However, tax increases or cuts in other federal entitlement programs would be required to offset the cost of the increased contingency funds. And if a severe regional recession occurred, there almost certainly would not be enough votes to provide billions of dollars more for a welfare contingency fund at a time it was assisting only a minority of states. In addition, the contingency fund is badly designed. Requiring states to put up 70 percent or 80 percent of the cost of such assistance, especially during recessions, is unprecedented. The likely result is that many states will fail to access the contingency funds when their economies falter because they will not expend the funds needed to meet these unrealistic matching requirements .
Serious hardship is likely to result.
The cuts in assistance to legal immigrants are deeper in both the House and Senate bills than in the vetoed welfare bill. The House and Senate bills both ban the overwhelming majority of legal immigrants from receiving subsistence benefits. Among those banned are poor legal immigrants who have no place else to turn because they have no sponsor, their sponsors are impoverished, or their sponsors have died. Under the Castle-Tanner bipartisan welfare proposal, poor legal immigrant children would be exempt from all of these bans. Neither of the current bills does that either.