Free Republic

Welfare reform has been touted by Bill Clinton as one of the great achievements of his administration. But hold on a minute. GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says it’s one of his major successes as speaker of the House. Rick Santorum, whose bid for the Republican presidential nomination has been resuscitated by the Iowa Caucuses, even claims to have been an author of the landmark welfare-to-work legislation. With all those claiming paternity, I’m reminded of the proverb: “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Unfortunately, the name of former U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, who represented South Florida...

A group of Republican senators has proposed a plan to reform welfare — not so much because they expect it to succeed, but to make an important point: that the deficit supercommittee can meet its $1.2 trillion goal without raising taxes. “I think there’s kind of an acceptance that as long as there’s Democratic control of the Senate, we’re not going to pass anything good,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), one of the bill’s cosponsors. “Our point here is to show that there is a lot of money that we could save and deal with our deficit in a...

Almost one million people will be stripped of their incapacity benefit payments and forced to look for jobs under major reforms to the welfare system over the next three years, research has found. The Coalition’s tougher rules on who can claim incapacity allowances will be felt most strongly in Labour’s heartlands of the north of England, Scotland and Wales, according to the study, which criticised the plan. The report from Sheffield Hallam University, in the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s constituency, warned that that “vast numbers” of people will be impoverished and left in distress as a result of the...

When the U.S. adopted welfare reform in the 1990s, it did so on the following assumption: Some kind of work is available to virtually everybody who wants it.Maybe the work is poorly paid. Fine. Take the job anyway, and the government will top up your wages with an Earned Income Tax Credit.By the late 1990s, we were discovering the limits of welfare reform. Because of substance abuse, mental health issues, disability, and cognitive impairments, some people were not going to participate in even the tightest labor market since the mid-1960s. What to do about this hard core of unemployables? Should...

David Cameron today defended the Government's plans to limit housing benefit, saying it was not fair for working people to see their taxes used to fund homes 'they couldn't even dream of'. The Prime Minister dismissed reports there could be a climbdown over the proposals, telling Labour leader Ed Miliband: 'We are going forward with all the proposals we put in the spending review and in the Budget'.

In 1996, the Republican-controlled 104th Congress passed the GOP's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. President Bill Clinton, reluctantly, signed it on August 26 after vetoing it twice. This reform measure allowed state governments to craft their own welfare programs provided they followed certain guidelines. Welfare would no longer be an entitlement, and those recipients able to work would be required to seek employment. No longer would states have financial incentives to add as many people to the welfare rolls as possible. The law has made significant progress in rolling back Democrat policies that for generations had trapped poor people...

Our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound.In early 2009, the United States was engaged in an intense public debate over a proposed $800 billion stimulus bill designed to boost economic activity through government borrowing and spending. James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, Vernon Smith, and Gary Becker, all Nobel laureates in economics, argued that while the stimulus might be an important emergency measure, it would fail to improve economic performance. Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, argued that the stimulus would improve the economy and indeed that it should be bigger. Fierce debates can be...

Here is another outstanding video from Heritage.org on the reform no one is talking about, but the one that is desperately needed: Welfare Reform. Brandon Stewart at Heritage’s, “The Foundry” blog, has all the information on how “Welfare Can and Must be Reformed.” Great video!

Ok, I have thought that ever since the whole debacle of the Obama care crap, what sort of reform that could be pushed through that would slip past the liberals but help cut money on social programs. Well I thought about it the other night when they were doing a story on the "replacement rate" when concerning demographics. My Solution: "Replacement Rate Based Welfare Benefits" The Logic behind this simply goes like this: The government seems to be looking out for Number One these days and that means the Government in general. Would it not be "progressive" that the government...

Barack Obama came to the presidency promising to be America's first post-partisan president. It is, therefore, ironic that one of his signature achievements has been to roll back one of the great bipartisan triumphs of the last two decades. Under the guise of helping unemployed Americans in a tough economy, the Obama administration and its congressional allies are reversing the 1996 welfare reforms that have been lauded as an overwhelming success by Republicans and Democrats alike for lifting millions of Americans from poverty. Before welfare reform, under the federal assistance program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the...

