Free Republic

Is the Obama administration targeting the most successful poverty-reduction program in decades?Most bureaucrats make a virtue of obfuscation, but the Department of Health and Human Services has taken that tendency to new heights with a recent “Information Memorandum” easing the requirements of the 1996 welfare-reform law. To hear President Obama’s supporters tell it, the administration is simply tweaking the hugely popular and largely successful law. Opponents, on the other hand, believe that the administration is preparing to shred a bill painstakingly written, duly passed, and, over time, reauthorized by an elected Congress. Given the history of poverty policy in the...

(CNSNews.com) – White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denied the Obama administration was trying to undermine the work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform law and said the Department of Health and Human Services waiver proposal is similar to what Republican lawmakers backed in the last decade. Late last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to unilaterally – without approval from Congress – move to grant waivers to states from the work requirements that were a key element of welfare reform passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. The act...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has a General Counsel and legal staff to ensure that the agency’s actions are lawful. Did they take the day off last Thursday?We have to question whether the department lawyers were consulted at all about the “Information Memorandum” issued by HHS last Thursday that invites states to come up with creative excuses (aka “demonstration projects”) to suspend the work requirements in the welfare reform law.Given the clear, unambiguous, and binding legal prohibition for that type of waiver, if they were consulted, the lawyers involved were embarrassingly careless in approving language that is...

When Republicans controlled Congress and Bill Clinton sat as president of the United States, one of the signature bills of the era was passed: welfare reform. No longer could someone just sit around and collect checks. Someone receiving government assistance was required to work. The bill was touted as "the end of welfare as we know it." Guess what? It's back, and it's back because Barack Obama would rather have people sit around than work. As noted in The Daily Caller: The Department and Health and Human Services announced the agency will issue waivers for the federal work requirement of...

The wail across the vast, reasonable U.S. citizenry has been dismay and outrage that Barack Obama undid then-President Bill Clinton's Welfare Reform, which was worked-out with Congress and voted upon and passed by both Chambers of Congress. With a few words, maybe written, but with no name other than a "policy directive," freeloaders may continue to freeload, living on your money and mine, with no need to provide for themselves - no need to show up at employment agencies, no need to find temporary work - no need to do anything but whip out the EBT card and cash the...

This afternoon, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive undermining the welfare reform law of 1996. The new policy guts the federal work requirements that have been the foundation of that law — one of the most successful domestic policy reforms in the 20th century. Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The underlying concept of welfare reform was that able-bodied adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving welfare aid. The...

Obama administration ‘guts’ welfare reform with new HHS rule 11:05 AM 07/13/2012 The Department and Health and Human Services announced the agency will issue waivers for the federal work requirement of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program — considered a central facet of welfare reform in 1996 — Thursday. The “Information Memorandum” states that the agency will be issuing waivers for TANF’s work participation requirements for parents and caretakers as a way to find new approaches to better employment outcomes. “While the TANF work participation requirements are contained in section 407, section 402(a)(1)(A)(iii) requires that the state plan...

The imperial Presidency has overturned Congress and the law again. Not content to stop at rewriting immigration policy, education policy and energy policy, yesterday, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996. The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the Clinton-era reform. While this real news occurred yesterday, most of the media remained fixated on political ads and speeches, letting a major and unilateral shift in America’s welfare system go nearly unreported. Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with...

Today, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996. The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the reform law. The Obama directive bludgeons the letter and intent of the actual reform legislation. Welfare Reform under Clinton Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The underlying concept of welfare reform was that able-bodied adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving...

"Can't Feed 'Em? Don' Breed 'Em" - - Wonkette.com April 15, 2010 Seems like sound advice to me.Advice that even my liberal friends can agree with. I mean, isn't that what the "Pro-Choice" movement is all about? Allowing women a "choice" when a mistake is made, when that mistake rains on future plans or worse yet, when a woman cannot afford to support that mistake?Strangely enough, liberals and conservatives can reach common ground. They just disagree on how to get there. Liberals are Pro-Choice, which affords one the opportunity to "fix" a mistake, while conservatives, for the most part, are Pro-Life, preferring abstinence instead. Liberals subscribe to the belief that government should provide for their contraceptive needs, while conservatives don't believe in funding protection against one's sexual exploits. At the core, however, remains the common belief that one should not breed children if one cannot afford children. As I said,...

