Preserving the Welfare Work Requirement and TANF Extension Act of 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I believe in the value of work. That's one of the reasons that I voted for the 1996 welfare reform law, because I wanted to see more people move from welfare to work. Our laws need to encourage job opportunities, but in the effort that we have before us today, it seems to me that this legislation as proposed is less malevolent and more irrelevant to those poor people.

Because of the way the TANF program is currently structured, only about 1 percent of working-aged adults across America who are poor are participating in TANF work activities at any particular time. So, this afternoon, for 99 percent of the poor Americans who are not participating in TANF work activities, this bill is not all that significant. These are people who are struggling to get up the economic ladder at about the first rung. What happens and whether there are waivers or there are not waivers, I think they basically just feel that we've waved good-bye to their plight and are not responding to it in a constructive way.

It also is important to remember that we have a higher proportion of our population living near the bottom of the economic ladder today than when welfare reform was first enacted. In 2011, about 46 million American neighbors lived in poverty. About 350,000 of those lived in the San Antonio area. Amidst this poverty, amidst this growing inequality in resources in our country, we have the lowest level of poor children receiving direct cash assistance from TANF in almost 50 years. In my home State of Texas, one in every 20 poor children receives TANF assistance directly, and when children get assistance, they don't get very much.

As we look at the whole question of extending the TANF law, what we've had are only short-term extensions, not long-term reform. And each of these has provided some convenient political opportunities to reenforce the old welfare Cadillac stereotypes that just blame the poor for being poor. A previous extension we had out here focused on whether we would prohibit poor people from withdrawing any of their TANF benefits at a strip club or at a casino. It's not an unreasonable restriction, but it's hardly going to the core issue of how to get more Americans out of poverty and into the workplace, and I don't think today's bill helps in that regard either.

I believe that poverty should be viewed as a major national problem that needs a resolution by our working together and not viewed as a weapon to just score political points out of the last Presidential campaign.

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Mr. DOGGETT. I think the real poverty at stake today is the poverty of cooperation, that of seeking a bipartisan response to poverty, a poverty of balance that contributes to the many children and their parents who are out there and who are seeing so little progress.

If you evaluate the TANF program and how it has operated over the last decade and a half, based upon the number of poor people who have been denied assistance, it has been a tremendous success; but if you evaluate it based on how many poor people have moved out of welfare and into the workforce--into a job with a living wage that they're still in--I think the progress has been very spotty, at best.

The responsibility for those failures is shared broadly here in Washington and in the States, many of which just used the TANF resources to replace other things they were doing in the social service area. I believe that today's attempt to restrict State authority to strengthen welfare to work initiatives is totally contradictory with what's going on right now in the Budget Committee on block granting health assistance.

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