Burgess Owens: “I will just take 2 minutes to associate myself with the remarks that have been made before. We are all in favor of…”

“I will just take 2 minutes to associate myself with the remarks that have been made before. We are all in favor of welfare reform. We are all in favor of reforming any aspect of Government that certainly will save money and improve efficiency. There is no program in Government anywhere that could not benefit from reform, including the CIA and the aircraft procurement program that is going to purchase the F-22, spending billions of dollars. There are numerous programs that ought to be reformed, and welfare is certainly no exception. The problem is, we do not want to have reform be merely a persecution of poor children and poor women. The fact that the majority party has chosen to trivialize child support enforcement and not deal with it up to now is shocking. I hope it will no longer be a partisan issue, that they will really get on board, and child support enforcement will become a major part of this reform process. Let us have welfare reform, but let us do it thoroughly. Let us deal with the provision of jobs and job training for welfare mothers. Let us deal with the child support enforcement. Billions of dollars are at stake here. We have heard the citing of the kind of money that can be recovered, and there are simple steps that can be taken. The question is why have we waited so long. Why have all these decades gone by, and we have not gone out to collect the kind of money that should be collected from absent parents.”