled ``maintenance of effort,'' as Mr. Dole effectively has, and make it essentially meaningless, as Mr. Dole also effectively has, by allowing states to count all sorts of extraneous expenditures as meeting this ``maintenance of effort'' requirement and having the requirement expire in a couple of years. The provision would give Mr. Dole cover with his party's moderates without really giving them much of substance. It's fake compromise. Much more of that sort of thing could become the rule in the coming weeks. Mr. Gramm can make welfare a centerpiece of his campaign against Mr. Dole if he wants to. But the rest of the Senate, not to mention President Clinton, does not need to be complicit in turning a momentous piece of legislation over to the politics of sound bites. Far better no welfare bill than the kind likely to be created in this atmosphere. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I see my distinguished friend, the Senator from North Dakota, on the floor, and I am happy to yield him 20 minutes if that will be sufficient for his purposes. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from North Dakota. Mr. DORGAN. I thank the Senator from New York for yielding me the time to discuss the Daschle amendment on welfare reform. A friend of mine the other day described a circumstance in his small rural hometown. There was a Lutheran minister who did not make very much money ministering to a very small congregation, being paid a very small salary. And because a minister in a small town is paid very little, his wife gave piano lessons in order to make a few dollars to try to make ends meet for him and his wife. These folks were the parents of the friend of mine who was referring them to me. He said they lived in a very meager house provided by the church and lived on a very meager income all of their lives. They contributed to their community by ministering at the church and by his wife giving piano lessons and teaching Sunday school. At the other end of the block, there was a wonderful family, as well. This family started a business, worked very hard, made an enormous amount of money and were very successful. They were well liked and also contributed much to the community. The two families had taken different routes. One chose ministering in a small rural church where they were never to earn any significant amount of money and always lived near subsistence. The other chose to pursue an occupation that would lead them to accumulate a substantial amount of assets. Both were good families and both contributed to their community. My friend said, ``I wonder if my parents contributed less to their community than the folks down the block who made a substantial amount of money.'' I think not. I think they made at least as great a contribution. But they ended up with nothing. I use that story to illustrate that, for some in this country these days, being poor is out of fashion. If you are poor, somehow you just did not make it in America and you chose not to spend all of your time trying to maximize your income. So you end up in circumstances, after age 70 and after having ministered for 40 years in a rural church, where you have nothing. And maybe you end up needing some help from someone. But that is not disgraceful. It was because you chose to contribute in other ways during your lifetime and chose not to spend 50 years trying to maximize your income. The question is, did the minister and his family contribute less to our country? No, they did not. They found themselves in circumstances of some difficulty--without income, without resources, without assets. There are a lot of good people in our country just like them. The people I just described are atypical. The more likely and typical person in need in this country, with respect to welfare, is a young woman in poverty--an increasingly feminine picture these days--who is raising children in a household without two parents present. One morning at about 6 a.m., I went down to a homeless shelter here in Washington, DC, and sat there for a couple of hours talking to the people who were there. I have told my colleagues on one previous occasion about my visit at the shelter with a 23-year-old young woman, whom I believe, had three children, whose husband had left her, who had no skills, no high school education, no job, and no place to live. She and her children, after having spent the night in a temporary shelter, as they did every night, were then put on buses in order to be at this feeding center at 6 a.m. I sat and visited with this young woman, and I discovered with her, as with virtually everyone else on welfare with whom I have ever visited, that what she wanted most in life was a good job. She was not asking me, can you give me a bigger welfare check? Can you find a way to extend your hand with more money, more benefits, more help? That is not what she was asking. [[Page S 12759]] I was asking her what would she really like if this morning she could wave a wand and change her life? Her response was that she desperately wanted to have a job that paid her a sufficient income so that she could save money for a first month's down payment to rent an apartment where she could live with her children. She said to me, I want a place to live. I know in order to get a place to live, I need to get a job. In order to get a job, I have to have some skills. I do look for work almost every day and I do get work. And the minute I get work--it is occasionally frying a hamburger at some franchise place and always at the minimum wage--I lose my health care benefits for my children. The moment I try to save $10 or $20 for the first month's rent on an apartment so I could get rid of this homeless condition for me and my children and find a place to live, the minute I save $10 or $20, I lose my AFDC payment or it is reduced by the same amount. And as I drove back to the office here on Capitol Hill the morning after I visited with her, I thought to myself, I am pretty well educated. I have a couple of college degrees. I have done pretty well. And I wondered how could I think my way through this problem if I were in this young woman's situation? What kind of a solution allows her to get off this treadmill, the treadmill of poverty, helplessness, hopelessness? I honestly, putting myself in her position, could not really think my way out of her problem. She cannot get a job because she does not have the skills. She cannot save money for a down payment on rent because she does not have a job. If she gets a job and starts saving money, she loses AFDC payments for her kids. It is an endless circle of trouble for someone who is literally trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they cannot recover. Now, I mention that story because in order to talk about welfare reform, you have to talk about two truths. One is often used by those of us in public office, regrettably, to talk about welfare. That is, the stereotypical notion of who is a welfare recipient. It is some bloated, overweight, lazy, slovenly, indolent, good-for-nothing person laying in a Lazy Boy recliner with a quart of beer in one hand and a Jack Daniels in another hand, with his hand on the television changer watching a 27-inch color television set and unwilling to get up and get out and get a job and go to work, munching nachos all day long watching Oprah, Geraldo, and Montel. That is the notion of the stereotypical welfare recipient. I suppose that happens. There is, I suppose, a small element among welfare recipients who are inherently lazy, unmotivated, unwilling to work, and have become institutionalized in the welfare system. This small element believes he or she can go on welfare and live on it forever, even if they are able bodied. That does happen. It should not happen. It is a minority of the people on welfare. We must eliminate those people for whom welfare has become an institutionalized way of life. We can and will stop these abusers of the system. The welfare bill that we have offered--Senator Daschle, Senator Moynihan, myself, and others--is a bill that says to those folks, if you believe that in this country you can live on welfare as a routine matter and you are able bodied, then you are wrong. Welfare is temporary assistance. We are willing to give it, we believe we must give it. But welfare is temporary and it is conditional. Our bill says we will offer a temporary hand if you are down and out. But you have a responsibility to take hold of that hand and get out of poverty by getting training to help you get a job. Our plan is intended to move people off the welfare rolls and on to payrolls. That is what our bill says. That is what we say to those folks. The abuser--the able bodied who are lazy, is a minority in the welfare system. The bulk of the welfare recipients are represented by the woman I discussed earlier--the young woman living in poverty, a 23- year-old unskilled woman with three children to raise, and not the means with which to do it. She represents the bulk of the welfare recipients. The question is, What do we do about it? Let me give a couple of other facts. It is also a stereotypical notion of welfare that we have a lot of people in this country who are simply producing large numbers of children in order to get more welfare benefits. It probably does happen, but it is not typical. The average size of the welfare family in America is nearly identical to the average size of the American family. Let me say that again because it is important. In public debate we all too often use stereotypes, and the stereotype is the notion that there is someone out there having 16 babies because producing babies allows them to get a lot of welfare. The average size of the welfare family is nearly identical to the average size of the average family in our country. We spend about 1 percent of the Federal budget on welfare. A substantial amount of money is spent in many ways in our country, but we spend only about 1 percent of the Federal budget. My interest in this issue has to do with two things. First, I would like to engage with people from as far right on the political spectrum as Pat Buchanan and people all the way to the far left and say we all agree on one thing: welfare is temporary. Welfare should not become institutionalized for people who are able bodied and believe they ought to live off of the rest of the taxpayers for the rest of their lives. The temporary nature of welfare assistance is embodied in the Daschle bill. Second, and more important to me, is an understanding of our obligation to America's children. Tens of millions of America's children are growing up in circumstances of poverty. They were born in circumstances of poverty not because they chose to, not because they decided that is what they wanted for their lives, but because of a circumstance of birth. Two-thirds of the people on welfare in America are kids under 16 years of age. No one, no matter how thoughtless they may be in public debate, would say, I hope, to a 4-, 6-, or 8-year-old child we say: ``You do not matter. Your hunger does not count. Your clothing needs are irrelevant.'' I have spent a lot of time working on hunger issues as a Member of Congress and have told my colleagues before about a young man who made an indelible impression with me. I will never forget it. A man named David Bright from New York City, who also lived in a homeless shelter, described to us on the Hunger Committee when I served in the House, his life in the shelter with rats and with danger and so on. He said that no 10-year-old boy like me should have to put his head down on his desk at school in the afternoon because it hurts to be hungry. This from a 10-year-old boy telling us in Congress about stomachs that hurt because they did not have enough to eat. This welfare bill care about our kids in this country. We must decide, whatever else we do about welfare, to take care of America's children in the right way--to give them hope, opportunity and, yes, nutrition, education, and shelter. Now, when I talk about children, there is one inescapable fact that the Senator from New York has talked about at great length that has to be addressed in the context of welfare reform. And that is the epidemic of teenage pregnancies in this country. There will be roughly 4 million babies born this year in America-- roughly. Over 1 million of those babies will be born in circumstances where two parents will not be present at the birth. 900,000 of children born this year will never in their lifetime learn the identity of their father. Think of the circumstances of that, what it means to a society. Nearly 1 million babies born this year will never in their lifetime learn the identity of their father. The Democratic alternative we are considering today addresses the issue of teenage pregnancy and the epidemic that is occurring in this country. We address the circumstances where children are growing up in homes where the parents are children themselves, and they have no information or experience to do adequate parenting. What we do in the Daschle amendment is that we want a national crusade against teenage pregnancy; we say that teenage pregnancy is not something that is acceptable to this country. It is not something we should promote or encourage; it is something we should discourage. People should have [[Page S 12760]] children only when they are able to care for them. What this amendment says to a child who is going to have a child, a 16- or 17-year-old child who is going to have a baby--which is happening all too often in this country--is you are not going to be able to live in a separate residence if that happens. You are not going to be able to leave school and get public assistance. We say there are going to be conditions for receiving assistance. Every teenage mother who has a baby out of wedlock has to understand this. If you do not stay in school, you will lose all benefits--nothing. Benefits are terminated. And you are not going to be able to collect money to set up a separate living arrangement for yourself and your baby. Our proposal establishes some adult-supervised living homes, where teenage mothers will have to live in supervised circumstances and stay in school as a condition for receiving benefits. We are saying this matters in our country. There is teenage pregnancy epidemic that this country must deal with. It is also an epidemic that eats up a substantial amount of our welfare benefits to respond to it. Our proposal says we can and should do something about it. As I indicated, the Senator from New York has done an enormous amount of work on this issue. I commend him for it. He was the impetus in our Democratic caucus for saying: This is wrong. This is going to hurt our country. This is going to disintegrate our society unless we address it in the right way. This amendment, the Daschle initiative, addresses