Testing Welfare Reform
December 18, 2008, 12:38 am
Posted by Eduardo Peñalver
To my mind, one of the worst things Clinton did during his time in office was the huge hole he sliced in our social safety net in 1996. It’s not that I think welfare as it then existed did not need reform, but turning it into a time-limited program was less a reform than a gutting of its fundamental premises. The recessions since then have been fairly mild, so this will be the first time we might see large numbers of people running into those time limits. It could get ugly.
In defense of President Clinton, he did not have much choice in ultimately signing PRWORA into law – he had vetoed it twice already and the final bill, H.R. 3734, passed with veto-proof majorities of 328-101 in the House and 78-21 in the Senate and due to the calendar, a pocket veto would not have been possible.
According to the article, the Federal government makes $16.5 billion available to the states for TANF (welfare).
At the risk of stating the obvious, that is approximately 1/10 of what the Federal government has spent on AIG this year.
How much do we spend on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a single month?
It COULD get ugly? Look around … it already is.