Rick Santorum

My understanding, if I can respond to the first point, is that the Senator from Connecticut has repeatedly said the formula was calculated based on fully funding every welfare parent who is required to work with children under 12. That…

If I can reclaim my time, I will be happy to answer the question. It says on page 4 of the amendment, eligible children are-- For purposes of this section, the term ``eligible child'' means an individual, who is less than 13 years of age…

The Senator is right, the AFDC dollars remain flat. When I talk about the 70-percent increase, I talk about all the means-tested entitlement programs included in this bill.

I would say to the Senator again in the Dole bill as recently modified there is a provision that States have to do 75 percent maintenance of effort over 3 years. There really is no attempt to race to the bottom. I do not know how many…

I am not making the point that we should not provide child care for women who are on welfare who want to work. I am not saying we should not do that. The point I was making is I do not think we should create a guaranteed entitlement for…

If you provide the amount of money that will be necessary to fully fund the program, in a sense you have not created an entitlement but you have created a slot for everyone.

I want to pick up on this issue of worker displacement because I do not think we got the full answer. I am reading from the bill, section 485 of the bill. Subsection (C) talks about nondisplacement. "In general, no funds provided under…

Where are the jobs,'' I hear. We are not allowed to refer them to the jobs. Under our bill, we would create the opportunity for those referrals. Under their bill, they prohibit job placements.

A city or State job. If you have a job available in the highway department holding a sign up--we have all seen that--and you want to refer a welfare recipient to that job, you cannot do that today; is that right?

If I own a company, a small business, and I want to hire a welfare recipient, they cannot refer that person unless it is a newly created job?

And programs where you saw it more as a dynamic program where people were there to do things, to make a positive contribution to their community. I am hopeful that is what will result in this. I am very optimistic that we can find, I…

What I found out was that, yes, it was 7.5, they raised it to 8, but they eliminated the requirement that they had to be a defined Bureau of Labor Statistics area, that the State could now define what the area would be. It could be an…

I do not know how you can be tighter if you have a million people--let us assume we have a million people in the welfare system in Pennsylvania, which is high, but let us say we have a million people, and we say 50 percent of those people…

I said that would not be my preference. My preference would be to have no exemptions at the Federal level. We allow the States the ultimate flexibility to determine who is going to work and who is not, given the standard of half, which is…

My feeling is we should allow the States complete flexibility to deal with this issue instead of the overall goal of what percentage of the entire caseload should be in work. I think 50 percent is fair of the entire caseload, given the…

Right. So what you basically take is, let us say, 65 percent of the people who come into the program, and then by the year 2000, half of the 65 percent must be in some sort of work program. On the Republican side, we do not make that…

Let me understand this. Maybe we are a little more different than I thought we were. What you are saying is you take the entire caseload of people that are on welfare, and you say a certain number of them are ineligible because of an…

On this issue, it seems like there is some agreement that 50 percent is a fair figure and allows for some State flexibility in considering the fact that roughly a third of the parents who are on the current AFDC caseload are disabled in…

And it is up to the State to determine who those people are that should be working or should not, which 50 percent. It is a State flexibility issue?

Now I ask maybe a broader question. How many people who go into the welfare program have to participate in this new program as designed by the leader's amendment? What is the participation--I know what it is in our bill. We eventually get…

I guess then my question is, let us say you have someone who is a single mom with a couple of children, and she is on the program for 2 years and has been in job search and doing things that are required under the temporary employment…

My understanding is you have participation rates. We have participation rates in our bill and you have participation rates in your bill.

Does that apply just to those exemptions or the high unemployment exemption also, so if the State of New York, for example, did not want the people to go to work in New York City? Or is that an automatic? Is there no State flexibility…

Even if they are in a high unemployment area--I am going through the other exceptions here--even if their children are living with other than a parent; even if you have a child who is ill or incapacitated, irrespective of all of these…

I know even at 8 percent, because I have seen figures, most major communities, at least in 1994, would not have met that criteria, and would have been over the 8 percent. So no recipient in that city, for the period of 1994, anyway--and my…