The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains. That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.” Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools...

Other states in America have jobs, homes that are affordable, opportunities for climbing the economic ladder and friendly down to Earth people who are good and righteous individuals. Then there are Liberal Democrat states colored in blue which reflects how blue things are there like in Maine. Maine has the distinction of being the worst place to set up a business and has like Michigan the worst job market in the country. It is the 3rd poorest state in the nation, it has the largest state government rivaled only by California, (pending the cuts to their budget of course) and...

This video shows how our Dear Leader has been working since at least 1998 against the idea of welfare reform, preferring to control people's lives through an endless intergenerational cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

Evidence Unearthed Obamas Plan All Along Was to Repealed Clinton 96 Welfare Reform, which he just did with the Stimulus Package Evidence Unearthed, Obamas original plan to repeal Clinton 96 Welfare Reform was a success Obama also reveals his views on Americas perceptions of Race and the Poor Buried deep in the stimulus plan is the repeal of Clintons 96 Welfare Reform

Evidence Unearthed Obama’s Plan All Along Was to Repealed Clinton 96 Welfare Reform, which he just did with the Stimulus Package http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEhsjAcGayA&feature=channel_page

GOODBYE, AMERICA! IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTEDFebruary 11, 2009It's bad enough when illiterate jurors issue damages awards in the billions of dollars because they don't grasp the difference between a million and a billion. Now it turns out the Democrats don't know the difference between a million and a trillion. Why not make the "stimulus bill" a kazillion dollars? All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies. Or as I call...

More than 98,000 welfare recipients in San Bernardino County stand to lose their monthly cash benefits as early as March unless the state can cough up the money needed to fund the program. The state's historic $42 billion budget crunch has forced the State Controller's Office to delay an estimated $3.3 billion in payments to California counties, taxpayers and various state agencies... County spokesman David Wert said the county has enough state money to fund the program through February, but after that, it is uncertain what will happen. "And that's a horrific prospect. People who need help now more than...

WASHINGTON — Despite soaring unemployment and the worst economic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years. The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by The New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships. Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. Rhode Island, the other, had...

Supporting the Particular Welfare by: Bethany Stotts, December 04, 2008 Since Welfare Reform was enacted in 1996, the number of welfare recipients receiving cash aid has dropped precipitously, from 4.5% of the population to 1.5%. But decreases in recipiency—participation in one or more welfare programs—have been small: In 1996, 16 % of the population received one or more of these benefits while nine years later, 15 % were recipients. What we commonly call welfare is officially called Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Before 1996, it was called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Additionally, the Social Security Administration...

Crippled by record unpopularity and uncharismatic, rudderless leadership, Germany's oldest political party has erupted into open revolt over the hot-button issue of welfare reforms. SPD, Germany's major mainstream Leftwing party, pushed through controversial liberalising reforms several years ago under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schroeder. But the reforms, which made it easier to sack workers and reduced unemployment benefits, have now come back to haunt the party, with its leading left-wingers demanding centrist economic policies be scrapped. The SPD, which governs in a grand coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party, is currently at a historic low in polls. Since the...

It may surprise some folks on the west coast to learn that California may not be the most liberal state in America when it comes to mandating socialism and political correctness. Yes there may be certain things where California out ranks Maine such as the outrageous ruling banning homeschooling and the coddling of illegal immigrants but in most cases, IE: taxes, BIG government, restriction, the environment, Maine outranks California as being one of the most backward socialist states in the country along with Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode island and a few other states and it shows greatly. Maine has the highest...

The campaign of 2008 started on July 1 when Obama launched his first national advertising buy of the season. How McCain responds and whether or not he does, will have a big impact in determining whether Obama can solidify or expand his current lead in the polls. As always, the media fails to cover the significant events of the campaign -- but this is one of the most critical.

Barack Obama aligned himself with welfare reform on Monday, launching a television ad which touts the way the overhaul "slashed the rolls by 80 percent." Obama leaves out, however, that he was against the 1996 federal legislation which precipitated the caseload reduction. "I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare," Obama said on the floor of the Illinois state Senate on May 31, 1997. "Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems." Obama's transformation from critic to champion of welfare reform is the latest...

