Why It Matters That Hillary Clinton Championed Welfare Reform

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/why-it-matters-that-hillary-clinton-championed-welfare-reform/

The Clintons have championed welfare reform for over 20 years—even as study after study has shown that it has severely harmed poor families, and driven a historic number of black and Latino children into deep poverty. In the early 1990s, they designed a strategy to lure white voters back to the Democratic Party: capitalize on white disgust toward “dependent” black and Latina mothers on welfare within a liberal veneer that promised them a “hand-up, rather than a handout.” As first lady, she not only cheered her husband’s goal to “end welfare as we know it,” but she also helped whip up support for the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the legislation that remade the welfare system: “I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage,” she recounted in her 2003 memoir Living History. Later, as senator, she continued to applaud it, referring in one 2002 interview to people who had left welfare as “no longer deadbeats—they’re actually out there being productive.” Even as recently as her 2008 run for president, she defended the welfare-to-work legislation as “enormously successful,” while lamenting that “people who are more vulnerable” would suffer more during the recession.

“They don’t acknowledge the number of people who were hurt. It’s just not in their lens,” Peter Edelman, a friend of Hillary’s since law school and former assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services, said of the Clintons in 2008.

But in her current campaign for president, Clinton, who is running as a “pragmatic progressive,” has publicly avoided the issue. At a time when many Americans are outraged over economic and racial injustice, she is quiet on the subject of welfare reform, because it tells a story of how she betrayed poor people of color and undermines her image as a feminist candidate who has been a lifelong champion for women and children.

Yet, nearly two decades after the Clintons helped make PRWORA the law of the land, welfare reform remains a defining “antipoverty” policy—one that urgently needs to be discussed. Its legacy still ripples through the country, where families remain as poor as—or, in many cases, poorer than—before, but with one crucial difference: Today, the “reformed” welfare system provides little safety net, and no hand-up. Instead, it traps poor mothers into exploitative, poverty-wage jobs and dangerous personal situations, deters them from college, and contributes to the growing trend of poor mothers who can neither find a job nor access public assistance. It is our failed social policy—not simply the recession—that is responsible for crisis-level poverty in the United States.

[jfern]

1. NAFTA and welfare reform were a real double whammy

People lost their jobs and then didn't have much of a safety net.

[RiverLover]

4. And normalized trade relations with China. I think that was worse. Both were devastating though.

nt

[Live and Learn]

2. Welfare Reform was the saddest part of the Clinton administration and one he has yet to

Last edited Thu Mar 3, 2016, 10:51 AM - Edit history (1)

admit how wrong he was about. He sold it as a way to get generations off of being stuck on welfare (which everyone agreed was a good concept) but failed to inform people that their was no solid path forward. In other words, they simply gave you 5 years to find a job and the you were on your own.

And the joke was also on the taxpayers. Welfare reform increased welfare administration costs ridiculously high. Other costs like job training (read how to create a resume training with no job experience, how to dress, etc.) were contracted out (read privatized). Staffing costs went through the roof vastly out spending the little savings realized by those thrown off of welfare and made homeless or forced to turn to illegal ways to survive. Of course, those that turned to illegal ways were useful to the private prisons the administration made popular too.

Welfare reform was a fraud perpetuated by the Clinton administration on taxpayers who are now subsidizing more public employees and private corporations to run the programs while more people are thrown in to the streets.

Taxpayers should be outraged and DUers, by their nature , should be even more so. Welfare reform was an utter failure and disgrace.

[RiverLover]

5. ^^^ Great post.

Very, very true!

[Warren Stupidity]

3. Pro death penalty. Pro war on drugs. Ended welfare.

Supported three strikes. Championed militarization of police.

"The social justice candidate".

And the other candidate is apparently a racist who opposed all of that shit consistently since the 60s.

And Trump supporters are the stupid people?

[tk2kewl]

6. k&r