teenage pregnancy, in my judgment, in a very significant way. I am very proud to say this is the right way to do it. It is the right way to go about it. We also say something else. We say to a young woman who has a child out of wedlock, ``If you are going to get benefits, you have a responsibility to help us identify who the father is. You have that responsibility. If you do not do that, you do not get benefits.'' We are going to find out who the father is, and we are going to go after deadbeat dads. Deadbeat dads have a responsibility to help provide for those children. Not just taxpayers, but the people who fathered those children have a responsibility to provide some resources to help those children. They each have a responsibility to be a parent. But in the event they will not do that, we are going to make sure that they own up to the responsibility of providing resources for those children. Our bill is tough on absent parents who are delinquent in child support. Our bill is tough on this issue. When a child is born out of wedlock and when a mother says ``I now want benefits,'' we insist that mother help us identify the father, and that father help pay for and contribute to the well-being of that child. I would like to mention two other points about this legislation. I have not done this in any necessary order. I guess I could have prioritized this welfare discussion a bit more, but I wanted to talk about a couple of component parts of it that are important to me. First, there is an assumption that if we reform the welfare system, there will be enormous savings. Savings of $100 billion over 7 years, as I believe was estimated in the budget resolution, are not going to happen. The fact is, if we do what is necessary to reform the welfare system, to make it really work, we are not going to save money in the next 7 years. But we can build a better country and make people more responsible and give people opportunity and get people off the welfare rolls and onto payrolls. The woman in the homeless shelter that I talked about earlier is the reason we are not going to save money. In order for her to work and get a job, she has two requirements. She has to get some training to get a good job. And then, in order to work at the job, she has to have some child care. If she does not get the training, she will not get the job. And if she does not have child care, she cannot work. Then, when those two requirements are met, one other element has to be present. If the job that person gets does not provide health care, then we have to have some Medicaid transition benefits as well. If we do not do those three things, welfare reform will fail. All three things cost money in the short term. In the long term, they will save money. But there is no way on God's green Earth to believe someone who says, if we reform this welfare system--and we should and we will-- and do it the right way, that we will save $100 billion in the next 7 years. We can put the country on the right track. We can do the right thing. We can end dependency on welfare by able-bodied people, but we will not save $100 billion and it is time for everyone in this Chamber to understand that. The second point I would like to make about the financing of welfare is the notion embodied in the Republican proposal, that we can solve this problem quickly and easily if only we simply aggregate all of this money into a block grant and ship it off somewhere and thereby create some nirvana by which the welfare problem is solved. By and large, block grants are blockheaded. They will, in my judgment, if used routinely and repeatedly, as some have suggested, on virtually every issue coming before the Congress, result in the most egregious abuse and waste of the taxpayers' money we will have ever seen. Do you want to describe how to promote waste in Government? I will tell you how. You have one level of Government raise the money and then send it to somebody else and say, ``You spend it. No strings attached. We will not watch.'' If you want to promote irresponsible, reckless, wasteful, wild, abusive spending, I guarantee you this blockheaded approach to block grants is the quickest and most effective way to do it. So, those who come to us with these simple little placebos, who say take this and you can believe it is medicine, whether it is block grants or $100 billion savings, it is pretty unimpressive to me. What we Democrats have done is put together an alternative. It is an alternative that says welfare cannot be permanent. Welfare is going to be temporary. Welfare is not unconditional. Welfare is going to be conditional. You need help? We are going to give you some help. But you have a responsibility in accepting that help. It is your responsibility to step up and out and off of the welfare system and become a productive member of our society on a payroll somewhere. The second element of our alternative piece of legislation that is critically important is that we say we are going to protect America's children. Yes, we are going to reform the welfare system, but we are going to do it the right way, with the right incentives that require responsibility for oneself. That is the foundation of our approach. But, at the same time, we are also going to protect America's children. Our plan leaves no questions unanswered about whether America's children will be protected. That is why I am delighted to be here to support the Daschle initiative. I was part of a large group of people who helped construct it. I was not the major architect. I know the Senator from New York and others support it as well. I have taken slightly more time than I intended, but I appreciate the generosity of the Senator from New York. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from New York. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, may I thank the Senator from North Dakota, Senator Dorgan, for beginning today's debate, today's critical debate, in an open, thoughtful, fair-minded manner. Could I comment on just one particular point? The Senator raised the question of the children born out of wedlock, and he is quite right. In 1992, 1,224,876 children were born out of wedlock--in some census tracts, 80 percent of all children born. Happily, North Dakota has been spared--or spared itself. This is something altogether new to our experience. And 30 years ago, you could not have discussed it on the Senate floor. There is a maturity coming to our debates. This was a subject-- the ratio, in 1992, reached 30.1 percent. It is probably almost 33 now. It has gone up every year since 1970. In 1970, it was 10.6 percent. So it has tripled, the ratio, and the number of children have tripled. We could not talk about this. We were not sure it was happening. Was it [[Page S 12761]] an aberration, just the weather, something like that? There used to be theories that when there would be blackouts there would be more children conceived. That turned out not to be so. We have a social crisis of a new order--not a recession, not a drought, not a collapse of farm prices, nor an increase in mortgages, the things that have come with some periodicity and consequence to us, and which we have learned to understand pretty much and manage. We have never had this before, and we have never talked about it before; not in the calm, thoughtful way the Senator from North Dakota has done. I want to thank him most sincerely for setting a tone which I think and I hope will continue throughout this debate. Mr. President, I look to my friend on the Republican side. Does he wish to speak? Mr. PACKWOOD. I do. Mr. MOYNIHAN. If I may observe, the Senator from Florida is here. Mr. PACKWOOD. I apologize. I can wait. I am going to be on the floor. The Senator may go right ahead. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield to the distinguished Senator from Florida 15 minutes. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Campbell). The Senator from Florida is recognized to speak for 15 minutes. Mr. GRAHAM. Thank you very much, Mr. President and my distinguished colleagues. I appreciate the courtesy. I want to talk some about the structure of the welfare reform proposal that is before us and some concerns I have as to whether we are building a foundation on reality with steel and concrete, or a foundation of sand based on theory, hope, and avoidance of responsibility. I am going to be talking from basically two sources. First, I will talk from some statistics that are generic and analytical of the legislation before us. I will also be talking from some anecdotes which are personal and specific. For the last 21 years, I have had a practice of taking an occasional job in a different area of interest within my State. In July, I took a job with one of the two welfare-to-work programs in Florida, this one in Pensacola. This is a program which is very similar to the objectives of both the underlying bill and the amendment that is before us. It is mandatory; that is, participation is required. It has the goal of placing a high percentage of those persons who are currently on welfare into employment. It is exploring what are the pragmatic requirements of accomplishing that objective, and it is doing so in the community of Pensacola, which is very representative of the kind of communities across America in which this type of program will be applied. I am going to be using some of the information and observations from that experience also as the basis of my comments on the plan which is before us today. Mr. President, I strongly support a serious effort to move people from the dependency of welfare to the independence of and self- sufficiency through employment. That is a fundamentally important objective. As we start this, I want us to understand almost the moral dimension of what we are doing, and I will place that in the context of eight women with whom I spent a considerable amount of time in Pensacola who are part of this process of making the transition. Just to describe these eight women, they were six white and two African American women. They were somewhat older than I had anticipated. The youngest was in the early twenties, up to the early forties. All of them had two or more children. Three of the eight women had a child with a serious medical disability. I was initially surprised that there would be that high an incidence of medical disability. But on reflection, given the fact that these women typically had no or very limited prenatal care with their children and had limited access to primary care since their children were born, it is not surprising that there would be that incidence of medical disability. These are women who are very committed to a better life for their children through the achievement of independence for themselves. Many of these women have limited educational backgrounds and, therefore, the kind of job training in which they are now engaged in Pensacola, the Welfare to Work program, is difficult for them. But they are making a maximum effort to be successful. In the course of attending one of the programs in which they are learning some of the basic skills that will be necessary, one of the women broke down and cried. She said: ``This is so difficult for me, but I understand the importance of this opportunity that I am being given and, if I do not succeed, not only will this likely be my last chance but it will fundamentally change the future for my children. I want to succeed.'' Our moral responsibility as a society, Mr. President, is we are telling these women that you have 2, maybe 3 years to be successful in preparing yourself and securing employment, and securing employment at a level that will allow you to support your children. We are making a commitment to them that not only are we going to provide them with what would be required to do so, but there will be a job there that they can secure upon the completion of their preparation. And the consequences of their failing to get that job is that they and their children will have the level of support that they are currently receiving terminated or substantially altered and reduced. So there is a commitment on both sides. And it is from that point that I would like to draw some observations about the underlying bill which is before us today, because I believe it is based on some unrealistic assessments of the world in which this proposal will actually operate and creates the potential of some serious unfairness and a violation of that moral commitment that we are making to these Americans. First, I believe that the goal of the welfare plan, which is to have 25 percent of the current welfare beneficiaries employed in year 1 of this plan and 50 percent employed in year 5, is unrealistic. In year 1, the definition of reaching that 25 percent is a month-by- month evaluation of how many persons who were on welfare had been moved into a work position. And if at the end of the first 12 months of the fiscal year, you do not have an average of 25 percent, then your State is subject to sanctions. I believe it is going to be virtually if not absolutely impossible to reach that 25 percent goal. There is a necessary startup period in terms of developing the job placement programs, the job training programs, and the support services such as transportation, as well as securing child care for the young dependents of these women, which makes reaching the goal of a 25-percent objective in year 1 highly unlikely. Equally as difficult will be to reach the 50-percent level in year 5. That is in large part because of whether the jobs are going to actually be available. Pensacola, FL, happens to be an area that has a relatively growing economy, an economy which is creating a substantial number of jobs. But even there the administrators of the program stated that it will be very difficult to reach a 50 percent placement level within a 5-year period. That would be true because of the competition for those jobs from all the other people in the community who will be seeking that employment--the issue of will there be jobs that will be not just at the barest minimum wage but at a level high enough or at least offering a sufficient potential to raise a sufficient amount of money to be able to support a family of a single mother and two children, which is the typical family in Pensacola. There are 6,600 welfare families in Pensacola, so the goal is to place 3,300 of those in work by the year 2000. That will be a challenge for Pensacola. But, Mr. President, let us put that in the context of another American city, a substantially larger city, and that is Philadelphia. Philadelphia has not 6,600 people on welfare; it has 500,000 people who are receiving some form of public assistance. In Philadelphia, using the statistics provided by DRI McGraw-Hill on U.S. Market Review, in 1994 there were 2,149,000 jobs in Philadelphia. In the last year of their