FREE CITIES How About Global Welfare Reform? by Ken Hagerty 04/08/2008 12:00:00 AM THE END OF THE COLD WAR deprived our foreign aid system of its strategic underpinnings. No longer could official development assistance be justified as part of a global struggle between two great superpowers and their competing economic systems. Foreign aid became a more amorphous exercise, motivated by a marbled mixture of altruism, vanity, pragmatism, guilt, and noblesse oblige. Development assistance has become a global welfare system, with many of the same syndromes that afflicted America's war on poverty. In 1996 the United States scrapped the war on...

The corrosive effects of AFDC on America's families - especially African-American families whose incidence of unwed motherhood has tripled since President Lyndon Johnson greatly expanded welfare (the Great Society), will finally begin to end if RI Governor Carcieri's plan passes, and the idea spreads. I have long advocated that AFDC should be an emergency program, with benefits ending after six months and eligibility denied for at least two years afterwards, as the way to help out families in crisis without creating the horrible system of dependence we have now.

I thought I had the most brilliant idea in my life the other day. Then I found that Charles Murray had already published something very much like it a year ago in his book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. Oh well... In a nutshell, the plan is to scrap every transfer program in the US federal budget - including Social Security, all forms of Welfare, medicare, Medicaid, etc. and replace it with a universal personal cash payment. As with most truly profound concepts, it's a simple and powerful idea, and one that has the potential...

Rudy Giuliani speaks at Harvard at the Kennedy School of Government on immigration and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act on October 10, 1996. [Transcribed starting at 1:07] I don't think immigration, over the last 30 to 40 years, has been a terrible problem for America, as I tried to point out. I think immigration has worked pretty well. I think it has areas of problems. I think the federal government isn't doing enough about illegal immigration--focusing on the right people, the people that are committing crime. But by and large, I don't think the immigration system needs tremendous reforms. And...

In the months leading up to the 2006 midterm elections, as pundits and bloggers looked forward to the '08 presidential election, there was almost a universal sense of conventional wisdom that John McCain was the plainly recognized frontrunner, whereas Rudy Giuliani's stature as a contender would immediately plummet "once those conservatives found out about those liberal social views of Rudy's." Then, during the summer of 2006, the mainstream media and beltway thinkers had their proof. A serious political action organization was formed by a group of hardcore social conservatives, dedicated to tearing down any chance of Rudy's at grabbing the...

Welfare reform is about requiring that those who depend on food stamps, ssi, and Wic be held accountable about how they spend taxpayer money to make sure they use it right. Fiscal conservatives complain about how some unemployed single mother with 5 children spends her money on a big screen TV instead of using it to feed her kids and find work. That's understandable but what about Tax cuts? We give Tax breaks to filthy rich CEOs because we hope that they will use it to build up their buisnesses and help the economy. Instead they use it to boost...

Suzette Strickland, a former welfare mother herself, sees plenty of families stuck in poverty in her outreach job at End Hunger Connecticut! Inc. From her perch in a converted house on Hartford's Hungerford Street, it's clear to her that welfare reform - exactly 10 years in - has left behind the single mothers most deeply mired in the cycle of desperation. Just last week, a 35-year-old grandmother came into Strickland's office to see about food stamps, with some of her extended family in tow. "She has a 21-year-old daughter with three children, plus custody of two grandchildren from another child,"...

There may be a reason why academics are nearly as reluctant to discuss welfare reform as they are to do a recap of The Cold War: most professors were wrong about the War on Poverty too. “Washington declared war on poverty and poverty won,” former President Ronald Reagan famously said. Most pedagogues never saw it that way. “In Wisconsin, 33 families a day entered the state from Illinois and Chicago lured by higher benefits,” the Claremont Institute’s Eloise Anderson remembers of the land-o-lakes she called home for three decades. “The academic community denied that was a motive to move from...

