Government welfare dollars would be more wisely spent by subsidizing employers who'd provide recipients on-the-job training and experience, Illinois Republican Rep. Bob Dold tells
Newsmax TV.
In an interview with "Newsmax Now" host Miranda Khan, Dold, who is sponsoring legislation aimed to get people off Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and into the workforce, hopes the bill will "create a trampoline effect."
"Ultimately this is about how do we put people that might be dependent on the government now, get them off of dependency of the government into a good, high-paying job," he said.
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Dold said his bill would set up a $100 million pilot program to "give more flexibility to local governments to be able to craft a plan that would be able to share some of the wages of that individual for the first 12 months."
"The government would be paying part of this salary and the business would be paying part of this salary to give them real working skills to be able to go back into the workforce," he said.
TANF, a welfare program created in 1996 by President Bill Clinton,
costs about $30 billion a year.
"[I]t's a win for the employer, it's a win for the employee as they are going to get real-world skills," Dold said.
"If you look at our labor force participation rate, it's at 62.8 percent… the lowest it's been in probably three decades," he added. "As we look at the number of people that have left the [employment] rolls, the number of people that are underemployed, I want to make sure that we're getting them back into the workforce."
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