survey, which is 1997, the projection is there will be 2,206,000 jobs in the Philadelphia area, or an increase of approximately 47,000 jobs over that period from 1994 to 1997. We do not have the statistics to the year 2000, but assuming that that rate of increase [[Page S 12762]] continues, we could expect maybe another 20,000 or 30,000 jobs to the year 2000, so well under a 100,000-job growth and yet we are saying that by the year 2000, half of this population of 500,000 people is supposed to be placed in jobs in Philadelphia. How is that going to happen? I think we have a level of unreality in terms of the scale of the population that we are saying has to be trained and placed and their children supported and the number of jobs which are going to be created, particularly in those areas of the country that are not experiencing the kind of robust economic growth that a community such as Pensacola, FL, has experienced. My first point is that I think we have a statistical unreality in terms of what we are saying has to happen and what, in fact, is likely to occur. And for that reason, independent groups such as the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office that have looked at this plan, have stated that 44 out of the 50 States will not be able to meet the expectations of this legislation--that 44 out of the 50 States are going to fall into the category of those that are nonperformers and therefore subject to a 5-percent penalty. I would suggest that these numbers are so unrealistic in terms of the kind of commitments that we are prepared to make that the 5 percent penalty will be accepted as a fact of life for many States and that any serious effort to meet these unrealistic goals is likely to be abandoned. It is interesting to me the difference in which we are treating those programs that we are about to ship off to the States and say, ``You run them,'' such as welfare reform and Medicaid, where we are setting these theoretical goals, and then essentially abandoning any effort to do those things that will be necessary to make those goals attainable, and how we are treating the one big program we are responsible for running and that at least as of today no one has suggested be sent to the States to run, which is Medicare. There we are saying that Medicare has to be treated above politics; that we have to be very, very careful it is structured properly because we know we are going to be held responsible for how that one is administered. With welfare and Medicaid, we essentially are saying we can abandon all responsibilities for the pragmatic implementation. That is going to be somebody else's responsibility. A second level of unreality is in the funding levels and specifically in the area of unfunded mandates to the States. It is interesting, when we came here back in January with a very expansive and aggressive agenda of domestic issues, which issue received primacy, which received that special recognition of being Senate bill No. 1. Well, that honor was assigned to the legislation that dealt with reducing unfunded mandates, that as our No. 1 domestic objective we were going to cease the process of having the Federal Government meet its responsibilities by telling somebody else, generally a State or local government, what to do and requiring them to use their resources in order to achieve that national objective. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Can the Senator use another 5 minutes? We want to be fair to all Senators. Mr. GRAHAM. If I could. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I would be happy to do it. I am listening to what he has to say. Mr. GRAHAM. The reality is that this bill which we are about to pass will be the grandfather of all unfunded mandates. We are going to be imposing significant new responsibilities on the States, without the resources to fund those responsibilities, and that as we impose that grandfather of all unfunded mandates, we are going to be creating a whole series of stepchildren as its consequence. Let me just use the example of my State, a family of three typically, and in the case of all eight of the women I mentioned earlier, this is the case, a single mother with two children. The State of Florida provides $303 a month in economic support, cash assistance to that mother and two children. That $303 is roughly half Federal money and half State money. Under this proposal, it is going to take 75 percent of the Federal money that we have been providing for the support of that family of three in order to pay for the job training and related support activities and the child care of that mother and her family while she is preparing to work. There is no proposal to act to fund those additional activities. In fact, the level of funding at the Federal level will be declining over the period of this program. So instead of that family having $303, it will see that reduced to approximately $185 a month which will be available for economic support because the remainder of the money, approximately $135, will be used to pay for these other mandated services. So we are saying that this family, which has been living on $303 a month, is now going to have to start living on $180 a month while the remainder of the money is used to prepare the mother for a future job and to provide child care for her dependent children. Mr. President, I think that is an unrealistic economic scenario. And it becomes even more draconian since we are no longer going to be requiring States, at least after 2 years, and even in a very soft way during the first 2 years, to provide any continuing match. So potentially not $85. If the State of Florida were to decide to abandon its local match and not provide any State funds, we could have this family living on $35 a month, just that portion of the Federal money that is left over after you have met your mandates. I think that is highly unrealistic and would defeat not only the goal of moving people from welfare to work, but would also undermine our basic American humanitarian and compassionate sense of responsibility to all of our citizens. And finally, the reality of this proposal is in the extreme disparities that will exist from State to State under this plan. I mention unfunded mandates. In the case of Florida, about 75 percent of our Federal funds would be required to meet the unfunded mandates. We are better off than Mississippi, where it will take 88 percent of Mississippi's Federal money to meet their unfunded mandates, which compares to the District of Columbia, that can meet their unfunded mandates with only 46 percent of the Federal money. Why is there such a great disparity? Because we start off with a tremendous disparity in how much Federal money per child is available under the proposal that has been submitted by the majority leader. A stark difference is right within a mile of where we stand. A poor child in the District of Columbia will get three times as much money under this proposal of the majority leader as will a poor child across the Potomac River in Virginia. I think that is not only indefensible and unfair, but undermines the basic credibility of this proposal as a means of moving people from welfare to work. So, Mr. President, in those areas, I think we have a house that is being built on a foundation of sand. Mr. President, we need to guard against passing legislation which has rhetorical mandates and aspirations, but without the practical understanding of what it would mean in the lives of people and, therefore, virtually assuring that we will have a failure of accomplishing our objectives and will have more decades of exactly the kind of welfare issue, exactly the kind of continuing dependence that we are trying to ameliorate through this effort. Mr. President, I urge the adoption of the more pragmatic amendment which has been offered by Senator Daschle and his colleagues as the starting point for serious, meaningful welfare reform. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself 5 minutes, if I need that much, to thank the Senator from Florida, the former Governor of Florida, who knows precisely of what he speaks when Federal formulas are involved. You heard the striking differences between the jurisdictions of Florida, Mississippi, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. I hope you also heard the Senator's comment about the city of Philadelphia, the number of jobs in the city, the numbers created in recent years. I have been trying to make a point, as I said yesterday--I do not know that I can persuade anyone, but I can try to make it and I can argue-- which is the point that 30 years ago, we might have considered turning this subject back to the States, giving them [[Page S 12763]] block grants of some kind, saying, ``You handle it. Cities, you handle it. It makes some sense since local governments are closer to the problem. It is not that big a problem.'' It is today, in one after another jurisdiction, a problem that has overwhelmed the capacity of the city and the State. The Senator mentioned Philadelphia. In 1993, 57 percent of the children living in the city of Philadelphia were on AFDC, welfare, at one point in the course of the year. At any given moment, 44 percent-- these are numbers never contemplated. Nothing like that happened in the Great Depression. And these children are paupers. They are not from unemployed families, where there is a house, an automobile, some insurance. One of the few regulations the Federal Government does have--the rest are all intended you have to waiver for--if you have less than $1,000 in assets, you are a pauper. The cities cannot handle it. And they will not. Just as when we began the deinstitutionalization of our mental institutions in the early 1960's--at the last public bill-signing ceremony President Kennedy had, on October 31, 1963, he signed the Community Mental Health Construction Act of 1963. I was present. He gave me a pen. I had been involved with this in New York, where it began. Transfer license. We were going to build 2,000 community mental health centers by the year 1980, and one per 100,000 thereafter. We built about 400. We kind of overlapped and folded the program in and forgot about the program. We emptied out the mental institutions. And we have been hearing about homeless shelters all day. I said yesterday, and I will repeat again, in 10 years' time, with this legislation in place, with these time limits in place, children will be in the streets. Seventy-six percent of the children on welfare are on welfare for more than 5 years. The Senator from Connecticut, I hope, will keep that in mind--76 percent. About 40 percent--the remainder come and go quickly and are never a problem. But if we do this, we will have in my city of New York half a million people on the streets in New York. We wonder about homeless people. They used to be in mental institutions. Now these children are in houses. They are in households. We will wonder where they came from. We say, ``Why are these children sleeping on grates? Why are they being picked up in the morning frozen? Why are they horrible to each other, a menace to all, and more importantly to themselves? Whatever happened?'' When the homeless appeared in New York, we right away diagnosed it as a lack of affordable housing. That is not what it was. It was Federal policy in its most perverse mode. Make a great change and do not follow through. Make changes you do not fully understand. Those tranquilizers were not as good as we thought. Here are some other cities. In Detroit, 67 percent of children were on welfare at one point or another in the year of 1993; in Baltimore, 56 percent. My time has expired. But I will return to this subject. Now I am going to suggest the absence of a quorum for 1 minute to see whether the Senator from Oregon wishes to speak--I do not see him on the floor--after which it is the turn of the Senator from Connecticut. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The absence of a quorum has been suggested. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. MOYNIHAN. 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. MOYNIHAN. I am happy to yield to my friend. Is 15 minutes sufficient for his purposes? Mr. DODD. Why do we not try 15. I may need 20. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Twenty, it is. Mr. DODD. I thank the Senator. Mr. MOYNIHAN. May I record, Mr. President, the Senator from Oregon does not wish to speak at this moment. So if the speakers are all on our side, it is because we are talking, I suppose, about our bill. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Dodd, is recognized for 20 minutes. Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from New York. Before beginning, our colleague from Florida asked me to yield to him for a minute to raise a question to the distinguished Senator from New York. Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut very much. I appreciate his courtesy. I want to commend the Senator from New York for the excellent statement, and particularly that he brings us back to reality, just what are the circumstances of the people that are going to be affected by our actions. I would like to inject, briefly, for the Senator's information and possibly further comment, some good news. I mentioned that in Pensacola, there were 6,600 welfare families. I am pleased to say that in the first 18 months of the transition program, which is a program based on the 1988 legislation that the Senator from New York sponsored, that almost 600 of those 6,600 have, in fact, been placed in employment, that having occurred because there was a willingness to put the resources required to provide the kind of training and support, including child care, to those families to allow it to happen. It can happen. This is not just a doom-and-gloom scenario. We are not consigned to have to deal with this problem in its current form forever. But it is not going to be easy, it is not going to be quick, and it is not going to be inexpensive if we are going to achieve real results. I appreciate the constant reminder of the Senator from New York of those realities. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank my friend from Florida, and I do particularly appreciate his reference to the Family Support Act, which never promised a rose garden. We said if you try hard, you will have something to show for it. Pensacola does. Thank you, Mr. President. