Nancy Kassebaum: “I will reiterate why I believe this amendment is important. Mr. President, I, too, feel strongly about the importance of…”

“I will reiterate why I believe this amendment is important. Mr. President, I, too, feel strongly about the importance of child care. In order to make our welfare reform effort successful, I could not support the measure that we just voted on because I felt it was an amount of money that could not be sustained and was not offset in a way that I felt would be successful. The rationale for my amendment is briefly three parts. It creates a unified system of child care at the State level, with one State plan. It is not an effort to, in any way, intrude on the infringement of one committee over another. It is my idea that a consolidation of these efforts is important, and it provides one set of regulations, rather than a two-track system. So it does not transfer jurisdiction of the Senate Finance Committee child care program to the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. But it does set up a single system through which child care is handled. It prevents families from experiencing disruptions in their child care since their eligibility is no longer tied to specific program requirements, that is, AFDC. Instead, eligibility is based on a family's income, through a sliding fee scale that the State determines. As parents earn more, they make a greater contribution for child care assistance. I feel it is very important that low-income families can be able to move off of welfare rolls and yet still be able to maintain some support for child care.”