Jack Kingston: “In fact, I think the gentleman from California said this will actually help the middle class from having higher taxes.…”

“In fact, I think the gentleman from California said this will actually help the middle class from having higher taxes. It is kind of like ``Hello, is anybody home in there?'' Because I do not follow that. If I go into a fast-food restaurant today and they cannot squeeze out any more jobs, then my french fries and hamburgers and Coca-Colas are going to go up, along with the goods and services I get from everywhere else, from health care to groceries. The middle class, one more time, will get stuck with this. I want to kind of bridge this. As we are talking about the middle class, maybe we should talk about welfare reform, since we have a lot of news in there today. We have two different approaches on welfare reform, from the conservative point of view and from the liberal point of view. We have a President who promised to apparently extend welfare as we know it, and President Clinton currently has vetoed two welfare reform bills, and to date I think has now endorsed a bill that allows welfare benefits for felons. So as I said, the President seems to want to extend welfare as we know it. I hear over and over again from middle class people that they are tired of the giveaway programs when they are out working 40, 45, 50, 55 hours a week and more, busting their tails, and then they have got able-bodied people who refuse to work because of the generous welfare benefits. The President vetoed a bill that required able-bodied recipients to work 20 hours a week.”