Maine Doubles Down on Welfare Reform Despite Media Backlash

dailysignal.com ^ | Nov. 19, 2015 | Madaline Donnelly

[PROCON]

Mary Mayhew, commissioner of Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, knows her politics aren’t always popular.

“I can’t stress enough what an attack campaign it has been from the media for four and a half years,” Mayhew said Thursday at an anti-poverty forum in Washington, D.C., hosted by The Heritage Foundation.

Then there are the more personalized critiques: “There is a poet, or he calls himself a poet, and he sends me poems all the time,” she added. “They are not nice poems.”

Mayhew claims that detractors—who mostly take issue with welfare reforms enacted by Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, since his election in 2011—have gone so far as to call her “Commissioner Evil,” and her and LePage’s policies a “War on the Poor.”

[Oatka]

I hear that they are being hired without skills as nurses aids and other kinds of assistance to provide cheaper translation skills.

Interesting. At the rate things are going here, they will have job security for the rest of their lives.