Jim Talent

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I will close, but first I will yield to my friend, the gentleman from Missouri.

Mr. TALENT. If I have time left, I will be glad to yield.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, we have a bill that will take substantial steps in that direction. That is what we are going to be talking about.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, the gentlewoman said that current law requires that everybody with a child three or under, is it, work. How many people are working now?

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote, and pending that, I make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself an additional 15 seconds. Mr. Chairman, a whole lot of people are working at that level. It is not punitive, and here we have the differences in visions. It is not punitive. It is good for them and their families.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, today we enter on an historic debate about a bill that will replace a failed welfare system with a system that is based on marriage, on family, on responsibility, and on work. I want to address in my remarks now, and I am sure it will come up later as well, the whole issue of work. There have been past welfare reform bills which have purported to be workfare bills. The 1988 bill, which was a bipartisan bill, purported to be a workfare bill. Everybody was going to work under the bill. Six years later we have less than 1 percent of the case load working. People need to understand what work has meant in the past to people who have really been defending the status quo. It has been an excuse for vast new expansions of the welfare state, constructing vast new bureaucracies, and nobody ends up working, but they will tell you that x percent of the case load is working. What they do not tell you is that they exempt up front a huge percentage of the case loads from the workfare requirements, so if they say 50 percent of the people who are working, they have already exempted 80 percent or 90 percent of the people from the beginning. The key to an honest workfare requirement, and our bill has that, is that it talks about percentages of the total case load. When we say 50 percent of the welfare case load is going to be working by the beginning of the next century, it means 50 percent of the people are going to be working by the beginning of the next century, and it means they are going to be working. They are not going to be looking for a job an hour a week, they are not going to be sitting in a class that somebody calls education, they are going to be working. That is the standard that we need to measure work everywhere throughout this debate. Mr. Chairman, the substitute offered by the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Deal], and I appreciate his efforts in this regard, is flawed in several important respects. For one thing, he defines work as job search, so people can be classified as working under his bill, even though they are not working, they are searching for a job. The States will presumably be given the authority to define that. That is part of the problem that we had in the past. He counts toward meeting the work participation requirements, people who normally move off of welfare anyway. In any given year there is like half a million people who will move off welfare, at least temporarily. My understanding of the gentleman's substitute is that it permits those people to be counted by the States toward meeting the participation requirements. They would get off welfare anyway, at least temporarily. If you are going to do that, you need to count the net increase of people who are getting off welfare because of work. We are going to go into this in a lot more detail in the days to come, Mr. Chairman. The point I want to make about work is that it has to be an honest work requirement, people working, people actually working, not looking for a job, not consuming an enormous amount of the taxpayers' money to be trained for some kind of vice president's job, but working. There are a number of States that are already doing that. It is very effective in introducing the dignity of work into those families. It is effective in moving those people who are almost employable off of the welfare rolls and into work. That is how we ought to measure the success of the program.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, that is why our bill, and as the gentleman will recall, the gentleman from Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson], and I wrote this language in the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, that is why our bill focuses the work requirements on people on welfare who are closest to employability. Two-parent AFDC families, parents with school age children or above, those people can go to work.