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut is recognized for 20 minutes. Mr. DODD. Mr. President, before my colleague from New York departs the floor and my colleague from Florida continues, I want to commend my colleague from Florida for an excellent statement. And, let me just say, the distinguished Senator from New York has contributed more to the collective wisdom in this body on the subject of welfare reform than anyone. I say that with all due respect to the other 99 of us in this Chamber, but the Senator from New York has dedicated virtually a lifetime of service focused on this complex issue. She is no longer with us, but Barbara Tuchman wrote a wonderful book called the ``March of Folly.'' It was related to foreign policy failures throughout history. What made her book unique is that she talked about failures where those responsible for conducting foreign policy--from the Trojan Wars to the Vietnam war--knew when they were about to do something that, in fact, it was wrong and that there were better alternatives. But, they refused to recognize them. She described several historical events beginning with Troy, including the American Revolution, and several others. Were she alive today and were she to write a domestic version of the ``March of Folly,'' I suspect our current debate on welfare reform might be a chapter in that book. My fear is, and I heard my colleague from New York express this over and over again, we are missing each other in the night as we discuss this subject matter. The Senator from New York has said repeatedly we are not engaged in reform here at all. What we are engaged in is a dismantling, total dismantling of a system with a faint hope that what we are about to put in place is somehow going to serve the public in a better way. What we are talking about here is reducing our Federal commitment to welfare by roughly $70 billion, passing the cost on to the States and localities of this country and asking them to assume the responsibility and burden of picking up this chore with little likelihood that we are going to achieve the desired goals expressed, with all due respect to the majority leader's bill. I just want to take a moment, before getting into the substance of my remarks, and urge my colleagues to [[Page S 12764]] please listen --listen--to our colleague from New York. There is a lot of wisdom in what he says. He knows this issue well. Historically, we have paid attention to our colleagues, regardless of party, regardless of ideology, who brought a special knowledge and experience to a subject matter. The Senator from New York is that individual in our midst. We ought to be listening to him on this subject. So I hope in the coming days, we can get away from a bit of the politics of this issue and think about what we are doing and what a mess we are likely to create in this country, costing the middle-class taxpayers billions of dollars before we are through, all in the name of some political debate about who is going to deal with the welfare recipient more harshly than the next. That ought not to be what this debate is about. It ought to be about how we reform our current system to make it work better in a realistic, thoughtful, prudent manner. Unfortunately, I do not think that this has been the case. I know my colleague from New York has other business to attend to, but I just felt very strongly when I came over here to address this matter. This is one of those rare occasions when the ``March of Folly'' seems to be upon us once again. Mr. President, I hope we will pay some close attention to the proposals that are being offered by the distinguished Democratic leader and hope that somehow in the next few days we may come to our senses and find some common ground on this issue. I read the other day that the distinguished majority leader announced in Chicago that there will be no compromises this fall. How does this institution function when the leader of our body says there will be no compromise on a subject matter that will have a profound effect on our country for years to come? We need to seek some common ground and thoughtful analysis to deal intelligently and effectively with the issue of welfare reform. There is no debate about what we are trying to achieve: How do we move people from dependency to self-sufficiency? We are now looking at grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who have been dependent on welfare without the ability or the fortune of work. How do we move people to work in an intelligent way? How do we make it possible for them to get there and stay there, so that they have at least the basic protection of health care and some safe place to put their children? This is not a concept that is terribly difficult to grasp, I hope. Every single family in this country ought to be able to relate to this. They do. When you go to work, where is your child? Who is watching your child? Every single person, from the highest paid chief executive officer down to the lowest wage earner in this country, understands that critical issue: if you are going to go to work, you need to have access to safe, affordable, and quality child care. It ought not to be difficult for us to try and come up with some ways to do achieve this. The benefit of all of this is not just fiscal, it also has to do with the fabric of our country. It has to do with helping to provide people opportunities to have a sense of self-worth as we build our neighborhoods and communities. It is a critical element. And trying to find the ways and the means to accomplish that goal ought to be the subject of our discussions. We should not, as I said earlier, outdo each other in our rhetoric to indict people, in most cases, who, through no fault of their own, are in this situation. I left this chart here, Mr. President, because it ought to be in everyone's mind. As our colleague from New York has pointed out, two- thirds of the people we are talking about in this bill are children; they are not adults, they are kids. Two-thirds of the recipients are America's children. In Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, there are staggering numbers of children who are recipients or dependents of families where there is this dependency on public assistance of one kind or another. I hope, again, we can have an honest and thoughtful debate about how we can improve this situation, rather than worsening it by creating a race to the bottom. The Washington Post the other day--I do not have it here with me today--had a lengthy article about what will happen as States race to cut benefits. As some States cut benefits, their actions will put great pressure on neighboring States to follow suit, or else risk becoming a magnet for families searching for ways to end their slide further down the economic ladder. As the race proceeds, it will cause great damage to our national commitment to address these problems. Maybe I am wrong, but I honestly believe when there is a child in Pennsylvania, or a child in Colorado, or a child in New York that is in trouble, I have an obligation as a Senator to help them. I am a U.S. Senator from the State of Connecticut, but my interest and concern about children is not limited to the geography that I represent. It is the country that I represent. And so when there is a child who is hurting in a Western State, an Eastern State, or my own State, I believe that, through the constitutional process which creates this institution, I ought to bring a concern to this national body to grapple with these problems in a way that makes sense for all of us. I should not just assume that these problems are Colorado's problem, or New York's problem, or Pennsylvania's problem alone. That belief would run contrary to our sense of nationhood. So the goals of work and independence and self-sufficiency and family unity are all things that we ought to be striving for. We are going to miss that mark substantially if we do not try and find ways to achieve those goals in a realistic way, and make the kinds of investments that will need to be made if we are going to be successful. The tendency to blame and punish is certainly tempting. I understand the politics of it. But in the long-term it is not going to help us resolve the kind of difficulties that I think we have been asked to assume by our election to this body as national representatives--not just our own States' representatives but national representatives. There is strong evidence that the rise of poverty is, in large part, attributable to declining wages. There has been a tremendous amount of evidence that over the past 2\1/2\ decades wages have declined, and anxiety and fear has grown among our people as a result of that trend. I hope we will keep this evidence in mind as we consider this debate on welfare reform. If we take the view that the only purpose of welfare reform is to punish people--as I said a moment ago, those who have been getting something for nothing--then we are going to ignore the fact that welfare is an unwelcome fate for most recipients. More important, we will miss the opportunity, in my view, for any kind of real, meaningful reform, because we will ignore what we must do to move people from the dependency of welfare to work: First, to provide them with education and training. Again, we all know we are entering a sophisticated age. There are fewer and fewer jobs where little or no education or training is needed. As it is right now, less than 1 percent of the jobs in this country are going to be available to people with less than a high school diploma. In a few years, it will be a college diploma. You are going to have to have those skills if you are going to move people to work. The jobs will not exist for people in this category without the training. Second, you have to ensure that States are partners with the Federal government, lest they engage in a race to the bottom that rewards States for spending less on moving their people from welfare rolls to payrolls. I do not think anyone believes that is a wise course to follow. Third, and I think most important in this debate, and I have referenced it already--is to ensure that parents have the child care that they need in order to keep a job in the first place. Child care, I happen to believe, is the linchpin of welfare reform. No matter what else we do, if a parent cannot find a safe and affordable place for their young children during the working day, that parent is not going to be able to hold down a job. I do not care how you look at that issue or analyze it. That is a fact. In my view, the alternative proposal offered by the majority leader, Senator Dole, fails to meet this three-part standard. It represents, I think, a retreat from the problem and not reform of it. It does not even, in my view, deserve to be called reform. All it would [[Page S 12765]] do is package up Federal programs for poor families, cut the funding by $70 billion, and ship the whole problem to the 50 States. Is somebody going to tell me that is reform? That is just passing the buck and asking the middle-class taxpayer to have their property taxes and sales taxes skyrocket at the local level--as we wash our hands of it. We have reformed the problem. Mr. President, we will have done nothing of the kind. The acid test of any welfare reform proposal is its impact on children, in my view, because they are the majority of the recipients. Is a reform proposal going to punish the children for the mistakes or bad luck of their parents? It bears repeating time and time again that two-thirds of the AFDC recipients are children. More than 9 million children received cash assistance in 1993. The Republican welfare reform proposal, as it is called, would single these children out for extraordinarily harsh treatment. I do not care what your ideology or politics are, I do not know of anybody that wants to see that happen. Yet, Mr. President, as a matter of fact, that is just what happens under this proposal. In my view, the Republican plan packages up punitive policies that aim for the parent, but will hit the child instead. Children should not be penalized because of the happenstance into which they have been born. I do not think we want to see that be the case. We promise the elderly and veterans a minimum level of support in our society. Why can we not do the same for children? We need a national commitment to see that children are not abused, that they do not go hungry, and that their basic needs are being met. The Republican proposal, however, fails to provide even the most basic minimum standards for our Nation's children. Mr. President, I want to stress that these children, I believe, are our Nation's r

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FAMILY SELF-SUFFICIENCY ACT
(Senate - September 07, 1995)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages S12757-S12796] FAMILY SELF-SUFFICIENCY ACT The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the hour of 10:30 a.m. having arrived, the Senate will now resume consideration of H.R. 4, which the clerk will report. The legislative clerk read as follows: A bill (H.R. 4) to restore the American family, reduce illegitimacy, control welfare spending, and reduce welfare dependence. The Senate resumed consideration of the bill. Pending: Dole modified amendment No. 2280, of a perfecting nature. Daschle modified amendment No. 2282 (to Amendment No. 2280), in the nature of a substitute. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the time until 3:30 p.m. shall be equally divided between the managers. Mr. MOYNIHAN addressed the Chair. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York is recognized. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it has been understood with my friend, [[Page S 12758]] the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Finance, that time is equally divided, and that should there be no speaker seeking recognition, we will suggest the absence of a quorum and the time will be charged equally to each side. Mr. PACKWOOD. That has been agreed upon. