Two Decades After the ‘End of Welfare,’ Democrats Are Changing Direction

WASHINGTON — A quarter-century ago, a Democratic president celebrated “the end of welfare as we know it,” challenging the poor to exercise “independence” and espousing balanced budgets and smaller government.

...The new Democratic stance is “a long cry from the days of ‘big government is over,’” said Margaret Weir, a political scientist at Brown University....

...Republicans’ increasing efforts to define themselves as a party of the working class, has scrambled the politics of economic policy across the ideological spectrum....

This is a Sunday morning article on a Saturday nite - that is, it's long.

The gist I get from it, besides more spending than the New Deal on big government, is the Dems intend to push this boondoggle of national debt as spending 'for the kids'.

A $100billion/yr, guaranteed $300/mo income for every family with children, which they intend to make permanent, is meant to gloss over the atrocities of frivilous spending. The estimate is 6 million kids raised out of poverty. But not a word about the millions of elderly that will be driven into poverty by the increase in prices that will come with this package. And there's no guarantee that $300/mo/kid won't go to drugs or gambling or that it will contribute to keeping the child in a two parent family, or school, or other things that keep kids in poverty.

Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign pledge of "end welfare as we know it" turned out, after the election, to mean an expansion of the earned income tax credit. He twice vetoed the Republican welfare reform bills and signed the third version only after Dick Morris famously told him that a third veto could cost him reelection.

Clinton does deserve a measure of credit on one count. As a former governor, he was willing to grant federal waivers to a number of states that wanted to try innovative approaches on welfare policy. Midwestern Republican governors were the key players here, most notably Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin and Jim Edgar in Illinois. (This was a very long time ago, in a universe far, far away, in which Chicago did not totally control the state and Republicans could still win statewide office in Illinois.) The spectacular success of state level initiatives made the case for the Gingrich/Armey/Contract with America GOP House majority to take the reforms national, despite Clinton and the democrats' bitter resistance to federal welfare reform.

The 1990's welfare reforms were one of the great policy successes of the last generation, ranking along with the 1986 Tax Reform Act and the balancing of the federal budget in the 1998-2001 period by -- again -- the Gingrich/Armey/Contract with American House Republicans, with the support of a Republican Senate that mainly just managed to stay out of the way and -- again -- over the bitter opposition of the democrats.

We have been backsliding on all these fronts ever since. It is worth remembering that Congress actually did the heavy lifting on these issues not so very long ago. Had we been able to consolidate those successes and move on to entitlement reform, we would be in a vastly better situation today. The left might have gracefully accepted the new situation and turned its energies to other battles. But no: to the left, mass welfare dependency is an entitlement and the basis of redistributionist politics. An incomprehensible and abusive tax code is a powerful tool for activist government and downward levelling. Out of control debt will eventually force a systemic collapse which the left intends to use to impose socialism. The left systematically embraces bad policy as a positive good, because the left is dedicated to overthrowing America as we know it.

Donald Trump is not the guy who almost saved the Republic. Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey are the guys who almost managed it. Gingrich was pushing in the right way on both Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid when the Monica Lewinsky episode pushed Clinton into survival mode solidarity with the democrat caucus on the Hill. Absent Monica, we might conceivably have had individually owned personal investment accounts in Social Security (aka, "privitazation") and health insurance reform based on individual policy ownership, freedom of choice, and market discipline. This would probably have yielded the catastrophic care insurance/HSA combo as the popular default option for most people, with subsidized high risk pools for the legitimate special needs cases. It is sickening to think of the lost opportunity.

The question now is how to retake the ground lost. We did it once. We can do it again. Many things must come together, but first and foremost, we have lacked a Gingrich-level strategist and communicator ever since Newt reached his sell-by date and was forced out. Gingrich understood that the conservative reform agenda was a good thing in-and-of itself, not unpleasant medicine to be forced down peoples' throats, and he knew how to communicate this in confident, upbeat tones. I think Trump understood this in principle, but Trump ... well, Trump made far too many unforced errors, but that's another story.

When analyzing almost all Democratic policy and behavior over the past years, “a systemic collapse” is exactly the goal of the true Leftists who control the Party. The Democratic Party and the fools that support it are merely the conduit of convenience that will lead to communist globalism. Yes its fair to say and painfully obvious that Paul Ryan was not the dynamic, innovative, prescient Newt Gingrich. Yet it must also be noted that like a Shakesprean hero destined to ultimately fail, Gingrich had his fatal flaw. He and Clinto both had a personalality that had ( as the Italians say) a weakness for women that was his undoing.

America would indeed had been much different and a better place if Gingrich had become President in 2000. However “what ifs” may be instructive but they do not solve current problems. An effective resistance to this demented corrupt figurehead and the leftist cabal that runs him is the prime concern of all decent, rational people today.

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