Ten years ago next month, a bipartisan majority in Congress and a Democratic president launched America's welfare policy in a new and largely uncharted direction. It would be difficult to exaggerate the predictions of doom hurled against the Republican welfare reform bill signed by President Clinton on Aug. 22, 1996. Mr. Clinton had previously vetoed two versions of welfare reform when, with skill, daring and persistence, Republicans in the House and Senate pushed it through Congress a third time and put it again on the president's desk. In an act of remarkable political courage, Mr. Clinton defied senior members of...

REAGANAUTS FOUND THEMSELVES IN MOURNING again last week as another of the Gipper's loyal servants unexpectedly passed away. Hard on the heels of the deaths of Caspar Weinberger and Lyn Nofziger came the sad news that Robert B. Carleson, architect of Reagan's welfare reform, had succumbed to complications from recent surgery. Hundreds of the old Reagan team gathered in the rotunda of the Ronald Reagan Trade Center, just a few blocks from the White House, to share a few tears and a few laughs, as a dozen old friends, led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, reflected on Carleson's life...

SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.[snip] Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime. And why do so many young...

WASHINGTON - Kevin McGuire estimates that 18,000 welfare recipients in Maryland have entered the work force during the past two years. "If that's failing, I'm guilty," said McGuire, who oversees the state's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. But under proposed changes to the nation's welfare laws, McGuire and his employees will have a lot of work to do over the coming year, or Washington could withhold millions of dollars. Congress is expected soon to approve legislation that requires states to place at least half of their welfare families in jobs or approved training programs. Only 10 states meet that...

In the wake of the scandalous reaction of the welfare underclass in New Orleans to the Katrina hurricane, a recent column by David Brooks in the NY Times was refreshing to read, but it probably bored most of its readers. Brooks pointed out that many good things have been happening in this country for the last few years, and they have spanned both Democrat and Republican administrations. He points out that: “The rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. The decline in domestic violence is of a piece with the decline in...

On March 9, 2005 at 10:00 a.m., the Senate Finance Committee will consider the Personal Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act of 2005,  S.105,better known as Welfare Reform.  In this bill is the Title V A-H definition of abstinence education.  There is a credible threat that Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) will attempt to amend the definition of abstinence education to include contraception and so-called "safe sex" promotion.   There is also a chance that an amendment will be offered on so-called "medical accuracy" or to authorize spending for a whole new sex-ed program.  We will not have specific information about the amendment until...

When an acquaintance of mine on the Left heard that I would be writing an article for the Free Press about how the right helps the poor, his initial reaction was laughter, accompanied by self-righteousness. It is almost written in stone today that our current welfare policies, though flawed, are the best we can do to address the dilemmas of poverty in America. When the various problems with these policies are pointed out, the Left is content to simply rest on the assumption that the Right could never offer anything better. If one’s thinking about the Left and the Right...

Oscar Wilde's imperious Lady Bracknell would have told this Labour Government that losing the initiative once at Orewa was due to misfortune; twice looks like carelessness. Yet it¹s happened. Labour has again been caught looking foolish, frantically erecting straw men with the help of the media, deliberately misrepresenting Don Brash¹s views on adoption, and making contradictory statements of protest. One minute Steve Maharey calls Brash "an idiot", then wants credit for doing several things Brash recommends. It was the same last year. One standard of citizenship and an end to special privileges for Maori was ³racist². Until, that is, Labour...

MILWAUKEE -- Angela Jobe, 38, is a grandmother who has lived most of her adult life at ground zero of the struggle to "end welfare as we know it." At about the time candidate Bill Clinton was promising to do that -- in autumn 1991 -- she boarded a bus in Chicago, heading for Milwaukee, lured by Wisconsin's larger benefits and lower rents. Unmarried, uneducated and unemployed, she already had three children and eight years on welfare. Today she is in her ninth year of employment in a nursing home, earning $10.50 an hour. How she left welfare, and how...

By George F. Will Published 2:15 am PST Thursday, December 30, 2004 MILWAUKEE — Angela Jobe, 38, is a grandmother who has lived most of her adult life at ground zero of the struggle to "end welfare as we know it." At about the time candidate Bill Clinton was promising to do that — in autumn 1991 — she boarded a bus in Chicago, heading for Milwaukee, lured by Wisconsin's larger benefits and lower rents. Unmarried, uneducated and unemployed, she already had three children and eight years on welfare. Today she is in her ninth year of employment in a...

