Political Quotes

“to close on this amendment, we have heard a lot about the phrase that ``we want to change welfare as we have known it'' and that it is a failed system. There are many citations as so what those failures are. If one of the objectives of the welfare system was, as the senior Senator from New York has stated, to move resources from the Northeast to the South and West, we will add that as an additional failure of the welfare system. How can you say that a system has accomplished that objective of assisting the poorest States in America when Texas receives one-fifth the amount of funds for its poor children as does New York and when Arkansas receives one-eleventh of the funds per poor child as does the District of Columbia? Another example of the failed system. Assume that we were to start this process with a blank piece of paper. Assume we had never distributed Federal money for the purposes of assisting poor children and assisting the guardians--particularly the single, female heads of households--of those poor children to get off welfare and on to work and thus independence. How would we go about allocating the money? First, I think we want to allocate it in a manner that would, in fact, make the system work, that would provide a sufficient amount of resources into each of the communities of America to allow the kinds of training programs and child care to be functional, to accomplish the objective of moving from dependence to independence through work.”