Date: 1995-03-21
Speaker: GENE GREEN (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Texas

Mr. Speaker. we had a member from the majority side a few minutes ago talking about joining the debate on welfare reform. I would be more than happy to join the debate with him. talking about the fallacies of both the original H.R. 4 that was introduced but also the H.R. 1214 that we are considering today and this week and which reminds me. Since last year I heard from so many talk show folks about. I wonder how many of those people have read H.R. 1214 who are now talking.about it as the greatest thing since sliced bread? It is not as big as some of the bills we have considered but it is almost 400 pages and I hope that some of the proponents who talk about how great it is have had a chance to read it. like some of us have who were on the committees who dealt with it. The school nutrition program will be hurt if we pass the. what is now H.R. 1214. The Republicans shell game continues with our children hanging in the balance. As this flier states. "When Its Budget Cutting Time. You Always Shoot at the Easiest Target." You can see how the impact of that will be when you talk about the WIC program. or you talk about the childrens nutrition program. Your argument should be that we do need to reform welfare. and I agree with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. but this bill that came out of both the Committee on Ways and Means and out of the committee I serve on was not a debate. it was just. "We have a plan and we are going to run over you as Democrats. Were not going to agree with you that we need to address childrens nutrition through the School Lunch Program. Were just going to blockgrant it. Were going to do what we want to do." So there was not a debate. It was the majority saying we are going to do it the way that we want instead of really making it a bipartisan effort. When I came to Congress in January. I thought that welfare reform would be a bipartisan effort. but I do not think we are going to see it today or this week because it has not been. I agree we need to reform welfare. We need to. take away the incentive of someone or the tragedy of a person being on welfare. But we do not need to cut the programs that provide the most effective safety net that we have for our children. We should require people to work. We should require a time limit about how long they are on there. We should require them to go to job training. We should require them to do all sorts of things. But when you take the school nutrition program and you say we are going to increase the authorization. whereas now a child shows up in school. they have a guarantee of that lunch if they are qualified and say we are going to authorize 4 percent more but next year in the Committee on Appropriations it may be cut and then we are going to let the State take 20 percent and spend it on something else because of the block granting. That is why this poster is so relevant: "When its budget cutting time. the easiest target is a child." Last week a colleague of mine from Texas talked about some of the highway demonstration projects in the rescission bill that were untouched. Yet we cut AmeriCorps. we cut job training. and most of these projects were not even requested -by our- local highway departments or transportation department. How is it equitable that we cut school lunches but not highway projects? The chief financial officer for the State of Texas has estimated that if this welfare bill passed today. this H.R. 1214 passes. it will cost the State of Texas over $1 billion in our next biennial. 199697. The Department of Human Services estimates that if this bill passes. it would cost the State of Texas $5.2 billion. The CBO has said that with growth in population and inflation. this reduction would be $2.3 billion. I know I am throwing out lots of numbers and some of them may disagree. but no matter how you cut it. the people who are going to pass this bill this week really do not know what it is going to do because all they are doing is running that train and saying we are going to pass a welfare reform bill. even if it does cut WIC or school nutrition. or it cuts a lot of other programs that are really important and have a great deal of support. If any of these are reduced fundings. particularly the one from the Congressional Budget Office estimates for savings and administrative costs. we are talking about stopping children from having a hot lunch. Yesterday I was In my district at J.P. Henderson Elementary School in Houston trying to show that the claim of the welfare reform Is missing the point. Those children are eating that hot lunch and that is at a school that has easily 80 percent of the children have a reduced and free lunch. We should not continue to be playing games with our childrens future. We need to do welfare reform. We can take school nutrition programs out of the welfare reform just like the majority took the senior citizens nutrition out of welfare reform 3 weeks ago. It is just that again it is too often popular to hit the easiest target and not the senior citizens. We do not consider buying text books. computers. or desks as welfare. We should not consider school nutrition welfare.