In 1996, Eric Clapton was handed a best-record Grammy Award for his hit “Change the World.” Congress caught Clapton’s spirit and changed America, if not the world, by passing a massive overhaul of federal welfare policies. But while Clapton continues to work at his craft, winning four Grammys since 1996, Congress has pretty much left welfare alone, mostly just renewing existing welfare programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which was extended for six more months in September. Never has an issue fallen off the public-policy radar screen so rapidly and so permanently. The Harris Poll has documented...

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) - Va Choua Vang, who fled Laos after the Vietnam War, couldn't sleep over worry about how he would support his family when the U.S. government stopped sending monthly checks. "I didn't want to live. I thought about suicide," said Vang, 74, through his son, Chue Neng Vang. The elder Vang, who doesn't speak English, did not know that the reason he and his wife stopped receiving the $1,500 in checks was because they failed to become citizens within seven years of their arrival in America. A Hmong, Vang felt betrayed. He and other members of the...

I first became interested in the subject of Welfare from reading various articles and commentary on the effects of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The reforms are generally claimed as being successful, but the lack of exploration and depth in which the media and even academic papers covered this was frustrating to me. How successful were they? What was the rhetoric of opponents and proponents before and after the bill passed and as the results came in? If Welfare Reform was so successful why was Welfare allowed to continue for so long? Was Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty a success?...

I first became interested in the subject of Welfare from reading various articles and commentary on the effects of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The reforms are generally claimed as being successful, but the lack of exploration and depth in which the media and even academic papers covered this was frustrating to me. How successful were they? What was the rhetoric of opponents and proponents before and after the bill passed and as the results came in? If Welfare Reform was so successful why was Welfare allowed to continue for so long? Was Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty a success?...

<p>Like Bill Clinton in recent days, the liberal Sen. John Kerry has spent the past few years bragging about his support for the historic 1996 welfare-reform bill. But neither is likely to admit that welfare reform, which has proved to be one of the most successful social-policy legislative acts in U.S. history, comprised a central plank in Rep. Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract With America."</p>

While no one issued a press release, welfare reform is probably dead this Congress — another legislative pelt nailed to the thick wooden door of Democratic obstructionism. And while probing the dynamics of legislative gridlock in the U.S Senate is certainly not a new subject, the stymieing of welfare reform — and the reasons why it's been derailed — deserve closer examination. Despite growing and substantial evidence that the 1996 welfare-reform legislation is the most successful social-policy change in generations, liberals in Congress appear stuck in a time warp, bludgeoning efforts to build on its successes with the same...

<p>Race to the Top Welfare Reform Works. Ted Kennedy Wants to Kill It.</p> <p>Government "reform" rarely works, as these columns often point out. But eight years after Congress ended welfare as a federal entitlement, the evidence is undeniable that this experiment in conservative social policy is a historic success. The only problem is that some people still won't forgive the reformers for being right.</p>

Governor Pataki recently proposed to make welfare reform a reality in New York. That’s why the poverty promoters in Albany are fighting him tooth and nail. The big idea behind the 1996 federal welfare reform law was this: If you want the government to support you, you have to do something in return. You must make some effort to become self-sufficient, whether through working or learning job skills or looking for work. In most of the country, that bargain holds. Not in New York. The dirty little secret of New York’s version of welfare reform is that you don’t have...

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) has voted for: Authorization for use of force against Iraq (2002, Iraq War - Op. Iraqi Freedom) Homeland Security Act of 2002 (Dept. of H.S.) Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001 Motion to dismiss impeachment of Clinton (motion failed, nonbinding vote) Authorization for air operations & missile strikes against Yugoslavia (Serbia) Welfare reform NAFTA Resolution supporting Pres. George H.W. Bush's actions against Iraq in Gulf War Kerry has voted against: Supplemental funding for Iraq/Afganistan military & humanitarian efforts (2003) Medicare Prescription Drug & Modernization Act of 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 Jobs and Growth...