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   Mr. Speaker, I ask the public and I ask my colleagues, please, please, do not be hesitant to invest in young families and in moms who have fallen on hard times. Do not assume that if someone is having a bad time, they did it on their own and deserve it, and if they were worth their salt they would not be there in the first place because that is just not true for any of the people who are in need today.

   Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Mrs. Mink) for being part of the welfare task force with me. We know that the things that we need to be concentrating on child care, education counting as work, flexibility in the welfare system, making sure that individuals who have domestic abuse problems, substance abuse problems, mental illness, language difficulties, making sure that they get an opportunity to get their situations together before the clock starts ticking on them will make a difference in ensuring that welfare makes work pay and count, and these people all count.

   Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) for her contribution here today. It is very powerful, especially her own personal explanation of how much the program meant to her and her young family.

   I think that is the message that we have to carry to our colleagues, that these individuals who are on welfare having hard times, they are worthy parents. They care about their children. They do not want to do anything to damage their future; but in many cases they need the time and the education, they need the training and they need the assurance that there is quality child care before they are forced off to work.

   I thank the gentlewoman for her contribution to this afternoon. We will engage the House, I am sure, on many of these issues as we go to our markup in the committee and full committee and eventually on the floor.

   Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman and look forward to working with her in getting the message across that the enemy is poverty, the enemy is not welfare or the welfare recipient. The enemy is poverty. If we can get that message across and do something about it, we will have helped welfare recipients as well as the working poor.

   Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, I think all of us want to do what we can to provide a safety net. Every President that I have worked with talks about the necessity of a social safety net. That is really all that the welfare program is. It is a safety net for families that have fallen on hard times, have recently gotten divorced, or lost a family member, as my colleague explained in her situation; and they need a helping hand. They should not be treated as though they are of less worth and dignity than all of us. We want their children to have the benefit of the best possible family situation that they could have.

   In talking about welfare benefits, I think Members have the feeling that there is this huge amount of money that is being remitted to the families on welfare, and that is certainly not true. The amounts of money that are allocated per month can be gotten by downloading the Congressional Research Service. It has a list of each

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   I recite this list of those that are in the lower threshold of monthly compensation to give Members an idea that we are not talking about very large sums of money that they are receiving to just tide themselves over. In addition, they have Medicaid and food stamps, and usually housing assistance as well to help them through.

   So this work idea is to try to uplift them from their condition of dependency upon the State, but it is not a lot of money. So the notion is how do we uplift them; and it seems to me that the most logical thing that we can do is to help them improve themselves through education and to fill the jobs that are available in teaching, nursing, in high tech, in other kinds of occupations that are available.

   The requirement of 40 hours is really punitive in rural America. I represent a rural district. I do not see how we are going to find jobs to fill the requirement of 40 hours. We cannot even fill the 30 hours in my remote areas on the Big Island, on Maui, Molokai, and Kauai.

[Time: 17:45]

   So I think that there has to be flexibility. Like my colleague the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) suggested, we have to give States flexibility. We know that they can exempt 20 percent of their population. That is already in the old law. No one seems to be changing that. We have to bear in mind that in some areas of America it is just not possible to get a job, so we have to think of other alternatives. Certainly an alternative is through education to uplift them, to qualify them for professions and careers. If we were satisfied with just a poverty-level compensated job and say, well, we have done our duty under TANF , then what we are saying is that for the rest of time, this family is going to receive food stamps, Medicaid, housing support and other kinds of support services dependent upon a condition of poverty. If they work, they will also get earned income tax credit refunds, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 depending on how much they earn and how many dependents they have.

   This is not the kind of policy that I think we want to perpetuate. What we want to do is to give these families the hope and the realization that our government policy is going to recognize self-betterment.

   And so if a woman, a single parent, wants to go to college, get a degree in nursing or some other profession, that should be encouraged, not discouraged by not considering it part of the program. Our bill is very modest. The gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) and myself in our bills provide that education is a work activity. So when the law says you must be in a work activity, going to school constitutes a work activity, and you cannot be penalized because you decided that you wanted to go to school. The colleges can decide whether the individual is sustaining herself by keeping up her grades and attendance and so forth, and so those kinds of requirements can be levied. Going to college, that family will have Pell grants, undoubtedly, being on welfare. That will help to pay the tuition and other costs of getting there, transportation and so forth. She can probably qualify for work-study, so that she can produce some work hours and earn some money at the same time. This is the sort of support that a safety network ought to provide.

