James M. Talent

in 1965 the out-of-wedlock birthrate was 6 percent. Today, it is 32 percent. We have had an explosion of illegitimacy in the country at the same time as contraceptives have been widely available without restriction to children. All of the…

last year's welfare reform bill was about, in part, getting welfare recipients into work. One of the most effective ways to do that is through community service and community work experience programs which we generally know as workfare…

I would ask the gentleman if it was the intention of the authors of the 1996 welfare reform law that workfare participants be considered employees, and thus covered under at least 25 labor laws, including prevailing wages, unemployment…

The local community has been very involved in designing a plan to clean up the site. Their concern is that the administration of clean-up will be moved away from the St. Louis area to Omaha, reducing the community's input and influence on…

I knew from the beginning of the session that there would be a series of attempts through the back door... to gut the work provisions in the welfare bill that we passed last year on a bipartisan basis, and that the President signed and…

The IRS has been responding to the signals that its political masters for a generation were sending it. I think what the IRS is guilty of is not understanding that the political masters have changed now, and the signals are changing. They…

the perspective is totally different. The last budget agreement, the budget plan, big increase in taxes, big new burst of domestic spending, deficits as far as the eye could see, passed on a totally partisan basis. Now we have a bipartisan…

I am just so pleased that we are finally passing bipartisan tax relief for the American people. And the position that is a bipartisan position on this bill, as anybody could tell who looked at the vote, is the affirmative position in favor…

I did want to talk briefly about the death tax because we have held hearings on this in the Committee on Small Business... It is the small family business, people who have done, as you were saying before so eloquently, who have done what…

Mr. Chairman, This is a noncontroversial but very significant bill, Mr. Chairman. It is a supplement to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996. We call it the Paperwork Elimination Act. What the bill does, in fine, is require that regulatory…

I want to thank all the speakers for their kind words about the bill and about the process. I do need to thank some other people, Mr. Chairman, very briefly. The Committee on Small Business shares jurisdiction over issues involving…

I reached the conclusion that indeed we had left hundreds and hundreds of men behind in Vietnam and probably in Korea as well, and I reached that conclusion, Mr. Speaker, to my shame. Well, in the years that have passed since then, I along…

I wanted to address briefly the incidence and pattern of behavior with regard to our reaction to Saddam Hussein's latest actions in Iraq, and I want to preface it by saying that I have defended the President's decisions in Missouri with my…

It leads me to wonder, Mr. Speaker. I think there would be very strong support on both sides of the aisle for any plausible plan to respond on an ongoing and consistent basis to the depredations by Saddam Hussein. I know I would be very…

I want to wish her all the best in her future endeavors. I would thank her again for yielding for this colloquy. Mr. Chairman, I would like to clarify our intent with respect to the language in this bill dealing with securitization. This…

I appreciate very much the tone of the debate to this point, but I think the reason we ought to oppose the Democratic substitute is that it is much weaker on work than the underlying bill. It is better than the ones they have offered in…

Mr. Chairman, the institution of marriage is not a creation of the State. It is older than the government, older than the Constitution and the laws, older than the Union, older than the Western tradition of political democracy from which…

we do not realize the true worth of a great man until he is gone. The networks of which he is a part, the man of which he is the hub, slip and shake and tremble. We all feel the insecurity of things if even the strongest among us can be so…

Let us look at this system that Governor Thompson and an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Wisconsin is trying to change. Let us look at what this system has given us. In the immediate postwar era, Mr. Speaker, welfare in this country…

My experience is one that I think is shared by most of the Members of this body. It simply does not reflect well on HUD. Mr. Chairman, let me tell a couple of anecdotes that show that. I was on a talk show about a year and a half ago with…

let me say to my friend, the last gentleman who spoke from Massachusetts, that I would hope that that is not the case as well. When I have seen a number of times, I hope that is not the case here, is Members who indicate that they are for…

I have a 3 year old little girl, she is going to owe $100,000 in taxes during her working lifetime just to pay the debt service that the last generation of congressional leadership ran up on the Federal debt in the last 20 years, and I am…

I think this amendment highlights the philosophical differences between the parties. We believe in Americans and what they have built on their own. We think workers and employers, subject to reasonable rules and regulations, are pretty…

on March 21, the House will take up comprehensive, real and historic welfare reform. The object of that bill will be an historic and fundamental change in the direction of our welfare policy, away from a failed system that is destroying…

Yesterday the House made an excellent start in holding this body accountable to the people, cutting its costs. What particularly impressed me about what happened yesterday was the strong bipartisan majorities that supported most, if not…