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, next week the House will take up an historic piece of legislation, the welfare reform bill. There has been a lot of discussion about spending on welfare in the context of that bill and there is going to be a special order later this evening which will discuss that further. I want to talk just for a few minutes not about spending as such, but about the relationship between spending on welfare and the effectiveness of our welfare system. And I am going to do that first by looking at this graph, which is very informative. It shows us how welfare spending has grown since the Great Society programs were announced in the mid-1960's. What you can see from that, Mr. Speaker, is that in approximately 1965 we were spending about $30 billion in Federal and State spending on welfare. And that by 1992, we were spending close to $300 billion on welfare, or a tenfold increase in how much we were spending on welfare. So we had an explosion in welfare spending on the Federal and State level in the last 30 years. But look, Mr. Speaker, at what has happened to the poverty rate during that period of time. In 1948, it began a steep decline, down to about 15 percent in approximately 1965, at the same time as welfare spending has exploded and it has stayed the same. It has gone up slightly since 1965. This vast explosion of welfare spending has brought us not a decrease in poverty but, in fact, a slight increase in poverty and we are entitled to say, why? Why at the same time as we have increased, exponentially, spending on antipoverty programs has poverty stayed the same when it was declining beforehand? The reason is because of the incentives in the welfare system. The welfare system pays this money only on the condition that people have a child without being married, earlier than they probably otherwise would, and without having a job. so what the welfare system is doing is destroying work and marriage and family and responsibility. And if you destroy that, it does not matter how much money the government gives somebody, you are not going to get people out of poverty. It is like bailing water out of a boat with one hand while you are pouring water in with the other. I want to go to the other chart. I only have a few minutes. This is a projection of what is going to happen with welfare spending in the future. Now, this is a baseline before the welfare reform bill that we are working with that we will be debating next week. You will see that welfare spending is projected to go up from $300 billion in 1992 to close to $520 billion by 1998. By that time, it will be almost twice what we spend on defense. Now, the CBO numbers are not out, Mr. Speaker, so I did not put it on here. The Republican welfare bill we are going to debate allows welfare spending to go up about half that much by the rate of inflation. And I want to close with a couple of comments. In the first place, nobody in Washington is talking about cuts in welfare. The bill we will debate next week will allow welfare to grow at approximately the rate of inflation. If you hear anybody talking about cuts in welfare, they are either very much mistaken or they are simply uttering something that is not true. The second point that these two graphs graphically show is how much we are spending on welfare is a lot less important than how we spend it, because values are more important than money. What we have been doing in the past is spending money on welfare in a way that has destroyed families and destroyed work. And so we have gotten not only not less poverty, but more poverty. time we begin spending money on welfare in a way that reinforces family and work and personal responsibility, and that will make a difference for the people caught up in the system. We take a step for the first time toward ending cash benefits at least for teen moms. We are going to give that money to the States and localities so they can take care of those moms in a way that reinforces family and work instead of destroying it. And not only are we going to stop punishing people for working, which is what the current system does, we are going to start requiring work so that by the end of the decade about 50 percent of the people on the welfare caseload, and that is an honest number, will have to work in order to get their welfare benefits. I am going to close, Mr. Speaker, with an observation that my friend Mr. Watts, our distinguished colleague from Oklahoma, often makes. Under the current system we have always measured the success of welfare by how many people we could get on food stamps and AFDC and medicaid and the 70-odd other Federal welfare programs. We measured success by how many people we could get on welfare; by how much money we could spend on welfare. We need to stop doing that because welfare is not a life of dignity and hope for anybody. We need to start measuring success, and we are going to start measuring success, by how many people we get off of welfare, off the AFDC, off of food stamps, off of medicaid, and into a life of dignity and hope and self-sufficiency which is the American dream. That is what we are offering to people. Mr. Speaker, that is what we are going to be debating next week.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, on March 21, the House will take up comprehensive, real and historic welfare reform. The object of that bill will be an historic and fundamental change in the direction of our welfare policy, away from a failed system that is destroying the poor and towards a system of relief marriage, on family, on work and on personal responsibility. Mr. Speaker, how is the welfare system hurting the poor? First and foremost, it is destroying their families. Let us take a look at this graph here on my left. In 1965, Mr. Speaker, one out of 15 children in the United States, about 6 percent, were born out of wedlock. Federal and State welfare spending at that time was about 30 billion. Today the out-of-wedlock birth rate is one out of three. It has increased by six times since 1965. The welfare spending has gone up 10 times to about $300 billion a year. Welfare spending has not brought us a decrease in poverty, as I will show in a minute. It has caused an explosion in illegitimacies. The best social studies also agree. A controlled study in New Jersey showed that a small restriction in the growth of welfare benefits