Free Republic

Mary Mayhew, commissioner of Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, knows her politics aren’t always popular. “I can’t stress enough what an attack campaign it has been from the media for four and a half years,” Mayhew said Thursday at an anti-poverty forum in Washington, D.C., hosted by The Heritage Foundation. Then there are the more personalized critiques: “There is a poet, or he calls himself a poet, and he sends me poems all the time,” she added. “They are not nice poems.” Mayhew claims that detractors—who mostly take issue with welfare reforms enacted by Gov. Paul LePage, a...

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

New York City’s welfare system is managed out of a boxy 25-story office building on Water Street in Lower Manhattan. Approximately 5,000 employees work there, directing government programs that provide billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded assistance to the poor and near-poor. A solid majority of the workers at 180 Water Street are African-American or Latino; their voter registration is almost certainly overwhelmingly Democratic; and all but about 300 of them are union members. But from 1995 until this past December, the people who worked in New York’s principal social-services agency were leading one of the most conservative and successful welfare...

In my last column, I discussed the difficulties of distinguishing between right and left in Sweden’s election politics, at least when it comes to the Social Democrats. The example I used is how the party recently promised to cut the scope of the Swedish central government by 10 billion kronor ($1.5 billion). But it doesn’t stop there. The Social Democrats have gone from challenging the scope of government bureaucracy to criticizing over utilization of the social safety net. The Social Democrats in the capital region of Stockholm recently published a "Contract for the future – for the Stockholm region". The...

In celebration of the Gipper's birthday, Townhall is featuring a series of concise examples of Mr. Reagan's wisdom, mostly in his own words, drawn from The Reagan Resolve, a monograph compiled by the Carleson Center for Welfare Reform. Ronald Reagan recognized that the expansion of the welfare state was the greatest threat to federalism, and fighting it was a driving force throughout his political career. California in 1971 was heading toward bankruptcy because of the massive growth in welfare spending. As Governor, Reagan discovered he was greatly hampered by federal welfare rules and policies. But, working with his welfare...

Barack Obama assured us that, after his signature legislation Obamacare went into effect, we would surely like it. Now Obama has decided he doesn't want us to find out how it affects us until after the 2014 elections. Obamacare is designed to force employers of 50 or more full-time employees to provide comprehensive health insurance that includes a mandate to pay for an abortion-inducing drug. The penalty for non-compliance is a tax of $2,000 per fulltime employee per year (beyond the first 30), and the Internal Revenue Service was supposed to start collecting the penalties on Jan. 1. Obama apparently...

So, remember last summer when the Obama administration unveiled its new plans to completely change requirements to receive welfare, yeah well Republicans are finally taking up efforts again to put a stop to it. This policy “allows states to apply for waivers under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, or welfare reform, in order to test new ways to increase employment among welfare recipients.” In essence, that means that a state could make its way around the Welfare to Work policy. Welfare to work requires welfare recipients prove that they are making an effort to find work in...

Commentators both left and right agree that Barack Obama's second inaugural speech Monday was highly partisan, with shout outs to his constituencies on the left and defiance of his critics on the right. Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and made brief reference to Abraham Lincoln's sublime Second Inaugural ("blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword"). But there was not much in the way of "with malice toward none, with charity for all." There were more references than in many inaugural speeches to specific programs and policies. One interesting question is what the practical effect...

If you earn a middle class paycheck like a lot of Americans do, you saw your Social Security taxes increase last week thanks to the so called fiscal cliff deal passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Considering the system is totally broke, losing that extra cash to the government "lock box" makes you think about where that money, and the rest of your tax dollars are actually going. The New York Post has discovered through an investigation that welfare recipients using EBT cards (which work like debit cards filled with taxpayer money, just swipe and buy)...

What if you had to choose between your child learning to read and making ends meet each month? Before child labor laws were passed, the solution for the poor seemed to be to pull kids out of schools and place them to work in factories or other employment. For some today, argues Nicholas D. Kristof in a recent column, the solution may be to make sure their kids don’t learn to read. That way the parents can continue to collect Supplemental Security Income (SSI) checks. “This is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country...

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) provides means-based cash assistance to families, but requires that states ensure a certain percentage of recipients are working or looking for a job, also known as workfare requirements. Robert Rector points out in his recent backgrounder for the Heritage Foundation that, according to Health and Human Services 2011 data, 41.6% of households on TANF are exempt from federal work requirements. 31.6% percent of adults on TANF were idle and only 14.3% of these adult recipients met the federal activity standard, or workfare requirements, according to Rector. The same HHS Department issued a directive this...

