JB> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/
 JB> article57334 99.ece

 JB> February 14, 2009

 JB> Obama warned over 'welfare spendathon'.

 JB> The new administration's economic stimulus plan may undo
 JB> reforms that cut the dole queues, critics say

 JB> RONALD REAGAN started it, Bill Clinton finished it and last
 JB> week Barack Obama was accused of engineering its
 JB> destruction. One of the few undisputed triumphs of American
 JB> government of the past 20 years, the sweeping welfare
 JB> reform programme that sent millions of dole claimants back
 JB> to work, has been plunged into jeopardy by billions of
 JB> dollars in state handouts included in the president's
 JB> controversial economic stimulus package.

 Well, aside from the fact that just about all of that is
 wrong... it's all wrong. Ronald Reagan talked a good game, but,
 according to his Office of management and Budget director David
 Stockman, when it came time to cut welfare, Reagan refused. See
 Stockman's book, "The Triumph of Politics".

 Clinton finished it not by passing Welfare reform, that was a
 dud from the word go, but by having an economy that grew so much
 there were enough jobs for people to leave welfare and enter the
 workforce.

 Not one penny of additional spending will jepordize the move
 from welfare to work, simply because the collapse of the job
 market has already done that.

 ...

 JB> billion) stimulus package through Congress was being
 JB> overshadowed by warnings that an unprecedented increase in
 JB> welfare spending would undermine two decades of bipartisan
 JB> attempts to reduce dependency on government handouts.

 The disappearance of millions of jobs has already done all the
 damage.

 JB> Robert Rector, a prominent welfare researcher who was one
 JB> of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill, warned
 JB> last week that Obama's stimulus plan was a "welfare
 JB> spendathon" that would amount to the largest one-year
 JB> increase in government handouts in American history.

 Does that include the great depression, with adjustments for
 inflation?

 JB> Douglas Besharov, author of a big study on welfare reform,
 JB> said the stimulus bill passed by Congress and the Senate in
 JB> separate votes on Friday would "unravel" most of the 1996
 JB> reforms that led to a 65% reduction in welfare caseloads
 JB> and prompted the British and several other governments to
 JB> consider similar measures.

 The welfare reform laws did very little to reduce welfare
 caseloads, other than *INCREASING* spending by way of child care
 benefits, medical care benefits, and transitional payments for
 support during the move to work. That was the only real benefit
 of welfare reform.

 JB> Though some researchers have questioned the true impact of
 JB> Clinton's "workfare" reforms, they were wildly popular with
 JB> millions of US taxpayers tired of subsidising what many saw
 JB> as a generation of slackers.

 It was the growing economy that was so wildly popular. The
 "generation of slackers" moved to work as soon as the job market
 improved.

 JB> Despite dire warnings that reduced benefits for single
 JB> mothers and deadlines on entitlement would create a social
 JB> calamity, one liberal senator warned at the time that
 JB> children would be "sleeping on grates", the 1996 reforms
 JB> cut welfare rolls from more than 5m families in 1995 to
 JB> below 2m a decade later without a discernible increase in
 JB> hardship.

 Uh... outright falsehood. By 2006, that ten years later,
 homelessness was on the upswing big time, and families were the
 growth industry in homelessness. There has been a rising tide of
 people seeking help from charities and food pantries, etc.
 Homelessness and hopelessness are the legacies of the first
 years of the new millenium.

 JB> In the American political lexicon, welfare has since become
 JB> a dirty word, often referred to as the W word, and
 JB> nothing arouses US tabloid ire more than the hint that
 JB> taxpayers' money is being wasted.

 In the American political lexicon welfare has *ALWAYS* been a
 dirty word.

 JB> When it emerged that Nadya Suleman, the mother of octuplets
 JB> born in Los Angeles last month, was a "single mom" with six
 JB> children already and was relying on welfare assistance, she
 JB> was transformed overnight from fertility goddess to the
 JB> target of death threats.

 She was never anything but a candidate for therapy to those
 of us who were not worshippers of the cult of celebrity.

 JB> Obama argued last week that his bill was essential for
 JB> reviving the US economy and protecting victims of the
 JB> credit crunch. Yet his Republican rivals have seized on the
 JB> billions lavished on new welfare spending to stir the
 JB> conservative faithful from their postelection misery and
 JB> reunite the opposition.

 His Republican opponents, not rivals, have always used welfare
 as a whipping boy, but it's going to be a hard sell when
 millions of long term self supporters are looking at the street
 themselves.

 JB> "If you like government dependence, you will love the plan
 JB> they are jamming through Congress," declared Michael
 JB> Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National
 JB> Committee.

 When he's unemployed tell me what he has to say.

 JB> Rector, a senior scholar at the conservative Heritage
 JB> Foundation, argued that Obama's spending proposals in
 JB> effect encouraged individual states to add more families to
 JB> their welfare rolls; the more Americans sign on to the
 JB> dole, the more state budgets will benefit from US Treasury
 JB> payouts.