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank my friend. Mr. President, in auspicious timing, the Washington Post has a splendid editorial this morning entitled ``Welfare: Two Kinds of Compromise.'' It speaks of the compromise that was notably on display when Congress, the Nation's Governors, and President Reagan worked out some of the better provisions of the Family Support Act in 1988, aimed at reforming welfare. The parties all agreed on the sensible principles that the Federal Government should help the poor and that the existing welfare program was not doing enough to move people into jobs. The resulting bill was far from perfect and was not adequately financed--that's why welfare reform is still very much a live issue--but it did result in some successes that could be built upon with a new round of reform. Mr. President, some time later in our debate, I will offer the Family Support Act of 1995, which builds on the 1988 legislation, which passed out of this Chamber 96 to 1. I recall that there was great bipartisan harmony in the Rose Garden when President Reagan signed it. In the Committee on Finance, I offered the Family Support Act of 1995, and it failed to pass, by 12 votes to 8, which is scarcely an overwhelming rejection. It was a party-line vote, I am sorry to say. Seven years ago it was very different. But we will have an opportunity to discuss it. I ask unanimous consent, as we begin this morning, to have this editorial printed in the Record. There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: [From the Washington Post, Sept. 7, 1995] Welfare: Two Kinds of Compromise There are different kinds of political compromise. The best kind happens when the contending parties find that substantive agreement can be reached without a compromise of principles. This sort of accord was notably on display when Congress, the nation's governors and President Reagan worked out some of the better provisions of the Family Support Act in 1988, aimed at reforming welfare. The parties all agreed on the sensible principles that the federal government should help the poor and that the existing welfare program was not doing enough to move people into jobs. The resulting bill was far from perfect and was not adequately financed--that's why welfare reform is still very much a live issue--but it did result in some successes that could be built upon with a new round of reform. But there is a less honorable tradition of compromise involving not a quest for consensus but the artful manipulation of labels and slogans. It is this kind of compromise that is most to be feared as Congress approaches the welfare issue. The debate now seems hopelessly entangled in the rivalry between Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm for the Republican presidential nomination. That was clear when Mr. Dole gave a speech the other day in Chicago promising to fight ``for revolutionary change vote by vote and bill by bill,'' and Mr. Gramm responded rapid-fire at a Washington news conference. ``I see Sen. Dole moving to the right in speeches every day,'' Mr. Gramm said. ``I don't see it reflected in what he's doing in the United States Senate.'' This is a bad context in which to legislate on a problem such as welfare, where the tough issues will not be solved by a resort to doctrine or slogans. Take a particularly hard question: If welfare is turned into a block grant, should states, in exchange for receiving something close to their current levels of federal aid, be required to maintain something like their current level of spending on the poor. Those spending levels, after all, got them their current allotments of aid in the first place. A small group of Senate Republicans who are trying to prevent Mr. Dole from reacting to Mr. Gramm by doing anything he wants, rightly see this as a central issue. But it's easy to include a provision in a bill labeled ``maintenance of effort,'' as Mr. Dole effectively has, and make it essentially meaningless, as Mr. Dole also effectively has, by allowing states to count all sorts of extraneous expenditures as meeting this ``maintenance of effort'' requirement and having the requirement expire in a couple of years. The provision would give Mr. Dole cover with his party's moderates without really giving them much of substance. It's fake compromise. Much more of that sort of thing could become the rule in the coming weeks. Mr. Gramm can make welfare a centerpiece of his campaign against Mr. Dole if he wants to. But the rest of the Senate, not to mention President Clinton, does not need to be complicit in turning a momentous piece of legislation over to the politics of sound bites. Far better no welfare bill than the kind likely to be created in this atmosphere. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I see my distinguished friend, the Senator from North Dakota, on the floor, and I am happy to yield him 20 minutes if that will be sufficient for his purposes. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from North Dakota. Mr. DORGAN. I thank the Senator from New York for yielding me the time to discuss the Daschle amendment on welfare reform. A friend of mine the other day described a circumstance in his small rural hometown. There was a Lutheran minister who did not make very much money ministering to a very small congregation, being paid a very small salary. And because a minister in a small town is paid very little, his wife gave piano lessons in order to make a few dollars to try to make ends meet for him and his wife. These folks were the parents of the friend of mine who was referring them to me. He said they lived in a very meager house provided by the church and lived on a very meager income all of their lives. They contributed to their community by ministering at the church and by his wife giving piano lessons and teaching Sunday school. At the other end of the block, there was a wonderful family, as well. This family started a business, worked very hard, made an enormous amount of money and were very successful. They were well liked and also contributed much to the community. The two families had taken different routes. One chose ministering in a small rural church where they were never to earn any significant amount of money and always lived near subsistence. The other chose to pursue an occupation that would lead them to accumulate a substantial amount of assets. Both were good families and both contributed to their community. My friend said, ``I wonder if my parents contributed less to their community than the folks down the block who made a substantial amount of money.'' I think not. I think they made at least as great a contribution. But they ended up with nothing. I use that story to illustrate that, for some in this country these days, being poor is out of fashion. If you are poor, somehow you just did not make it in America and you chose not to spend all of your time trying to maximize your income. So you end up in circumstances, after age 70 and after having ministered for 40 years in a rural church, where you have nothing. And maybe you end up needing some help from someone. But that is not disgraceful. It was because you chose to contribute in other ways during your lifetime and chose not to spend 50 years trying to maximize your income. The question is, did the minister and his family contribute less to our country? No, they did not. They found themselves in circumstances of some difficulty--without income, without resources, without assets. There are a lot of good people in our country just like them. The people I just described are atypical. The more likely and typical person in need in this country, with respect to welfare, is a young woman in poverty--an increasingly feminine picture these days--who is raising children in a household without two parents present. One morning at about 6 a.m., I went down to a homeless shelter here in Washington, DC, and sat there for a couple of hours talking to the people who were there. I have told my colleagues on one previous occasion about my visit at the shelter with a 23-year-old young woman, whom I believe, had three children, whose husband had left her, who had no skills, no high school education, no job, and no place to live. She and her children, after having spent the night in a temporary shelter, as they did every night, were then put on buses in order to be at this feeding center at 6 a.m. I sat and visited with this young woman, and I discovered with her, as with virtually everyone else on welfare with whom I have ever visited, that what she wanted most in life was a good job. She was not asking me, can you give me a bigger welfare check? Can you find a way to extend your hand with more money, more benefits, more help? That is not what she was asking. [[Page S 12759]] I was asking her what would she really like if this morning she could wave a wand and change her life? Her response was that she desperately wanted to have a job that paid her a sufficient income so that she could save money for a first month's down payment to rent an apartment where she could live with her children. She said to me, I want a place to live. I know in order to get a place to live, I need to get a job. In order to get a job, I have to have some skills. I do look for work almost every day and I do get work. And the minute I get work--it is occasionally frying a hamburger at some franchise place and always at the minimum wage--I lose my health care benefits for my children. The moment I try to save $10 or $20 for the first month's rent on an apartment so I could get rid of this homeless condition for me and my children and find a place to live, the minute I save $10 or $20, I lose my AFDC payment or it is reduced by the same amount. And as I drove back to the office here on Capitol Hill the morning after I visited with her, I thought to myself, I am pretty well educated. I have a couple of college degrees. I have done pretty well. And I wondered how could I think my way through this problem if I were in this young woman's situation? What kind of a solution allows her to get off this treadmill, the treadmill of poverty, helplessness, hopelessness? I honestly, putting myself in her position, could not really think my way out of her problem. She cannot get a job because she does not have the skills. She cannot save money for a down payment on rent because she does not have a job. If she gets a job and starts saving money, she loses AFDC payments for her kids. It is an endless circle of trouble for someone who is literally trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they cannot recover. Now, I mention that story because in order to talk about welfare reform, you have to talk about two truths. One is often used by those of us in public office, regrettably, to talk about welfare. That is, the stereotypical notion of who is a welfare recipient. It is some bloated, overweight, lazy, slovenly, indolent, good-for-nothing person laying in a Lazy Boy recliner with a quart of beer in one hand and a Jack Daniels in another hand, with his hand on the television changer watching a 27-inch color television set and unwilling to get up and get out and get a job and go to work, munching nachos all day long watching Oprah, Geraldo, and Montel. That is the notion of the stereotypical welfare recipient. I suppose that happens. There is, I suppose, a small element among welfare recipients who are inherently lazy, unmotivated, unwilling to work, and have become institutionalized in the welfare system. This small element believes he or she can go on welfare and live on it forever, even if they are able bodied. That does happen. It should not happen. It is a minority of the people on welfare. We must eliminate those people for whom welfare has become an institutionalized way of life. We can and will stop these abusers of the system. The welfare bill that we have offered--Senator Daschle, Senator Moynihan, myself, and others--is a bill that says to those folks, if you believe that in this country you can live on welfare as a routine matter and you are able bodied, then you are wrong. Welfare is temporary assistance. We are willing to give it, we believe we must give it. But welfare is temporary and it is conditional. Our bill says we will offer a temporary hand if you are down and out. But you have a responsibility to take hold of that hand and get out of poverty by getting training to help you get a job. Our plan is intended to move people off the welfare rolls and on to payrolls. That is what our bill says. That is what we say to those folks. The abuser--the able bodied who are lazy, is a minority in the welfare system. The bulk of the welfare recipients are represented by the woman I discussed earlier--the young woman living in poverty, a 23- year-old unskilled woman with three children to raise, and not the means with which to do it. She represents the bulk of the welfare recipients. The question is, What do we do about it? Let me give a couple of other facts. It is also a stereotypical notion of welfare that we have a lot of people in this country who are simply producing large numbers of children in order to get more welfare benefits. It probably does happen, but it is not typical. The average size of the welfare family in America is nearly identical to the average size of the American family. Let me say that again because it is important. In public debate we all too often use stereotypes, and the stereotype is the notion that there is someone out there having 16 babies because producing babies allows them to get a lot of welfare. The average size of the welfare family is nearly identical to the average size of the average family in our country. We spend about 1 percent of the Federal budget on welfare. A substantial amount of money is spent in many ways in our country, but we spend only about 1 percent of the Federal budget. My interest in this issue has to do with two things. First, I would like to engage with people from as far right on the political spectrum as Pat Buchanan and people all the way to the far left and say we all agree on one thing: welfare is temporary. Welfare should not become institutionalized for people who are able bodied and believe they ought to live off of the rest of the taxpayers for the rest of their lives. The temporary nature of welfare assistance is embodied in the Daschle bill. Second, and more important to me, is an understanding of our obligation to America's children. Tens of millions of America's children are growing up in circumstances of poverty. They were born in circumstances of poverty not because they chose to, not because they decided that is what they wanted for their lives, but because of a circumstance of birth. Two-thirds of the people on welfare in America are kids under 16 years of age. No one, no matter how thoughtless they may be in public debate, would say, I hope, to a 4-, 6-, or 8-year-old child we say: ``You do not matter. Your hunger does not count. Your clothing needs are irrelevant.'' I have spent a lot of time working on hunger issues as a Member of Congress and have told my colleagues before about a young man who made an indelible impression with me. I will never forget it. A man named David Bright from New York City, who also lived in a homeless shelter, described to us on the Hunger Committee when I served in the House, his life in the shelter with rats and with danger and so on. He said that no 10-year-old boy like me should have to put his head down on his desk at school in the afternoon because it hurts to be hungry. This from a 10-year-old boy telling us in Congress about stomachs that hurt because they did not have enough to eat. This welfare bill care about our kids in this country. We must decide, whatever else we do about welfare, to take care of America's children in the right way--to give them hope, opportunity and, yes, nutrition, education, and shelter. Now, when I talk about children, there is one inescapable fact that the Senator from New York has talked about at great length that has to be addressed in the context of welfare reform. And that is the epidemic of teenage pregnancies in this country. There will be roughly 4 million babies born this year in America-- roughly. Over 1 million of those babies will be born in circumstances where two parents will not be present at the birth. 