Hillary Clinton Wants to Help Families at the Bottom-Will She Change Her Mind About Welfare Reform?

[Ken Burch]

Will She Change Her Mind About Welfare Reform? (from The Nation)

http://www.thenation.com/blog/206953/hillary-clinton-wants-help-families-bottom-so-will-she-change-her-mind-welfare-reform

After welfare reform, poverty did decrease for a time and people moved out of the program and into jobs. The poverty rate for single mothers fell from 55.4 percent in 1991 to 39.3 percent in 2001. But that was during the ’90s boom, when jobs were relatively easy to find.

The story has changed in a more unstable economy. The share of families headed by a single mother that live in poverty climbed back up to two-fifths by 2012, and the share of those mothers who are neither working nor getting assistance had risen 10 percent by 2005. And for many, poverty has become much more acute. The share of families in deep poverty, or whose incomes are below half the poverty line, is higher than in 1996, while the share in extreme poverty who live on $2 a person or less each day has risen sharply since then. Poor mothers’ life expectancy also dropped after reform.

Welfare reform also imposed lifetime limits on the program and work requirements for eligibility. Research has shown that those limits leave families who get kicked off the rolls with lower incomes and higher poverty rates.

And when times get really bad, TANF can’t do much to cushion the blow. The unemployment rate spiked sharply between 2007 and 2011, but in almost a third of states TANF caseloads actually fell. The rolls only ever increased 16 percent, while the number of unemployed people went up by 88 percent. States just didn’t have the money to give out more assistance, and because TANF is a block grant, the federal government didn’t get involved. Meanwhile the caseload for food stamps, a program that isn’t block-granted, rose 45 percent.

Hillary Clinton supported her husband’s push for welfare reform, which may not be surprising, given how often she has stood by her man. But she also voiced support for it during her 2008 campaign, expressing no misgivings about how it turned out and telling The New York Times that she thought it was necessary and enormously successful.

[leftofcool]

1. I see you used the right wing/Ann Coulter "stand by your man" meme.

[Ken Burch]

2. The article in The Nation used the phrase, not me.

I wouldn't have said it that way. I'm not responsible for the phrasing of the linked piece. I've now taken the passage where the phrase was used out of bold font.

What matters, though is that, as of 2008, HRC herself(when she no longer had any need to do so)was still defending the policy. She could have said "look, when you're First Lady, you don't speak out publicly against your husband's policies(and it will go the other way with Bill if I get elected). But now I'm running as my own person, and I now recognize the damage that was done by giving into racist and classist bigotry prejudice towards the poor. If elected, my OWN approach to poverty will be totally different".

But she didn't.

And I stand, on this issue, with Marian Wright Edelman(HRC's friend who ended their friendship over the issue)and her husband Peter Edelman(the former Robert Kennedy staffer who resigned from the Clinton Administration in protest over the signing of the bill.

[Bugenhagen]

3. I see you used the nifty misdirect and attack technique.

Your kung fu is strong.

[frylock]

4. yawn

[cprise]

5. K&R