   The TANF legislation that we passed in 1996 completely ignores this part of our government responsibility. We have passed countless pieces of legislation having to do with higher education, expanding the opportunity of young people to go to college. It should be no different for a family person who is on the welfare rolls. That person ought to have the same encouragement to get off welfare by getting an education that will then sustain that family at a salary that would lift them up from poverty so that they do not have to rely on food stamps, housing subsidies, earned income tax credit and all the rest of it.

   So I think that this comprehensive look at what welfare reform should be, not just getting any job, but lifting people out of poverty, enhancing their condition and making it possible for the children of these families to have the kind of family life, family stability, with somebody who will be able to nurture them, carry them on to college because they themselves have had that opportunity.

   It is this outlook that we hope to engage this House further upon as we take this bill up in subcommittee and full committee and bring the matter to the floor. It is expected that this legislation will come before us sometime in early or mid-May. So we have not much time. I invite the enlarged community to contribute their thoughts and views, because there are many, many organizations out there that have contributed already, in

   the hundreds of meetings that they have conducted where they have consulted with welfare recipients, and we have learned so much from them about the agony of raising families and how difficult it is to match the requirements of the law with their responsibilities for their families.

   I am delighted that we are joined here by my dear friend, the distinguished gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton) who has, I am sure, many words of advice to give us on this very, very important area, particularly rural America which I was just talking about.

   Mrs. CLAYTON. I want to thank the gentlewoman very much for holding this special order and raising this whole issue of welfare reform and giving us the opportunity, our colleagues and the American people, to know that this is an issue that is being debated and which the President now has made a proposal. We know Ways and Means will be debating those areas and the committee on which the gentlewoman from Hawaii serves, the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

   We have a unique opportunity in the reauthorization of welfare-to-work. The whole idea for welfare-to-work was indeed to move people from dependency to independence. In our State we call it Work First. You have an opportunity to try to find a job. The requirement was to make sure you entered into those kinds of activities to prepare you for a job, and the State, supposedly with the assistance of the Federal Government, was supposed to do that. There was not a policy that we were going to move people out of poverty. That would have been a better one, but it was that we were moving people to work.

   But we have learned some things during that process. I would caution us that even some of the things we have learned from State studies may not be as reflective as it should be, because when you understand that our State as a whole may have some areas that work better than others, we have some parts of our States that have more opportunities for jobs, more opportunities to move people to work, and you have some places where I come from, the rural areas, where there is indeed a great decline in low-skill jobs. The economy, as we know, has depressed even those jobs who were upward mobile and diminished agriculture opportunity, so we are having less opportunities to move people into.

   Also, when we look at what we are doing or, better still, we are looking at how Governors in the States may use waivers. They use waivers in a variety of ways. Sometimes it is more of an advantage to the Governor or a State than it is to the individual communities for that. For instance, they can use waivers to exempt areas that have a high concentration of unemployment. But if the State looks at it as a whole, they may not see that, because the State as a whole may be in that. So States have not used those waivers to target resources strategically where people have opportunities or people have a lack of opportunities. I think we have some opportunity to refine that.

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   The area that I am most interested in, and I am interested in all of them, but is the area of day care and child care. The child care capacity for parents who have very young children, if we expect them to be independent, they need to have the assurance that there is adequate, safe, child care and affordable child care. In rural areas, just having the access almost to any child care is not there. And then to have the assurance that you have placed your child in a qualified, well-equipped, designed, child care facility is almost remote, particularly when you understand that child care gets to be expensive.

   And if you are not investing in training the

   personnel, if you are not investing in the infrastructure of the community college, or you are not creating opportunities for nonprofits or faith-based organizations to provide that child care, saying that people should find child care without providing for it I think is not only grossly negligent, I think it is unforgivable when we are expecting that this should be strengthening families.

   One whole premise is strengthening families. Very few families I know of think they are strengthening their family if they throw their kids at just any place without regard to the quality and the safety of it, and then when you are not affording the kind of reimbursement.

