
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, December 4, 1993                   TAG: 9312040125
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

6 STEPS TO REPAIR WELFARE

President Clinton's welfare proposal will set a time limit on benefits and include expanded child care and job training, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said Friday. It should not require new taxes, she said.

Shalala said she could not put a price tag on the initiative, because Clinton had not yet received the recommendations of his welfare-reform task force. But to pay for the costly training and child-care programs, she said, the administration was prepared to recommend cuts in entitlement programs.

"This is a town in which no one believes you can do anything new without passing a tax, without finding a new revenue source," Shalala said in a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council's annual conference. "But before one new dime is spent - and the president feels as strongly about this on health care as he does on welfare - we need to look strongly at how we are spending existing money."

Shalala said the Clinton proposal would take a six-point approach to welfare reform, beginning with more aggressive efforts to determine paternity when single women have babies, new efforts to curb teen-age pregnancy and removal of welfare provisions that "discourage two-parent families."

"The problem is obvious: We have children having children in the United States," Shalala said. "We will never successfully deal with welfare reform until we reduce the amount of teen-age pregnancy in this country."

She said the child-care provisions would give states broad flexibility in designing the programs but said the plan must "make work pay" by guaranteeing welfare recipients that their children would be taken care of if they took jobs or enrolled in training programs.

Thirdly, she said the time limit, likely to be two years, would be tied to participation in education and training programs that might be open to absent fathers as well as mothers.

Next, Shalala said child-support enforcement would try to track absent parents across state lines.

The proposal also would include "reinventing the welfare office, so to speak" so that recipients were not simply told what programs they were eligible for. Instead, welfare offices would guide recipients into training programs, require them to attend and provide social and career counseling if necessary.

The sixth element, funding, was still unclear because Clinton has not reached final decisions on the scope of the proposal, Shalala said.

But she said "there is no new money in this town" and that the administration would "find those resources within existing pots of money."

by CNB