Bryce Covert on Welfare Reform
Just read Bryce Covert’s excellent post criticizing welfare reform. It is too good to excerpt.
Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.
Just read Bryce Covert’s excellent post criticizing welfare reform. It is too good to excerpt.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor get poor
The rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows——–Leonard Cohen
Robert:
It is a good piece. Thanks
Great article. I found the following a bit humorous:
…and that, subsequently, “a more generous era would ensue. Harmful stereotypes would fade. New benefits would flow.” But political scientists Joe Soss and Sanford F. Schram found that welfare reform didn’t improve the public’s perception of the poor or support for expanded programs.
Of course it didn’t, we got Fox News around that time and it’s been doing its damnedest to promote selfishness and self importance via ostracizing of those perceived to be lesser.
look. i don’t like Paul Ryan, and I am prepared to believe the article is “essentially true”, but if you want to be taken seriously you don’t let this kind of thing go by:
“the poverty rate for single mothers fell from 55.4 percent in 1991 to 39.3 percent in 2001. Conservatives often boast about the drop in poverty up until that year. “All of a sudden, conservatives stop talking about it after 2001, when a recession hit and the story ends,” Boteach pointed out. “If we did that with other programs, I don’t think we’d find that to be completely intellectually honest.”
Its goal is not poverty reduction, but caseload reduction.
While poverty may have declined after welfare reform, it’s climbed back up in recent years. By 2012, two-fifths of families headed by a single mother lived in poverty.
this seems to say that the poverty rate for single monthers has gone up from 39.3% in 2001 to 40% in 2012. shocking.
The left-leaning Brookings Institution concluded Clinton’s welfare reform worked, at least before the work requirement was watered-down substantially.
Welfare Reform, Success or Failure? It Worked
March 15, 2006
“Welfare reform has been a triumph for the federal government and the states — and even more for single mothers.”
http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2006/03/15welfare-haskins
The article is from 2006. By golly, much has happened to the employment&housing situation since then.
It’s not that old an article, I mean Brookings wasn’t even a ” left-leaning” think tank then.
meanwhile, they give us the rate in 1991 and 2001
it would be interesting to know the rate in 1996 when the law was changed.
and was the drop…if any… due to the law change, or to the “clinton economy”
just asking.
Peak Trader, “The left-leaning Brookings Institution concluded…..”
From Wikipedia’s summary. “Its largest contributors include the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her husband Richard C. Blum, Bank of America, ExxonMobil, Pew Charitable Trusts, the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Qatar, the Republic of China and the District of Columbia.”
Judging from that list of major contributors to the Brookings Institution, I assume that P.T.’s reference to it being left leaning is yet again an example of his (her?) blowing smoke out of his butt.