Nothing Bill Clinton Said To Defend His 1996 Welfare Reform Is True

[Octafish]

Nothing Bill Clinton Said To Defend His Welfare Reform Is True

C’mon man.

by Zach Carter, Senior Political Economy Reporter,
The Huffington Post, April 8, 2016, Updated Apr 09, 2016

Everything Bill Clinton said Thursday to defend his 1996 welfare reform law was false.

Clinton claimed that he left the program with plenty of money for poor people, suggested that it helped reduce black poverty and that it was only the mean, nasty Republicans from the George W. Bush era who gutted it and hurt the poor. Clinton’s distortions of economic history and his own record are so outrageous that — you will be shocked — it is difficult to believe he was being honest.

Here’s what he told protesters at a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia:

“They say the welfare reform bill increased poverty. Then why did we have the largest drop in African American poverty in history when I was president? The largest in history. What happened was, all these Republicans got into — the Supreme Court elected President Bush 5 to 4, then all these Republicans took over state legislatures. We left ‘em with enough money to take care of all the poor people who couldn’t go to work on welfare. We left ‘em with the money they had before the welfare rolls went down 60 percent. The Republicans took it away, and [these protesters are] blaming me.”

This is not true. Poverty dropped during the Clinton years not because of welfare reform, but because the entire American economy was being juiced by a massive stock market bubble. No credible economist even disputes this. The Clinton bubble was fueled by the aggressive financial deregulatory policies of Clinton and his Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan. When the stock market bubble burst, millions of people who previously would have received welfare fell into poverty.

Welfare reform was an intentional effort to curb financial assistance to poor people, on the grounds that many were simply too lazy to get a job. Clinton turned over a federal program to states, who were effectively allowed to slash welfare funding and impose new work requirements on people who received assistance. Even Republican co-architects of welfare reform concede that the program ended up hurting the poor. “In a recession, it doesn’t work,” former GOP staffer Ron Haskins told The Huffington Post in 2012 about the welfare reform bill, which he helped shape. “Even in 2001, which was a relatively mild recession, we saw a lot of these single mothers leaving the workforce because they just couldn’t find a job and being forced off the welfare rolls.”

SNIP...

Clinton is fabricating political history for a reason. His wife, then-first lady Hillary Clinton, was an aggressive champion of his welfare reform agenda. She is now running for president at a time when the Democratic Party is undergoing a mass re-evaluation of his presidency. Many of them are concluding that it was an eight-year disaster for progressive ideas. And they want to know whether Hillary Clinton still supports the policies that she and Bill Clinton advanced during the 1990s. When she sends Bill Clinton out on the campaign trail and he blatantly misleads his audience to defend those ideas, it’s hard to conclude that she doesn’t still support them.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-clinton-welfare-reform_us_5707cbf4e4b0c4e26a227a34

[floriduck]

1. The man has gone over the edge. There's no hope for him or his wife to lead an honest life.

[reddread]

3. would you trust anyone that dedicated to the ladies?

seriously, his agenda might not have had America coming first.

[Gomez163]

2. This is by far the worst thing Bill Clinton ever did.

But remember Bill Clinton did it. Hillary would have supported him in anything he did.

Hillary would never have proposed it herself.

[BootinUp]

4. Don't believe everything you read either

In particular I have a problem with this:

This is not true. Poverty dropped during the Clinton years not because of welfare reform, but because the entire American economy was being juiced by a massive stock market bubble. No credible economist even disputes this.

The truth is, that you can find economists that will say just about anything. There are damn few of them that write on political issues that consistently back up their arguments with good economic model based analysis. Right off I can point to Paul Krugman who would not agree with the statement above at all.

This stretching of reality without any effort to back it up except rhetoric was enough for me to stop reading.

[amborin]

5. shameless mendacity

[AzDar]

6. K & R &...

( for that pic)

[GreatGazoo]

7. Bush's tie is blue and Bill's is red

It is like political cross-dressing