Bush pushes for tougher welfare requirements

? President Bush insisted Monday that welfare recipients put in a 40-hour work week and said a Senate bill requiring less was riddled with “so many exceptions, so many loopholes” that it would reverse six years of welfare progress.

Bush leveled his assault on the Democrat-written legislation while on a $1.2 million fund-raising hop to South Carolina for the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Sanford.

He faulted legislation passed last month by Democrats, who control the Senate Finance Committee, because it did not include the stiffer work requirements he sought, would not produce as much money as he wanted for programs promoting marriage, and would increase funds to help working welfare parents pay for child care.

“They’re saying we got to spend a bunch more money in order to make us feel better and to make things work better. We don’t need that,” Bush said.

The landmark 1996 welfare overhaul law expires Sept. 30 and the House has already passed a reauthorization in tune with what Bush wanted most notably by requiring most welfare recipients to work 40 hours per week to continue receiving government checks. The 1996 law requires 30 hours of work each week.

The Senate is looking at a different version, written by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., that toughens the current work requirement but allows more flexibility in counting education and training as work.

“There are so many exceptions, so many loopholes, so many ways out of holding people to high standards that fewer people would actually be moving from welfare to work,” Bush told an invited audience at Charleston’s West Ashley High School.

One proposed “loophole” he criticized would let welfare recipients count college classes toward their work requirements.

“Under the way they’re kind of writing it right now out of the Senate Finance Committee, some people could spend their entire five years there’s a five-year work requirement on welfare going to college,” Bush said.

“Now, that’s not my view of helping people become independent and it’s certainly not my view of understanding the importance of work and helping people achieve the dignity necessary so they can live a free life, free from government control.”

Bush highlighted the success of the 1996 law, which, combined with the booming economy, cut welfare rolls by more than half. He said tougher work requirements would continue that progress.

The Senate bill, he contended, “is a retreat from the success.”

“I believe that if the bill goes through the way they’ve written it, we’re going to go backward here in America and the bill would hurt the very people we’re trying to help,” the president said.

The measure proposes spending $5.5 billion to help working parents pay for child care, $1.8 billion more than the House version and $1 billion more than the current law.