Radical Change? Indeed!
Michael Tanner, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has an op-ed in today’s New York Post concerning stealth aspects of the so-called stimulus bill. He writes:
“Much of the "stimulus" bill is devoted to a backdoor undoing of one of Washington's greatest achievements of recent years - welfare reform.”
“One of the most important changes of the Clinton-era reform law was replacing the individual entitlement to welfare with a block grant to the states. In the old system, the more people a state signed up for welfare, the more money it got from Washington. The block grant broke this link, creating an incentive for states to help people become self-supporting.
“But, as The Post's Charles Hurt has reported, slipped into the stimulus bill is a provision establishing a new $3 billion emergency fund to help states pay for added welfare recipients, with the federal government footing 80 percent of the cost for the new "clients."
“Plus, the bill would reward states for increasing caseloads, even if the growth came because the state had loosened its requirements for recipients to work.”
Tanner explains that it is “radical change,” explaining “the measure will erode all the barriers to long-term welfare dependency that were at the heart of the 1996 reform.” He explains it this way:
“States that succeed in getting people off welfare would lose the opportunity for increased federal funding. And states that make it easier to stay on welfare (by, say, raising the time limit from two years to five) would get rewarded with more taxpayer cash. The bill would even let states with rising welfare rolls still collect their "case-load reduction" bonuses.”
And that’s just part of it. Tanner concludes by saying:
“Since Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on poverty" in 1965, this country has spent nearly $10 trillion on that cause. Yet, 44 years later, the poverty rate remains perilously close to where it was. By now we should have learned that throwing money at the problem doesn't work.
“As a state senator, Barack Obama opposed the 1996 welfare reform. As a candidate for president, he praised its results. Where does he stand now? Does he really want to return to welfare as we knew it before 1996 and put millions more Americans on the public dole?”
Good questions, indeed!