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

DATE: TUESDAY, March 19, 1991                   TAG: 9103190282
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

BUSH URGED TO AID POOR CHILDREN/ UNCOLLECTED CHILD SUPPORT TARGETED

Two influential members of Congress on Monday urged President Bush to make America's poor children his top domestic priority, and offered some ideas about how to raise funds and restructure programs.

"If I were president, I'd focus on children. They've been in the dark cellar of policy debate for too long," House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., said in a speech to the National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions. "Their problems are stark. They cannot plead their own case. And kids are a good investment. If we help them today, they'll strengthen our economy tomorrow."

Rostenkowski said that he is "not afraid" to consider new taxes earmarked especially for children's programs, but added that no revenue measure could move through Congress without the president's blessing.

Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., addressing the same group, said it was "fundamentally amoral" that children have become the poorest group in society and that one child in five is now growing up in poverty.

Rockefeller is chairman of the National Commission on Children, a bipartisan panel appointed two years ago by the president and congress that is due to issue a report later this spring. One of its likely recommendations, he said, is a proposal to replace the current system of welfare payments to impoverished single parents with a strengthened child-support enforcement system, backed up by guaranteed federal allowances for children whose parents do not have the means to support them.

The new system would be designed to collect the "$25 to $30 billion sitting out there in child support but not being paid" by non-custodial parents, Rockefeller said, while at the same time providing the backup of a guaranteed federal benefit that would not be stigmatized with the label of welfare.

Even though the commission's members span the ideological spectrum from left to right, Rockefeller predicted the panel would issue a consensus report. Rostenkowski spent much of his speech spelling out the cost of doing nothing.

"There's a depressingly logical momentum here," he said, "Kids who start off on the wrong foot spend a lifetime trying to catch up. And they often don't."

by CNB