Patsy T. Mink: “Mr. Speaker, the big issue facing the White House, as the gentleman knows, is they have the proper thoughts about…”

“Mr. Speaker, the big issue facing the White House, as the gentleman knows, is they have the proper thoughts about welfare reform, the necessity for education and training and counseling and job searching, and maybe even the necessity of public service jobs if there are no private sector jobs and child care. But the problem is how to pay for it. The shocking thing is, as the White House Task Force has looked for ways to pay for it, they are thinking taxing food stamps, taxing public housing tenants, taxing the welfare benefit itself, taking legal aliens off of SSI and Medicare and some of these programs. So your contributions on how this thing could be paid for, I think, are extremely noteworthy. I hope that the White House is listening and paying attention to your suggestions. The important point is to make the point over and over again, and that is, welfare reform is not a means to reduce the deficit or to balance the budget. It is a sincere effort, I hope, to help these poor people help themselves to get a job. I am not for forcing them out of the home. An interesting statistic, my colleague, again, I picked it up from CRS, is that 77 percent of the parents on welfare coming on the first time and staying on that 2-year period have a child 1 year or younger.”