Political Quotes

“It is an interesting point because presently we provide about 640,000 children in a program with assistance. What we need to talk about is not just people on welfare but people going to work at 125 percent or so of poverty. And there is a transition where people should start to contribute to their own child care needs. I did not mention this in my remarks, but one of the dangers I think of what is going to happen here is that you have people working right now that are out there, they are getting help with their child care. If we are now going to say to the welfare recipient that you have got to go to work, and we are going to say, take what exists out there today, we may be taking care from some of the very people working right now, managing to stay at work because they are getting help with child care. They are going to be put into a second-class status because the person on welfare is going to utilize that dollar. My colleague is correct. We have provided, not to any great extent, for some families to try and keep them off of welfare because even if you get off welfare, you have to stay off and staying off requires a bit of time so you can get up to a point where you can afford the rent. Setting aside health care and looking just at food, rent and so forth, average day care costs, private costs are $80, $100 a week, for the least expensive programs in many cases, and if you are pulling down something a bit above minimum wage that gets almost impossible.”