Greg Ganske: “I appreciate that and agree with what my colleague has been saying. I have to smile because when he was talking about…”

“I appreciate that and agree with what my colleague has been saying. I have to smile because when he was talking about his father coming home and discussing the three or six newspapers that he had read that day with you and all of the ideas, I remembered that usually my dad and I discussed the sports page. But to return to welfare, I think there are principles in our welfare reform bill that are very, very important. The first one is the able- bodied should work. The second one is that there should be time limits. We do not want to see one generation after another generation, four or five generations, caught in welfare. Another idea that is very important is that for those welfare recipients who are under the age of 18, there should be strong incentives for them to continue and stay in school. You do not receive benefits unless you are living with an adult and unless you are in school because, if you do not stay in school, there is very little chance that you are ever going to get out of the trap of the welfare system. So I think there are a lot of good things that we have been trying to do. I would like to go to one thing, though, and that relates to what we are talking about in terms of cuts. An example is the most recent HHS appropriations bill, where for the Department of Education we increased funding this year by roughly $2.4 billion. That was somewhere between a 4- and a 5-percent increase. Now, within that we shifted some of the funds around.…”