caused a 30 percent reduction in illegitimacy. And June O'Neill, who is the current head of the Congressional Budget Office, conducted a study showing that a 50 percent increase in AFDC and food stamps led to a 43 percent increase in the out-of-wedlock birth rate. President Clinton has said there is no question that if we reduced Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and I am sure he meant substituting that with a different form of assistance for the poor, it would be some incentive for people not to have dependent children out of wedlock. So history, social science, the President and common sense all agree: the welfare system as it is currently structured with its current incentives destroys families. It promotes illegitimacy by promising young men and women a measure of security and independence through a welfare package, but if and only if they have a child without being married, without having a work skill and earlier than they otherwise would. That means that the existing welfare system causes poverty, because, Mr. Speaker, work and marriage are essential to eliminating poverty. The best antipoverty programs are family and work. I invite the House to look at the next graph. The red line in that graph shows the poverty rate in the postwar era. It has declined steadily all throughout that era until about 1965, when it reached approximately 15 percent. The blue shaded area on the graph shows State and Federal spending on welfare since 1948. As the graph shows, that welfare spending held basically steady until about 1965, when the Great Society programs were started. At that time it exploded and increased by a factor of 10 times to about $300 billion. At the same time as we were increasing welfare spending by a factor of 10 times, the poverty rate actually increased slightly. It was a little under 15 percent in 1965, and now it is a little bit over 15 percent. In the last generation, the Federal Government has transferred trillions of dollars to the poor. But the welfare system at the same time has destroyed their families and, therefore, their incentives to seek the American dream for themselves and their children. It is as if you are bailing out a boat with one hand while you were pouring water into the boat with the other. Mr. Speaker, as we proceed through this debate on welfare we should remember two principles. The debate over welfare should not be about blaming the poor. It is the Federal Government that has perversely given material assistance to the poor on the conditions that they accept the kind of innervating spiritual poverty. We should not reform this system because people on welfare are abusing it, although that does happen. We should reform the welfare system because the system has been abusing people on welfare. The second principle is this: Welfare reform shouldn't mean abandoning the poor. America must stand or fall together as a people with common ideals and aspirations. Welfare reform should mean bringing back the welfare system to reliance on those ideals. My friend, the distinguished freshman from Oklahoma [Mr. Watts] put it this way. He says that for the past 30 years the Federal Government has measured the success of welfare by how many people we could get on AFDC and food stamps and medicaid. We need to measure success by a different index. Real welfare reform means measuring success this way by how many people we can get off of AFDC, food stamps and medicaid and into a life of dignity and hope. That is what the fight for welfare reform over the coming weeks in this House should be about. It is a fight that we can and must and will win for all of the American people.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, very briefly I would like to make a point in keeping with the point the gentleman made that this particular provision which the gentleman from North Carolina seeks to amend was added in the Small Business Committee and carefully worked out by Members on both sides of the aisle and adopted by consensus. So I just want to emphasize the point the gentleman made, this was the result of a bipartisan agreement in the Small Business Committee.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the indulgence of the House. I will try not to speak very long. The distinguished gentlewoman who chairs the Committee on Small Business is not here, and I cannot say I speak for her or I speak for the committee, but I would just like to make a couple of comments that I think might summarize the views of the committee which, again, unanimously supported this legislation. First of all, we have been talking here about procedure and substance. And I guess when you get into a bill like this which lawyers have worked on, you talk about things like that. Of course, the bill is procedural in the sense that it is part of administrative procedure. But it has a very important substantive, real impact on real small business people in the real world. Let us not argue over whether it is substantive or procedural. The point is, this change in the Regulatory Flexibility Act is of very great importance in helping real small business people produce goods and services and produce the jobs on which the economy depends. What it basically says is it represents the verdict of the Congress in the last 14 years in which we have recognized that what we tried to do in 1980 has not worked because the agencies have basically ignored it. What we said in 1980 was, look, when you are passing a regulation, do it in the way that is the least burdensome and the least intrusive on small business. And they have not done that, Mr. Chairman. They have not