“Make welfare temporary and the welfare office an employment and job training office. Unlock America’s vast energy resources to create millions of good-paying jobs,” Sen. Jeff Sessions said. “Defend American workers from unfair foreign trade practices. Reform the tax code to make America globally competitive, creating more jobs here. Make government leaner, less wasteful so it produces greater results for the money you earned and sent here. Enforce an immigration policy that protects legal US workers from unlawful competition.”
Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions delivered the Weekly Republican Address Saturday, highlighting the fact that both poverty and spending on government assistance continues to grow in America.
“We spend a trillion dollars each year on federal poverty programs. That’s more than the budget for Social Security or Defense,” he said. “But poverty seems only to increase.”
Sessions, the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, highlighted the low-income troubles in the nation’s capitol, where 1 in 3 children in Washington D.C. live in poverty and 2 in 3 live in single parent homes. Just northward in Baltimore, Sessions added, 1 in 3 are living on food stamps and 1 in 3 children are living in poverty.
“Americans are committed to helping our sisters and brothers who are struggling, but we are seeing the damaging human consequences of our broken welfare state,” he said.
The Alabama senator slammed the Agriculture Department for its aggressive outreach efforts to enroll more people on food stamps, including strategies to overcome “mountain pride,” and the USDA’s contention that “each $5 in new [food stamp] benefits generates almost twice that amount in economic activity for the community.”
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