900,000 of children born this year will never in their lifetime learn the identity of their father. Think of the circumstances of that, what it means to a society. Nearly 1 million babies born this year will never in their lifetime learn the identity of their father. The Democratic alternative we are considering today addresses the issue of teenage pregnancy and the epidemic that is occurring in this country. We address the circumstances where children are growing up in homes where the parents are children themselves, and they have no information or experience to do adequate parenting. What we do in the Daschle amendment is that we want a national crusade against teenage pregnancy; we say that teenage pregnancy is not something that is acceptable to this country. It is not something we should promote or encourage; it is something we should discourage. People should have [[Page S 12760]] children only when they are able to care for them. What this amendment says to a child who is going to have a child, a 16- or 17-year-old child who is going to have a baby--which is happening all too often in this country--is you are not going to be able to live in a separate residence if that happens. You are not going to be able to leave school and get public assistance. We say there are going to be conditions for receiving assistance. Every teenage mother who has a baby out of wedlock has to understand this. If you do not stay in school, you will lose all benefits--nothing. Benefits are terminated. And you are not going to be able to collect money to set up a separate living arrangement for yourself and your baby. Our proposal establishes some adult-supervised living homes, where teenage mothers will have to live in supervised circumstances and stay in school as a condition for receiving benefits. We are saying this matters in our country. There is teenage pregnancy epidemic that this country must deal with. It is also an epidemic that eats up a substantial amount of our welfare benefits to respond to it. Our proposal says we can and should do something about it. As I indicated, the Senator from New York has done an enormous amount of work on this issue. I commend him for it. He was the impetus in our Democratic caucus for saying: This is wrong. This is going to hurt our country. This is going to disintegrate our society unless we address it in the right way. This amendment, the Daschle initiative, addresses teenage pregnancy, in my judgment, in a very significant way. I am very proud to say this is the right way to do it. It is the right way to go about it. We also say something else. We say to a young woman who has a child out of wedlock, ``If you are going to get benefits, you have a responsibility to help us identify who the father is. You have that responsibility. If you do not do that, you do not get benefits.'' We are going to find out who the father is, and we are going to go after deadbeat dads. Deadbeat dads have a responsibility to help provide for those children. Not just taxpayers, but the people who fathered those children have a responsibility to provide some resources to help those children. They each have a responsibility to be a parent. But in the event they will not do that, we are going to make sure that they own up to the responsibility of providing resources for those children. Our bill is tough on absent parents who are delinquent in child support. Our bill is tough on this issue. When a child is born out of wedlock and when a mother says ``I now want benefits,'' we insist that mother help us identify the father, and that father help pay for and contribute to the well-being of that child. I would like to mention two other points about this legislation. I have not done this in any necessary order. I guess I could have prioritized this welfare discussion a bit more, but I wanted to talk about a couple of component parts of it that are important to me. First, there is an assumption that if we reform the welfare system, there will be enormous savings. Savings of $100 billion over 7 years, as I believe was estimated in the budget resolution, are not going to happen. The fact is, if we do what is necessary to reform the welfare system, to make it really work, we are not going to save money in the next 7 years. But we can build a better country and make people more responsible and give people opportunity and get people off the welfare rolls and onto payrolls. The woman in the homeless shelter that I talked about earlier is the reason we are not going to save money. In order for her to work and get a job, she has two requirements. She has to get some training to get a good job. And then, in order to work at the job, she has to have some child care. If she does not get the training, she will not get the job. And if she does not have child care, she cannot work. Then, when those two requirements are met, one other element has to be present. If the job that person gets does not provide health care, then we have to have some Medicaid transition benefits as well. If we do not do those three things, welfare reform will fail. All three things cost money in the short term. In the long term, they will save money. But there is no way on God's green Earth to believe someone who says, if we reform this welfare system--and we should and we will-- and do it the right way, that we will save $100 billion in the next 7 years. We can put the country on the right track. We can do the right thing. We can end dependency on welfare by able-bodied people, but we will not save $100 billion and it is time for everyone in this Chamber to understand that. The second point I would like to make about the financing of welfare is the notion embodied in the Republican proposal, that we can solve this problem quickly and easily if only we simply aggregate all of this money into a block grant and ship it off somewhere and thereby create some nirvana by which the welfare problem is solved. By and large, block grants are blockheaded. They will, in my judgment, if used routinely and repeatedly, as some have suggested, on virtually every issue coming before the Congress, result in the most egregious abuse and waste of the taxpayers' money we will have ever seen. Do you want to describe how to promote waste in Government? I will tell you how. You have one level of Government raise the money and then send it to somebody else and say, ``You spend it. No strings attached. We will not watch.'' If you want to promote irresponsible, reckless, wasteful, wild, abusive spending, I guarantee you this blockheaded approach to block grants is the quickest and most effective way to do it. So, those who come to us with these simple little placebos, who say take this and you can believe it is medicine, whether it is block grants or $100 billion savings, it is pretty unimpressive to me. What we Democrats have done is put together an alternative. It is an alternative that says welfare cannot be permanent. Welfare is going to be temporary. Welfare is not unconditional. Welfare is going to be conditional. You need help? We are going to give you some help. But you have a responsibility in accepting that help. It is your responsibility to step up and out and off of the welfare system and become a productive member of our society on a payroll somewhere. The second element of our alternative piece of legislation that is critically important is that we say we are going to protect America's children. Yes, we are going to reform the welfare system, but we are going to do it the right way, with the right incentives that require responsibility for oneself. That is the foundation of our approach. But, at the same time, we are also going to protect America's children. Our plan leaves no questions unanswered about whether America's children will be protected. That is why I am delighted to be here to support the Daschle initiative. I was part of a large group of people who helped construct it. I was not the major architect. I know the Senator from New York and others support it as well. I have taken slightly more time than I intended, but I appreciate the generosity of the Senator from New York. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from New York. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, may I thank the Senator from North Dakota, Senator Dorgan, for beginning today's debate, today's critical debate, in an open, thoughtful, fair-minded manner. Could I comment on just one particular point? The Senator raised the question of the children born out of wedlock, and he is quite right. In 1992, 1,224,876 children were born out of wedlock--in some census tracts, 80 percent of all children born. Happily, North Dakota has been spared--or spared itself. This is something altogether new to our experience. And 30 years ago, you could not have discussed it on the Senate floor. There is a maturity coming to our debates. This was a subject-- the ratio, in 1992, reached 30.1 percent. It is probably almost 33 now. It has gone up every year since 1970. In 1970, it was 10.6 percent. So it has tripled, the ratio, and the number of children have tripled. We could not talk about this. We were not sure it was happening. Was it [[Page S 12761]] an aberration, just the weather, something like that? There used to be theories that when there would be blackouts there would be more children conceived. That turned out not to be so. We have a social crisis of a new order--not a recession, not a drought, not a collapse of farm prices, nor an increase in mortgages, the things that have come with some periodicity and consequence to us, and which we have learned to understand pretty much and manage. We have never had this before, and we have never talked about it before; not in the calm, thoughtful way the Senator from North Dakota has done. I want to thank him most sincerely for setting a tone which I think and I hope will continue throughout this debate. Mr. President, I look to my friend on the Republican side. Does he wish to speak? Mr. PACKWOOD. I do. Mr. MOYNIHAN. If I may observe, the Senator from Florida is here. Mr. PACKWOOD. I apologize. I can wait. I am going to be on the floor. The Senator may go right ahead. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I yield to the distinguished Senator from Florida 15 minutes. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Campbell). The Senator from Florida is recognized to speak for 15 minutes. Mr. GRAHAM. Thank you very much, Mr. President and my distinguished colleagues. I appreciate the courtesy. I want to talk some about the structure of the welfare reform proposal that is before us and some concerns I have as to whether we are building a foundation on reality with steel and concrete, or a foundation of sand based on theory, hope, and avoidance of responsibility. I am going to be talking from basically two sources. First, I will talk from some statistics that are generic and analytical of the legislation before us. I will also be talking from some anecdotes which are personal and specific. For the last 21 years, I have had a practice of taking an occasional job in a different area of interest within my State. In July, I took a job with one of the two welfare-to-work programs in Florida, this one in Pensacola. This is a program which is very similar to the objectives of both the underlying bill and the amendment that is before us. It is mandatory; that is, participation is required. It has the goal of placing a high percentage of those persons who are currently on welfare into employment. It is exploring what are the pragmatic requirements of accomplishing that objective, and it is doing so in the community of Pensacola, which is very representative of the kind of communities across America in which this type of program will be applied. I am going to be using some of the information and observations from that experience also as the basis of my comments on the plan which is before us today. Mr. President, I strongly support a serious effort to move people from the dependency of welfare to the independence of and self- sufficiency through employment. That is a fundamentally important objective. As we start this, I want us to understand almost the moral dimension of what we are doing, and I will place that in the context of eight women with whom I spent a considerable amount of time in Pensacola who are part of this process of making the transition. Just to describe these eight women, they were six white and two African American women. They were somewhat older than I had anticipated. The youngest was in the early twenties, up to the early forties. All of them had two or more children. Three of the eight women had a child with a serious medical disability. I was initially surprised that there would be that high an incidence of medical disability. But on reflection, given the fact that these women typically had no or very limited prenatal care with their children and had limited access to primary care since their children were born, it is not surprising that there would be that incidence of medical disability. These are women who are very committed to a better life for their children through the achievement of independence for themselves. Many of these women have limited educational backgrounds and, therefore, the kind of job training in which they are now engaged in Pensacola, the Welfare to Work program, is difficult for them. But they are making a maximum effort to be successful. In the course of attending one of the programs in which they are learning some of the basic skills that will be necessary, one of the women broke down and cried. She said: ``This is so difficult for me, but I understand the importance of this opportunity that I am being given and, if I do not succeed, not only will this likely be my last chance but it will fundamentally change the future for my children. I want to succeed.'' Our moral responsibility as a society, Mr. President, is we are telling these women that you have 2, maybe 3 years to be successful in preparing yourself and securing employment, and securing employment at a level that will allow you to support your children. We are making a commitment to them that not only are we going to provide them with what would be required to do so, but there will be a job there that they can secure upon the completion of their preparation. And the consequences of their failing to get that job is that they and their children will have the level of support that they are currently receiving terminated or substantially altered and reduced. So there is a commitment on both sides. And it is from that point that I would like to draw some observations about the underlying bill