 No state is "encouraged" to do anything by any force other than
 exploding unemployment.

 JB> "They have completely overturned the fiscal and policy
 JB> foundations of welfare reform," Rector complained.

 He should be cheering. After all, his party's 8 year celebration
 of greed and corruption led us to this point.

 JB> Supporters of the bill argue that the current crisis is so
 JB> grave that intellectual quibbling about the nature of
 JB> welfare has to take second place to the upheaval
 JB> transforming millions of American lives.

 And that is the correct answer.

 JB> "How can you tell someone who has lost his income to look
 JB> for another job if there aren't any more jobs?" asked one
 JB> Obama backer.

 Bingo! Until the republicans can come up with an answer to that,
 and about 8 million jobs, they are whistling in the wind.

 JB> While some scholars are beginning to suspect that Clinton's
 JB> welfare reforms were fatally flawed, or at least viable
 JB> only during an economic boom, Republicans are not alone in

 Gee... that's what I was telling you a dozen years ago.

 JB> fearing that Obama's hastily concocted package is the first
 JB> step towards the creation of a quasi- socialist welfare
 JB> state.

 Republicans are frightened little children looking under their
 beds for socialists.

 JB> Even Mickey Kaus, a prominent liberal blogger, has
 JB> denounced what he describes as the "get more people on
 JB> welfare" provisions of Obama's bill. Writing at Slate, the
 JB> political website, Kaus said: "Lack of jobs isn't a reason
 JB> to loosen work requirements . . . Have the Dems never heard
 JB> of 'workfare'?

 The Dems *INVENTED* workfare. Can you spell "WPA"?

 JB> "Give recipients useful community service work, and if they
 JB> do the work, then they get the [welfare] cash."

 IOW, jobs, part of the "full employment economy" we promoted
 something like 30 years ago. Republicans shot it down over and
 over.

 In the meantime we need a system now, to keep people off the
 street, and from eating out of garbage cans.

 Trivial denegration deleted.

 JB> Obama also stumbled over a curious claim that his stimulus
 JB> plan would enable Caterpillar, one of America's leading
 JB> manufacturers of heavy earth-moving equipment, to start
 JB> rehiring workers. He was promptly contradicted by the
 JB> company's chief executive, who said he had no such
 JB> intention and was planning more lay-offs.

 He is probably a republican. Caterpillare *WILL* be able to
 rehire workers, *IF* the stimulus plan gets shovel ready
 projects going.

 He has no such intention *NOW*, but then again, the stimulus
 plan is not in effect *NOW*. He will when things improve, or he
 will be fired by his board of directors.

 More trivial distractions deleted.

 JB> In Wisconsin, the state that forged a pioneering path in
 JB> welfare reforms in the 1990s, residents were astonished by

 Actually, Massachusetts had a lot of those pioneering path
 programs in force in the late '80s. And almost all of them were
 democratic programs decades before that.

 JB> a newspaper investigation that disclosed that a $340m
 JB> (£236m) programme offering taxpayer-financed child care to
 JB> low-income working parents was riddled with fraud and
 JB> expensive loopholes.

 Well, republicans have been running it for 8 years.

 JB> In one case, a family of four sisters who had 17 children
 JB> between them put all of them together, took it in turns to
 JB> babysit them and over the past three years claimed $540,000
 JB> (£374,000) in perfectly legal state childcare subsidies.

 State? Gee... is that Obama's fault?

 JB> Examples like that fuel American suspicion that so-called
 JB> "big government" invariably turns out to be inefficient,
 JB> expensive and easily exploitable. And there has been no
 JB> bigger government action in the US than the stimulus
 JB> package presented by Obama.

 Speculation, and absurd linkage. Republican big government tends
 to be inefficient, and highly corrupt.

 JB> Few dispute the need for some kind of stimulus, but has
 JB> Obama got the details right? The Republicans do not think
 JB> so and, led by Gregg, they are already shunning the
 JB> president's bipartisan overtures.

 The are shunning his bipartisan overtures because they want it
 to fail, no matter how much damage it does to the economy. The
 only stimulus they want is tax cuts. And tax cuts haven't worked
 yet.

 ...

 JB> confident either. In a telling commentary last week, Paul
 JB> Krugman, the 2008 Nobel prize-winning economist, declared
 JB> that Obama's stimulus victory "feels more than a bit like
 JB> defeat".

 JB> Krugman added: "I've got a sick feeling in the pit of my
 JB> stomach, a feeling that America just isn't rising to the
 JB> greatest economic challenge in 70 years."

 Krugman objects to the pandering to republicans in the tax cuts.
 He says the tax cuts are a waste of time and money. And the tax
 cuts we had before sunk this country deep in debt.

 JB> Progressive taxation is economic slavery for those who
 JB> succeed .....


BOB KLAHN bob.klahn{at}sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

... Progressive taxation is economic justice for those who work.
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