Hillary called people on welfare "deadbeats"

[0rganism]

55. this is an extremely important point

let's for the moment attribute the dismal economy of the early 2000's entirely to W's unleadership and stupidity. everything was fine under president Clinton, and then W came along and fucked it all up. that's a pretty standard narrative, one cited in this very sub-thread. forget any arguments or observations about cycles or delayed feedback or anything like that, the whole thing boils down to a change of leadership from decent to crappy.

point is, we get welfare reform in all cases, good economy or dismal, decent leadership or crappy leadership.

every couple years, people in this country make a decision about leadership. sometimes we choose well, sometimes we don't.

what welfare as it was gave us was some degree of assurance that people would be protected from the vicissitudes of economic fate, whether caused by cyclic downturns or democracy fucking up.

WJC ended that assurance. for all the good he did (and he did some good things) he really shit the bed on this one, like he thought we'd never see hard times ever again. oops.

we could build that safety net back into our social fabric, but it will be difficult politically, and difficult to maintain once we have it. doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it's not going to be ez-pz. we the people have a tendency not to appreciate what we have, and accept losses of basic protections as some kind of new normal -- like a sports team losing a star player to injury or something, it just happens sometimes, and you can't stop playing the game because of it, right?

except this isn't a game, and the people of america aren't a sports team. i do hope we the people recognize this someday.