Welfare reform has been touted by Bill Clinton as one of the great achievements of his administration. But hold on a minute. GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says it’s one of his major successes as speaker of the House. Rick Santorum, whose bid for the Republican presidential nomination has been resuscitated by the Iowa Caucuses, even claims to have been an author of the landmark welfare-to-work legislation. With all those claiming paternity, I’m reminded of the proverb: “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Unfortunately, the name of former U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, who represented South Florida...

A group of Republican senators has proposed a plan to reform welfare — not so much because they expect it to succeed, but to make an important point: that the deficit supercommittee can meet its $1.2 trillion goal without raising taxes. “I think there’s kind of an acceptance that as long as there’s Democratic control of the Senate, we’re not going to pass anything good,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), one of the bill’s cosponsors. “Our point here is to show that there is a lot of money that we could save and deal with our deficit in a...

Almost one million people will be stripped of their incapacity benefit payments and forced to look for jobs under major reforms to the welfare system over the next three years, research has found. The Coalition’s tougher rules on who can claim incapacity allowances will be felt most strongly in Labour’s heartlands of the north of England, Scotland and Wales, according to the study, which criticised the plan. The report from Sheffield Hallam University, in the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s constituency, warned that that “vast numbers” of people will be impoverished and left in distress as a result of the...

When the U.S. adopted welfare reform in the 1990s, it did so on the following assumption: Some kind of work is available to virtually everybody who wants it.Maybe the work is poorly paid. Fine. Take the job anyway, and the government will top up your wages with an Earned Income Tax Credit.By the late 1990s, we were discovering the limits of welfare reform. Because of substance abuse, mental health issues, disability, and cognitive impairments, some people were not going to participate in even the tightest labor market since the mid-1960s. What to do about this hard core of unemployables? Should...

David Cameron today defended the Government's plans to limit housing benefit, saying it was not fair for working people to see their taxes used to fund homes 'they couldn't even dream of'. The Prime Minister dismissed reports there could be a climbdown over the proposals, telling Labour leader Ed Miliband: 'We are going forward with all the proposals we put in the spending review and in the Budget'.

In 1996, the Republican-controlled 104th Congress passed the GOP's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. President Bill Clinton, reluctantly, signed it on August 26 after vetoing it twice. This reform measure allowed state governments to craft their own welfare programs provided they followed certain guidelines. Welfare would no longer be an entitlement, and those recipients able to work would be required to seek employment. No longer would states have financial incentives to add as many people to the welfare rolls as possible. The law has made significant progress in rolling back Democrat policies that for generations had trapped poor people...

Our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound.In early 2009, the United States was engaged in an intense public debate over a proposed $800 billion stimulus bill designed to boost economic activity through government borrowing and spending. James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, Vernon Smith, and Gary Becker, all Nobel laureates in economics, argued that while the stimulus might be an important emergency measure, it would fail to improve economic performance. Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, argued that the stimulus would improve the economy and indeed that it should be bigger. Fierce debates can be...

Here is another outstanding video from Heritage.org on the reform no one is talking about, but the one that is desperately needed: Welfare Reform. Brandon Stewart at Heritage’s, “The Foundry” blog, has all the information on how “Welfare Can and Must be Reformed.” Great video!

Ok, I have thought that ever since the whole debacle of the Obama care crap, what sort of reform that could be pushed through that would slip past the liberals but help cut money on social programs. Well I thought about it the other night when they were doing a story on the "replacement rate" when concerning demographics. My Solution: "Replacement Rate Based Welfare Benefits" The Logic behind this simply goes like this: The government seems to be looking out for Number One these days and that means the Government in general. Would it not be "progressive" that the government...

Barack Obama came to the presidency promising to be America's first post-partisan president. It is, therefore, ironic that one of his signature achievements has been to roll back one of the great bipartisan triumphs of the last two decades. Under the guise of helping unemployed Americans in a tough economy, the Obama administration and its congressional allies are reversing the 1996 welfare reforms that have been lauded as an overwhelming success by Republicans and Democrats alike for lifting millions of Americans from poverty. Before welfare reform, under the federal assistance program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the...