which is before us today, because I believe it is based on some unrealistic assessments of the world in which this proposal will actually operate and creates the potential of some serious unfairness and a violation of that moral commitment that we are making to these Americans. First, I believe that the goal of the welfare plan, which is to have 25 percent of the current welfare beneficiaries employed in year 1 of this plan and 50 percent employed in year 5, is unrealistic. In year 1, the definition of reaching that 25 percent is a month-by- month evaluation of how many persons who were on welfare had been moved into a work position. And if at the end of the first 12 months of the fiscal year, you do not have an average of 25 percent, then your State is subject to sanctions. I believe it is going to be virtually if not absolutely impossible to reach that 25 percent goal. There is a necessary startup period in terms of developing the job placement programs, the job training programs, and the support services such as transportation, as well as securing child care for the young dependents of these women, which makes reaching the goal of a 25-percent objective in year 1 highly unlikely. Equally as difficult will be to reach the 50-percent level in year 5. That is in large part because of whether the jobs are going to actually be available. Pensacola, FL, happens to be an area that has a relatively growing economy, an economy which is creating a substantial number of jobs. But even there the administrators of the program stated that it will be very difficult to reach a 50 percent placement level within a 5-year period. That would be true because of the competition for those jobs from all the other people in the community who will be seeking that employment--the issue of will there be jobs that will be not just at the barest minimum wage but at a level high enough or at least offering a sufficient potential to raise a sufficient amount of money to be able to support a family of a single mother and two children, which is the typical family in Pensacola. There are 6,600 welfare families in Pensacola, so the goal is to place 3,300 of those in work by the year 2000. That will be a challenge for Pensacola. But, Mr. President, let us put that in the context of another American city, a substantially larger city, and that is Philadelphia. Philadelphia has not 6,600 people on welfare; it has 500,000 people who are receiving some form of public assistance. In Philadelphia, using the statistics provided by DRI McGraw-Hill on U.S. Market Review, in 1994 there were 2,149,000 jobs in Philadelphia. In the last year of their survey, which is 1997, the projection is there will be 2,206,000 jobs in the Philadelphia area, or an increase of approximately 47,000 jobs over that period from 1994 to 1997. We do not have the statistics to the year 2000, but assuming that that rate of increase [[Page S 12762]] continues, we could expect maybe another 20,000 or 30,000 jobs to the year 2000, so well under a 100,000-job growth and yet we are saying that by the year 2000, half of this population of 500,000 people is supposed to be placed in jobs in Philadelphia. How is that going to happen? I think we have a level of unreality in terms of the scale of the population that we are saying has to be trained and placed and their children supported and the number of jobs which are going to be created, particularly in those areas of the country that are not experiencing the kind of robust economic growth that a community such as Pensacola, FL, has experienced. My first point is that I think we have a statistical unreality in terms of what we are saying has to happen and what, in fact, is likely to occur. And for that reason, independent groups such as the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office that have looked at this plan, have stated that 44 out of the 50 States will not be able to meet the expectations of this legislation--that 44 out of the 50 States are going to fall into the category of those that are nonperformers and therefore subject to a 5-percent penalty. I would suggest that these numbers are so unrealistic in terms of the kind of commitments that we are prepared to make that the 5 percent penalty will be accepted as a fact of life for many States and that any serious effort to meet these unrealistic goals is likely to be abandoned. It is interesting to me the difference in which we are treating those programs that we are about to ship off to the States and say, ``You run them,'' such as welfare reform and Medicaid, where we are setting these theoretical goals, and then essentially abandoning any effort to do those things that will be necessary to make those goals attainable, and how we are treating the one big program we are responsible for running and that at least as of today no one has suggested be sent to the States to run, which is Medicare. There we are saying that Medicare has to be treated above politics; that we have to be very, very careful it is structured properly because we know we are going to be held responsible for how that one is administered. With welfare and Medicaid, we essentially are saying we can abandon all responsibilities for the pragmatic implementation. That is going to be somebody else's responsibility. A second level of unreality is in the funding levels and specifically in the area of unfunded mandates to the States. It is interesting, when we came here back in January with a very expansive and aggressive agenda of domestic issues, which issue received primacy, which received that special recognition of being Senate bill No. 1. Well, that honor was assigned to the legislation that dealt with reducing unfunded mandates, that as our No. 1 domestic objective we were going to cease the process of having the Federal Government meet its responsibilities by telling somebody else, generally a State or local government, what to do and requiring them to use their resources in order to achieve that national objective. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Can the Senator use another 5 minutes? We want to be fair to all Senators. Mr. GRAHAM. If I could. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I would be happy to do it. I am listening to what he has to say. Mr. GRAHAM. The reality is that this bill which we are about to pass will be the grandfather of all unfunded mandates. We are going to be imposing significant new responsibilities on the States, without the resources to fund those responsibilities, and that as we impose that grandfather of all unfunded mandates, we are going to be creating a whole series of stepchildren as its consequence. Let me just use the example of my State, a family of three typically, and in the case of all eight of the women I mentioned earlier, this is the case, a single mother with two children. The State of Florida provides $303 a month in economic support, cash assistance to that mother and two children. That $303 is roughly half Federal money and half State money. Under this proposal, it is going to take 75 percent of the Federal money that we have been providing for the support of that family of three in order to pay for the job training and related support activities and the child care of that mother and her family while she is preparing to work. There is no proposal to act to fund those additional activities. In fact, the level of funding at the Federal level will be declining over the period of this program. So instead of that family having $303, it will see that reduced to approximately $185 a month which will be available for economic support because the remainder of the money, approximately $135, will be used to pay for these other mandated services. So we are saying that this family, which has been living on $303 a month, is now going to have to start living on $180 a month while the remainder of the money is used to prepare the mother for a future job and to provide child care for her dependent children. Mr. President, I think that is an unrealistic economic scenario. And it becomes even more draconian since we are no longer going to be requiring States, at least after 2 years, and even in a very soft way during the first 2 years, to provide any continuing match. So potentially not $85. If the State of Florida were to decide to abandon its local match and not provide any State funds, we could have this family living on $35 a month, just that portion of the Federal money that is left over after you have met your mandates. I think that is highly unrealistic and would defeat not only the goal of moving people from welfare to work, but would also undermine our basic American humanitarian and compassionate sense of responsibility to all of our citizens. And finally, the reality of this proposal is in the extreme disparities that will exist from State to State under this plan. I mention unfunded mandates. In the case of Florida, about 75 percent of our Federal funds would be required to meet the unfunded mandates. We are better off than Mississippi, where it will take 88 percent of Mississippi's Federal money to meet their unfunded mandates, which compares to the District of Columbia, that can meet their unfunded mandates with only 46 percent of the Federal money. Why is there such a great disparity? Because we start off with a tremendous disparity in how much Federal money per child is available under the proposal that has been submitted by the majority leader. A stark difference is right within a mile of where we stand. A poor child in the District of Columbia will get three times as much money under this proposal of the majority leader as will a poor child across the Potomac River in Virginia. I think that is not only indefensible and unfair, but undermines the basic credibility of this proposal as a means of moving people from welfare to work. So, Mr. President, in those areas, I think we have a house that is being built on a foundation of sand. Mr. President, we need to guard against passing legislation which has rhetorical mandates and aspirations, but without the practical understanding of what it would mean in the lives of people and, therefore, virtually assuring that we will have a failure of accomplishing our objectives and will have more decades of exactly the kind of welfare issue, exactly the kind of continuing dependence that we are trying to ameliorate through this effort. Mr. President, I urge the adoption of the more pragmatic amendment which has been offered by Senator Daschle and his colleagues as the starting point for serious, meaningful welfare reform. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield myself 5 minutes, if I need that much, to thank the Senator from Florida, the former Governor of Florida, who knows precisely of what he speaks when Federal formulas are involved. You heard the striking differences between the jurisdictions of Florida, Mississippi, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. I hope you also heard the Senator's comment about the city of Philadelphia, the number of jobs in the city, the numbers created in recent years. I have been trying to make a point, as I said yesterday--I do not know that I can persuade anyone, but I can try to make it and I can argue-- which is the point that 30 years ago, we might have considered turning this subject back to the States, giving them [[Page S 12763]] block grants of some kind, saying, ``You handle it. Cities, you handle it. It makes some sense since local governments are closer to the problem. It is not that big a problem.'' It is today, in one after another jurisdiction, a problem that has overwhelmed the capacity of the city and the State. The Senator mentioned Philadelphia. In 1993, 57 percent of the children living in the city of Philadelphia were on AFDC, welfare, at one point in the course of the year. At any given moment, 44 percent-- these are numbers never contemplated. Nothing like that happened in the Great Depression. And these children are paupers. They are not from unemployed families, where there is a house, an automobile, some insurance. One of the few regulations the Federal Government does have--the rest are all intended you have to waiver for--if you have less than $1,000 in assets, you are a pauper. The cities cannot handle it. And they will not. Just as when we began the deinstitutionalization of our mental institutions in the early 1960's--at the last public bill-signing ceremony President Kennedy had, on October 31, 1963, he signed the Community Mental Health Construction Act of 1963. I was present. He gave me a pen. I had been involved with this in New York, where it began. Transfer license. We were going to build 2,000 community mental health centers by the year 1980, and one per 100,000 thereafter. We built about 400. We kind of overlapped and folded the program in and forgot about the program. We emptied out the mental institutions. And we have been hearing about homeless shelters all day. I said yesterday, and I will repeat again, in 10 years' time, with this legislation in place, with these time limits in place, children will be in the streets. Seventy-six percent of the children on welfare are on welfare for more than 5 years. The Senator from Connecticut, I hope, will keep that in mind--76 percent. About 40 percent--the remainder come and go quickly and are never a problem. But if we do this, we will have in my city of New York half a million people on the streets in New York. We wonder about homeless people. They used to be in mental institutions. Now these children are in houses. They are in households. We will wonder where they came from. We say, ``Why are these children sleeping on grates? Why are they being picked up in the morning frozen? Why are they horrible to each other, a menace to all, and more importantly to themselves? Whatever happened?'' When the homeless appeared in New York, we right away diagnosed it as a lack of affordable housing. That is not what it was. It was Federal policy in its most perverse mode. Make a great change and do not follow through. Make changes you do not fully understand. Those tranquilizers were not as good as we thought. Here are some other cities. In Detroit, 67 percent of children were on welfare at one point or another in the year of 1993; in Baltimore, 56 percent. My time has expired. But I will return to this subject. Now I am going to suggest the absence of a quorum for 1 minute to see whether the Senator from Oregon wishes to speak--I do not see him on the floor--after which it is the turn of the Senator from Connecticut. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The absence of a quorum has been suggested. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. MOYNIHAN. 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. MOYNIHAN. I am happy to yield to my friend. Is 15 minutes sufficient for his purposes? Mr. DODD. Why do we not try 15. I may need 20. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Twenty, it is. Mr. DODD. I thank the Senator. Mr. MOYNIHAN. May I record, Mr. President, the Senator from Oregon does not wish to speak at this moment. So if the speakers are all on our side, it is because we are talking, I suppose, about our bill. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Dodd, is recognized for 20 minutes. Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from New York. Before beginning, our colleague from Florida asked me to yield to him for a minute to raise a question to the distinguished Senator from New York. Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut very much. I appreciate his courtesy. I want to commend the Senator from New York for the excellent statement, and particularly that he brings us back to reality, just what are the circumstances of the people that are going to be affected by our actions. I would like to inject, briefly, for the Senator's information and possibly further comment, some good news. I mentioned that in Pensacola, there were 6,600 welfare families. I am pleased to say that in the first 18 months of the transition program, which is a program based on the 1988 legislation that the Senator from New York sponsored, that almost 600 of those 6,600 have, in fact, been placed in employment, that having occurred because there was a willingness to put the resources required to provide the kind of training and support, including child care, to those families to allow it to happen. It can happen. This is not just a doom-and-gloom scenario. We are not consigned to have to deal with this problem in its current form forever. But it is not going to be easy, it is not going to be quick, and it is not going to be inexpensive if we are going to achieve real results. I appreciate the constant reminder of the Senator from New York of those realities. Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank my friend from Florida, and I do particularly appreciate his reference to the Family Support Act, which never promised a rose garden. We said if you try hard, you will have something to show for it. Pensacola does. Thank you, Mr. President. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut is recognized for 20 minutes. Mr. DODD. Mr. President, before my colleague from New York departs the floor and my colleague from Florida continues, I want to commend my colleague from Florida for an excellent statement. And, let me just say, the distinguished Senator from New York has contributed more to the collective wisdom in this body on the subject of welfare reform than anyone. I say that with all due respect to the other 99 of us in this Chamber, but the Senator from New York has dedicated virtually a lifetime of service focused on this complex issue. She is no longer with us, but Barbara Tuchman wrote a wonderful book called the ``March of Folly.'' It was related to foreign policy failures throughout history. What made her book unique is that she talked about failures where those responsible for conducting foreign policy--from the Trojan Wars to the Vietnam war--knew when they were about to do something that, in fact, it was wrong and that there were better alternatives. But, they refused to recognize them. She described several historical events beginning with Troy, including the American Revolution, and several others. Were she alive today and were she to write a domestic version of the ``March of Folly,'' I suspect our current debate on welfare reform might be a chapter in that book. My fear is, and I heard my colleague from New York express this over and over again, we are missing each other in the night as we discuss this subject matter. The Senator from New York has said repeatedly we are not engaged in reform here at all. What we are engaged in is a dismantling, total dismantling of a system with a faint hope that what we are about to put in place is somehow going to serve the public in a better way. What we are talking about here is reducing our Federal commitment to welfare by roughly $70 billion, passing the cost on to the States and localities of this country and asking them to assume the responsibility and burden of picking up this chore with little likelihood that we are going to achieve the desired goals expressed, with all due respect to the majority leader's bill. I just want to take a moment, before getting into the substance of my remarks, and urge my colleagues to [[Page S 12764]] please listen --listen--to our colleague from New York. There is a lot of wisdom in what he says. He knows this issue well. Historically, we have paid attention to our colleagues, regardless of party, regardless of ideology, who brought a special knowledge and experience to a subject matter. The Senator from New York is that individual in our midst. We ought to be listening to him on this subject. So I hope in the coming days, we can get away from a bit of the politics of this issue and think about what we are doing and what a mess we are likely to create in this country, costing the middle-class taxpayers billions of dollars before we are through, all in the name of some political debate about who is going to deal with the welfare recipient more harshly than the next. That ought not to be what this debate is about. It ought to be about how we reform our current system to make it work better in a realistic, thoughtful, prudent manner. Unfortunately, I do not think that this has been the case. I know my colleague from New York has other business to attend to, but I just felt very strongly when I came over here to address this matter. This is one of those rare occasions when the ``March of Folly'' seems to be upon us once again. Mr. President, I hope we will pay some close attention to the proposals that are being offered by the distinguished Democratic leader and hope that somehow in the next few days we may come to our senses and find some common ground on this issue. I read the other day that the distinguished majority leader announced in Chicago that there will be no compromises this fall. How does this institution function when the leader of our body says there will be no compromise on a subject matter that will have a profound effect on our country for years to come? We need to seek some common ground and thoughtful analysis to deal intelligently and effectively with the issue of welfare reform. There is no debate about what we are trying to achieve: How do we move people from dependency to self-sufficiency? We are now looking at grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who have been dependent on welfare without the ability or the fortune of work. How do we move people to work in an intelligent way? How do we make it possible for them to get there and stay there, so that they have at least the basic protection of health care and some safe place to put their children? This is not a concept that is terribly difficult to grasp, I hope. Every single family in this country ought to be able to relate to this. They do. When you go to work, where is your child? Who is watching your child? Every single person, from the highest paid chief executive officer down to the lowest wage earner in this country, understands that critical issue: if you are going to go to work, you need to have access to safe, affordable, and quality child care. It ought not to be difficult for us to try and come up with some ways to do achieve this. The benefit of all of this is not just fiscal, it also has to do with the fabric of our country. It has to do with helping to provide people opportunities to have a sense of self-worth as we build our neighborhoods and communities. It is a critical element. And trying to find the ways and the means to accomplish that goal ought to be the subject of our discussions. We should not, as I said earlier, outdo each other in our rhetoric to indict people, in most cases, who, through no fault of their own, are in this situation. I left this chart here, Mr. President, because it ought to be in everyone's mind. As our colleague from New York has pointed out, two- thirds of the people we are talking about in this bill are children; they are not adults, they are kids. Two-thirds of the recipients are America's children. In Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, there are staggering numbers of children who are recipients or dependents of families where there is this dependency on public assistance of one kind or another. I hope, again, we can have an honest and thoughtful debate about how we can improve this situation, rather than worsening it by creating a race to the bottom. The Washington Post the other day--I do not have it here with me today--had a lengthy article about what will happen as States race to cut benefits. As some States cut benefits, their actions will put great pressure on neighboring States to follow suit, or else risk becoming a magnet for families searching for ways to end their slide further down the economic ladder. As the race proceeds, it will cause great damage to our national commitment to address these problems. Maybe I am wrong, but I honestly believe when there is a child in Pennsylvania, or a child in Colorado, or a child in New York that is in trouble, I have an obligation as a Senator to help them. I am a U.S. Senator from the State of Connecticut, but my interest and concern about children is not limited to the geography that I represent. It is the country that I represent. And so when there is a child who is hurting in a Western State, an Eastern State, or my own State, I believe that, through the constitutional process which creates this institution, I ought to bring a concern to this national body to grapple with these problems in a way that makes sense for all of us. I should not just assume that these problems are Colorado's problem, or New York's problem, or Pennsylvania's problem alone. That belief would run contrary to our sense of nationhood. So the goals of work and independence and self-sufficiency and family unity are all things that we ought to be striving for. We are going to miss that mark substantially if we do not try and find ways to achieve those goals in a realistic way, and make the kinds of investments that will need to be made if we are going to be successful. The tendency to blame and punish is certainly tempting. I understand the politics of it. But in the long-term it is not going to help us resolve the kind of difficulties that I think we have been asked to assume by our election to this body as national representatives--not just our own States' representatives but national representatives. There is strong evidence that the rise of poverty is, in large part, attributable to declining wages. There has been a tremendous amount of evidence that over the past 2\1/2\ decades wages have declined, and anxiety and fear has grown among our people as a result of that trend. I hope we will keep this evidence in mind as we consider this debate on welfare reform. If we take the view that the only purpose of welfare reform is to punish people--as I said a moment ago, those who have been getting something for nothing--then we are going to ignore the fact that welfare is an unwelcome fate for most recipients. More important, we will miss the opportunity, in my view, for any kind of real, meaningful reform, because we will ignore what we must do to move people from the dependency of welfare to work: First, to provide them with education and training. Again, we all know we are entering a sophisticated age. There are fewer and fewer jobs where little or no education or training is needed. As it is right now, less than 1 percent of the jobs in this country are going to be available to people with less than a high school diploma. In a few years, it will be a college diploma. You are going to have to have those skills if you are going to move people to work. The jobs will not exist for people in this category without the training. Second, you have to ensure that States are partners with the Federal government, lest they engage in a race to the bottom that rewards States for spending less on moving their people from welfare rolls to payrolls. I do not think anyone believes that is a wise course to follow. Third, and I think most important in this debate, and I have referenced it already--is to ensure that parents have the child care that they need in order to keep a job in the first place. Child care, I happen to believe, is the linchpin of welfare reform. No matter what else we do, if a parent cannot find a safe and affordable place for their young children during the working day, that parent is not going to be able to hold down a job. I do not care how you look at that issue or analyze it. That is a fact. In my view, the alternative proposal offered by the majority leader, Senator Dole, fails to meet this three-part standard. It represents, I think, a retreat from the problem and not reform of it. It does not even, in my view, deserve to be called reform. All it would [[Page S 12765]] do is package up Federal programs for poor families, cut the funding by $70 billion, and ship the whole problem to the 50 States. Is somebody going to tell me that is reform? That is just passing the buck and asking the middle-class taxpayer to have their property taxes and sales taxes skyrocket at the local level--as we wash our hands of it. We have reformed the problem. Mr. President, we will have done nothing of the kind. The acid test of any welfare reform proposal is its impact on children, in my view, because they are the majority of the recipients. Is a reform proposal going to punish the children for the mistakes or bad luck of their parents? It bears repeating time and time again that two-thirds of the AFDC recipients are children. More than 9 million children received cash assistance in 1993. The Republican welfare reform proposal, as it is called, would single these children out for extraordinarily harsh treatment. I do not care what your ideology or politics are, I do not know of anybody that wants to see that happen. Yet, Mr. President, as a matter of fact, that is just what happens under this proposal. In my view, the Republican plan packages up punitive policies that aim for the parent, but will hit the child instead. Children should not be penalized because of the happenstance into which they have been born. I do not think we want to see that be the case. We promise the elderly and veterans a minimum level of support in our society. Why can we not do the same for children? We need a national commitment to see that children are not abused, that they do not go hungry, and that their basic needs are being met. The Republican proposal, however, fails to provide even the most basic minimum standards for our Nation's children. Mr. President, I want to stress that these children, I believe, are our N