done that because there has been no procedure in the review. What the bill does is say, basically say, courts may review the agency decision as to whether it needed a regulatory flexibility analysis and, second, if it issued one, whether the agency was what the lawyers call arbitrary and capricious in deciding that its regulation could not have been done in a way that was less burden on small business. That is a real standard of review. It has real teeth. It means that agencies out there are going to be doing things in ways that cost fewer jobs, that create more opportunity for more small business people and, therefore, for more Americans. The point I want to make is whether it is procedural or substantive, and I respect the gentleman here for arguing that point from the standpoint of this amendment, it is very important to people. I wanted to reaffirm that. As to the amendment of the gentleman from Illinois, I read what he is saying as basically saying this. If for some reason or other a small business person, either because they inadvertently or they sleep on their rights or they, for good reason or bad reason, they do not challenge the rule in a way that other statutes allow them to challenge the rule within 180 days, they still have another 180 days to raise these appeals under the Regulatory Flexibility Act. It gives them a little extra leeway under this particular provision. I think the gentleman is doing it because this probably alone among all the protections in the Administrative Procedures Act applies only to small business people. Small business people maybe are less able than larger businesses to recognize when their rights may be at stake and to file suit. I think is a reasonable change. Personally, I am going to support it. The point I wanted to make is whether you call this bill procedural or substantive, it is an important bill that creates real extra opportunity in jobs, in growth for real people out there and harmonizes our regulatory statutes to some degree with the spirit of enterprise and the spirit of America.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to join the other Members who have expressed support for this improvement of the Regulatory Flexibility Act, really making it effective. This is an act Congress passed in 1980, again with the intention of saying to the bureaucracy, ``Look, if you feel you have some overriding goal in terms of the environment or worker safety that you need to accomplish, look and see the impact on small business which produces the jobs and the flow of goods and services the country depends on, and do it in a way that has the least negative impact on costs and on job growth in the country.'' It is a very commonsense bill. It did not work because we did not place a check in the system that was effective in making them do it. I just want to make one broader observation here. When people build the businesses, the small businesses of the United States, they are building part of the backbone of the private society of this country. They are exercising, really, an unalienable right. It is one thing if we feel that some overriding policy requires that we intrude on what they are trying to do for themselves and their employees in America. It is another thing when we let agencies act arbitrarily and capriciously, in a manner that unnecessarily undermines the efforts they are engaged in. This bill is an attempt to stop that. I support it. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding time to me.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I have always been fascinated by the story, and really, the hair on the back of my neck went up when you told that story. I am certainly very glad, and I think the country has been very well-served, that a sovereign who has always guided this Nation's fortunes chose to pull you out of that water at that point. The gentleman said something. I have been listening to the whole story. I just had to ask the gentleman, did you say that your uncle was the Tinman on the Wizard of Oz?

Mr. TALENT. I thank the gentleman, for that is one of my favorite movies from certainly my favorite year of motion pictures.

Mr. TALENT. It really was. I do not mean to interrupt the gentleman's story, but I really had to ask. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. TALENT. I was not aware that the Japanese had ever shelled the mainland.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that my name be withdrawn as a cosponsor of House Joint Resolution No. 2.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the House made an excellent start in holding this body accountable to the people, cutting its costs. What particularly impressed me about what happened yesterday was the strong bipartisan majorities that supported most, if not all, of the measures that were brought before the House. The following measures and many others as well passed by unanimous or near unanimous votes: Substantial cuts in committee staff, an independent auditor to examine the books of the House, banning of proxy voting, congressional compliance, that this body would finally be brought under the same laws that it has passed for everyone else. Yesterday, Mr. Speaker, what we heard was the sound of gridlock breaking. It was broken not by partisanship or by arm-twisting but by the power of good ideas. I look forward to the power of good ideas dominating in this House for the next 100 days, substantial support from both sides of the aisle toward an agenda that brings this body back to the people of the United States. (Mr. BUNN of Oregon asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)