The Obama administration’s efforts at extending executive authority were dealt a setback on Tuesday. The bipartisan Government Accountability Office flagged the administration’s end run around Congress in its July memo announcing changes to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) act, aka “welfare reform.” The GAO said that the White House needs to give Congress the chance to block its plan that permits states to tweak the work requirements that needy families must satisfy in order to receive government assistance under the program. The official word came in the form of a letter to lawmakers from GAO’s general counsel, Lynn...

The future? Or simply the high point of dependency before a reverse?That's what the election will be about.The Weekly Standard: A new chart set to be released later today by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee details a startling statistic: "Over 100 Million People in U.S. Now Receiving Some Form Of Federal Welfare." "The federal government administers nearly 80 different overlapping federal means-tested welfare programs," the Senate Budget Committee notes. However, the committee states, the figures used in the chart do not include those who are only benefiting from Social Security and/or Medicare. Food stamps and Medicaid make up a...

President Obama appeals to women by pushing the issue of access to contraceptives, while Mitt Romney accuses him of watering down welfare reform — an issue that tends to stir up feelings about race among whites. With the election still locked in a near-tie, the politics of gender and race have moved into the spotlight of the presidential campaign. For most of the summer, the debate has focused on two things: the state of the economy and Mitt Romney's background in business. But in recent days, the two campaigns have added new, sharp-edged issues to the mix.

To call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a "mad dog," as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank did, is an affront to the canine community and those suffering from legitimate mental illness. Reid was completely sane when he spread hearsay about an anonymous Bain Capital investor who allegedly told him Mitt Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Doesn't Reid, a Mormon like Romney, subscribe to the prohibition in the Ninth Commandment: "Thou shall not bear false witness"? He appears to pay no political price because he's a Democrat and unlike Joe McCarthy, to whom some are comparing him, no prominent...

President Obama has created a firestorm by overturning the work requirements of the popular 1996 welfare-reform law. Now his White House is bristling because Mitt Romney dares to point out that fact on the stump and in a new campaign ad. Obama’s move is only the latest step in a long history of liberal opposition to work requirements. The Left blocked welfare-reform efforts under both Presidents Nixon and Reagan, for example. In 1996, a Republican Congress drafted a welfare-reform law — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — that for the first time established meaningful work standards for welfare recipients....

CNN relied on liberal analysis and Democratic talking points to dismantle a new Romney campaign claim about Obama gutting welfare reform. On Wednesday morning the network twice cited PolitiFact calling Romney's new ad "Pants on Fire" and quoted former President Clinton calling it false. As NewsBusters reported, the July HHS directive does away with work requirements for welfare recipients, which was at the heart of the 1996 welfare reform bill. The memo would allow states to creatively redefine the work requirements and replace them with excuses for "work." Not so, says CNN, who even resorted to quoting former Democratic President...

Bill Clinton, after steering clear of the flap over Mitt Romney using him in an ad in which he accused President Obama of trying to "gut" the 1996 welfare reform act, responds tonight with a statement rapping the Republican:  "Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true.  "The act emerged after years of experiments at the state level, including my work as Governor of Arkansas beginning in 1980.  When I became President, I granted waivers from the old law to 44 states...

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign says Barack Obama’s “gutting” of welfare reform shows how the president is much more liberal than former Democratic President Bill Clinton. “President Obama apparently believes that Bill Clinton was way too conservative,” said Ted Cruz, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, in a Tuesday conference call organized by the Romney campaign. The campaign plans to start running television ads about Obama’s “dismantling of bipartisan welfare reform” passed during the Clinton administration in 1996, Romney officials said Tuesday. In June, the Obama administration issued a memo removing work requirements for welfare recipients that were...

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will launch a new attack against President Barack Obama on Tuesday, taking aim at the Democrat's plan to waive parts of a landmark welfare-to-work law. Romney is targeting Obama's plan to let states seek a waiver from the work requirements of a 1996 welfare law that was a signature bipartisan achievement of former Democratic President Bill Clinton's administration. Romney's attack, laid out in a new television ad and a topic he will address at a campaign event in the Chicago area, is aimed at bolstering his charge that Obama's solutions to many of America's...