Home > Speeches > 2005 Speeches

TANF Extension Needed, But Falls Short
House of Representatives - June 29, 2005

Mr. Speaker, these are going to be the two classic glass-half-empty/glass-half-full speeches because the chairman has told you the good things that have happened, and there are some. But, today, we have two bad choices in front of us.

Watch this floor speech [Click here to get Windows Media Player]

The first is to support this BandAid approach that has temporarily continued the funding for TANF and the child care development block grants for yet another 3 months. The other alternative is to abandon our most vulnerable citizens until the Republican majority accepts its responsibility to chart a new course that provides a helping hand, not a slap on the wrist.

Now, I deplore these kind of crossroads at which we stand. Ten times in the last 3 years we have stood right here, as we do today, the lives and welfare of the disadvantaged hanging in the balance. At a time like this, America should shine. Instead, the Republican majority strains the needs of our most vulnerable citizens to the breaking point.

Ten temporary extensions over 3 years should send the House a clear and unmistakable message. We need to treat America's disadvantaged as first class citizens by charting a new course for the long-term reauthorization of the TANF program.

On this Republican watch, the House has taken up hopelessly divisive bills that have drawn the condemnation of mayors, governors, welfare directors, religious leaders and poverty experts.

Time and again, the Republicans have tried to terminate Federal responsibility by replacing State flexibility with unfunded mandates and changing the focus of welfare reform from real jobs to make-work. Nothing good comes from this approach.

Instead, this wrong path has led to legislative gridlock. Those who suffer most are those who most need our help. The disadvantaged need our compassionate ideas and commitment to promote reforms that will help them leave welfare and actually escape poverty. This goal is particularly important when you consider that an additional 4.3 million Americans have fallen into poverty over the last 3 years for which we have data. In 2003 alone, almost another 800,000 children fell into poverty. Now, that should be a rallying cry, driving us to act.

But, instead, the Republicans use the misfortune of some Americans to suggest that poverty is rising because welfare recipients are not working hard enough. That is just wrong. It is callous and cold-hearted. The problem is not the unwillingness of people on welfare to work.

The problem is too many of those leaving welfare are not finding work, or they are finding jobs that do not lift them out of poverty. We could, of course, help by providing more child-care assistance, job training and a higher minimum wage, but the Republican leadership and the President have resisted such reforms. Instead, the Republicans try to sell the same worn-out threadbare suit of clothes again.

It happened again in March when the majority unveiled their new 3-year old idea from the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources. Nothing has happened since. Nothing, leaving many to believe the Republican leadership intends to include the welfare legislation as part of the upcoming budget reconciliation bill rather than considering it as a separate measure.

Such a process will make it harder to provide the necessary investments in child care because Republicans know the budget reconciliation process is meant to cut programs, not improve them. And that is just fine by the Republican leadership because they do not believe working families deserve any more help for child care. Like so much from their leadership, the rhetoric does not match the reality.

According to data from their own HHS, Health and Human Services Department, only about a quarter of the children who are eligible for child-care subsidies under State eligibility criteria actually receive assistance. This fraction drops to roughly one out of seven, if you use the Federal eligibility standard for daycare assistance. The data does not lie. We are falling short in helping low-income families meet the challenges of raising a family and at the same time going to work.

President Bush's response to this problem is to make it even worse. His proposed 2006 budget shows the number of people receiving child assistance will decline, decline by 300,000 over the next 5 years. So the administration is proposing even greater work requirements for welfare recipients at the same time that the President proposes cutting child care. So much for a helping hand.

My friends on the other side of the aisle suggest their bill is modestly more generous on child care than the administration's budget. However, that Republican package, in reality, underfunds child care assistance by $10.6 billion over the next 5 years. That is their calculation.

Republicans want to outsource Federal responsibility to the States without a dime more to address a $10 billion deficit. That leads nowhere except forcing States to face deep cuts in child-care assistance for the working poor.

Mr. Speaker, there is a better way. We have proposed legislation that gives the States the flexibility and the funding needed to move welfare recipients into real jobs and out of poverty. It is the right thing to do, and this is the right time to do it. And with that hope, I support this temporary extension of the current law. I will not abandon disadvantaged Americans at the very time they need us most.

Watch this floor speech [Click here to get Windows Media Player]

Mr. Speaker, it really speaks volumes that there is no one who wants to come out here and talk about what happens to ordinary people here in this country.

The last election was one in which people said the issue was whether people had values or not. The values that the Democrats have stood for 70 years, really since the Depression, were a minimum income for everyone.

Now, let us start with the minimum wage. We have not raised the minimum wage in this House since 1997. We raised our own salary yesterday 2 percent or whatever it was. I do not know. But the people at the bottom have not had an increase since 1997.

We take a young woman who has got a kid and got out of high school and did not graduate, and we send her out and say, go get a job, go get a job; and she gets a job at minimum wage which amounts to about 50 percent of the poverty level. That is not a value that I support.

Housing is another value that we should be talking about. These people are struggling to find a place to live in the city close to their job. In Seattle you cannot find very many places inside the city. As we gentrify the centers of the city, the people have to move out farther and farther and farther to the point where the bus lines require a couple of hours to get into the city to work at a minimum-wage job.

Health care, another value. There should not have to be a colloquy over here about whether we are going to provide health care for these people. We know that we need a workforce that is healthy. We need people going to work who are healthy, and we need children who are healthy who can go to school and learn and become part of an educated workforce. To fail these children in their earliest years is to present ourselves with a problem. Maybe not us, because we will not be here when the kids who are on welfare today become a problem for the Congress, but 20 years from now people are going to say, why did we not have health care?

The reason we wound up with a school lunch program in this country was because when they went to drafting people in the Second World War, they had so many recruits that had nutrition-related diseases that they had to reject them. And so, Mr. Truman, it was not some big-hearted thing, he started the school lunch program so that we would have healthy kids. And yet we are still questioning whether these youngsters, we are putting the pressure on the States to make cuts in welfare in every single jurisdiction.

The chorus of hollering is going to start when these bills start passing and State governments have to deal with what we have put out there as an insurmountable problem for them, a mandate from us that they have to find the money for.

Finally, education of kids. That is a value. You want kids to have an education. You want parents to have an education. Kids follow the model of their own parents. If we do not help these people on welfare get an education, if we make it an insurmountable task, the kids do not see their own mother or own father get an education.