   As you begin to craft the bill, I hope you will understand that there is some differential between our urban communities and our rural communities. The suffering may be the same. I am not arguing against anything that should go in the urban areas, but the infrastructure is different. We have to travel longer periods of time, for a longer distance, for health care, for education, for shopping. We travel for job opportunities. If you are going to ignore the lack of transportation to facilitate this, then you will have put my district and my communities within my district at a disadvantage.

   So in order to make sure that there is access to that, child care must be there. That means providing sufficient money for training as well as reimbursement for opportunities.

   Then when you think about actually getting to a job, if I live 10 miles from the Wal-Mart that is going to hire me, by the way for $7 an hour, chances of me getting a car on $7 and paying for it, hey, as our young kids say, we need to get real if we really want this to happen.

   I think we want to make the welfare bill even better. We just do not want to have statistics that say we have moved people off of welfare. Moving people off welfare is much easier, I submit to you, than moving people off welfare into meaningful work, where they can move from dependency to self-sufficiency, working, advancing themselves.

   Finally, the whole issue of education of the welfare mother or the welfare adult, that is critical not only to the economy of our district but also to the stability of that person working and not going from welfare to work, laid off. If we understand, if we invest in their upward mobility by providing them training on a continuous basis, we are investing not only in the statistic of movement from welfare, but we are investing in the vitality of our community and a statistical reality that these people will stay as employed persons.

   I commend the gentlewoman for giving attention to this. I just urge as you go forward that you will consider those infrastructure needs as well as the distance and the economies of scale and what that means in putting the same kinds of programs that we would have in urban areas, where things are relatively close to each other, and there may be a sufficient infrastructure there that would accommodate day care, where there are well-established church day cares or well-established nonprofits, and even for-profits.

   They are not in my communities, unfortunately. I wish they were there. We have to find a way to give some incentives to those nonprofits or faith-based organizations investing in child care. We have to find ways of accommodating transportation in rural areas for the purpose of both education as well as for employment. We also have to find adequate resources to reimburse people for the day care.

   Finally, the education of our mothers and people who are dependent is not only investing in that individual, which is worthy in and of itself, but we are investing in the vitality of that community and the stability of that community.

   Again, I commend the gentlewoman for her leadership in this area. By the way, I say to you, we are trying to relieve the responsibility of food stamps out of day care. I am a part of the agriculture conference committee, and part of the idea as we considered that was to try to reform and bring new quality to food stamps. You remember, food stamps and welfare reform are partners. If you examine who is getting food stamps now, a little better than half of the people who are getting food stamps are working families. And if you take who those people may be, they are children of working families as well as their parents; and then senior citizens and children, just combine those alone, are over 60 percent.

   So making food stamps and the transition from welfare or Work First to work, having the ability to supplement that $7-an-hour job I talked about with food stamps with a family of three, that is a big help. And so we want to make sure that that goes in tandem with it. Just as Medicaid has been made a little easier for the transition, we are trying to make an alignment between Medicaid and welfare reform and food stamps, so that this will be a part of the package we put together in enabling the tools for a person moving from welfare to have those additional tools to supplement a very low-wage job.

[Time: 18:00]

   Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I commend the gentlewoman for her contributions, and I certainly hope that in her conference on the farm bill that she can work this alignment so that the families that are moving off of welfare getting their minimum wage job will have easier access to food stamps.

   Right now we are told that many of them fall between the cracks, because the eligibility requirements are so different and nobody is there to help them qualify, so many of these families, though they are eligible income-wise, are not really getting this benefit at all.

   Mrs. CLAYTON. We are very hopeful, and I think it is moving in the right direction.

   Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Wonderful. We had the opportunity to hear from Secretary Tommy Thompson the other day. He came and testified about the importance of child care. I want to say that I was very impressed with the passion with which he made his comments about child care, that you cannot have a national policy that requires work of single-parent families unless you provide adequate quality child care. So I think we have a friend there as far as the concept is concerned, but the mechanics of making this statement a reality for families is still short. It is not there.

   In our bill, H.R. 3113, we say that if the government is not able to find child care for a family that it is requiring work activity out of, then the family is exempt from finding work activity until such child care can be made available, and the clock stops. It seems to me that is simple justice. If we believe that the work requirement cannot be enforced without child care, then we cannot put sanctions and penalties upon the family for something over which they have no control.

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