Political Quotes

“Decades of experience tell us that the most effective antipoverty program is a job, and this bill helps low-income Americans earn success through the dignity of work. States actually, as my good friends on the other side know, spend very little of their TANF funding on moving people into jobs. Today, half of all TANF recipients are neither working nor preparing for work. This bill ensures that money only goes to those who are working, providing individuals with paychecks in lieu of benefit checks, a key tenet in welfare reform. This pilot only provides funding for one fiscal year, repurposing money that has already been appropriated and, frankly, using it in a better way than it was originally appropriated to achieve. The bill requires that States report on outcome measures and provide high-quality evaluations so that Congress can make appropriate decisions after we have actually seen the results yielded by the program. And finally, as we have been pointing out, but I think around here it is always worth pointing out multiple times, where actually CBO estimates the bill has no cost.…”