On the recordApril 17, 2002
I first came to this body in 1994. At that time what I had heard from the constituents in my district and people all throughout the State of Florida was what a terrible disaster the welfare system was, locking millions of Americans in a cycle of poverty that they were literally unable to escape from. In the county that I live in, we had chronically 2,500 people on welfare. With the passage of welfare reform, that number has been reduced to 400 people, an 80 percent reduction. These kinds of reductions were seen all over the country. Millions of Americans have been able to move successfully from welfare to work. Surprisingly, now that we are in the place where we need to reauthorize this legislation, there are some Members who want to turn the clock back and look at the tremendous success of welfare reform and say it was a failure and we need to go back to the old ways.
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