Welfare Reform Part 2 - Road to the Middle Class

WHATEVER happened to welfare reform? Last we heard, President Clinton had signed welfare reform in summer 1996 after vetoing two bills from the Republican Congress. Democrats had all predicted disaster. But by the year 2000 welfare rolls had dropped to 6 million—from a level of 13 million in 1995—and child poverty had gone down too. After that, silence.

Well, it turns out that, right under our noses, the incompetent Bush administration has been doing welfare reform part 2, and it’s working, according to Steve Malanga in City Journal.

The reason you haven’t heard about this new welfare reform push is that it was implemented in the 2005 Budget Reconciliation Act. These days you can’t reform anything in a regular authorization bill because the liberal moss-backs in the Senate will filibuster any reform of the welfare state. So you slip it in under the radar in the budget process where you only need 51 votes in the Senate.

The new reforms put the states back under the gun to move welfare recipients from welfare to work. Writes Malanga:

The federal government also tightened the definition of what counts in fulfilling the work requirement: no longer would spending time in psychological counseling or in traveling to job training do the trick. And the feds urged states to enroll more welfare recipients with physical or mental disabilities in job-training and job-placement programs.

In case some liberal states didn’t get the point, the Bushies spelled it out for them.

“Individuals who happen to have disabilities should be afforded the same opportunities to engage in work—to find work-related training, work experience, and employment—as those who do not have a disability,” the Bush administration’s Department of Health and Human Services wrote in its new regulations.

As is the common practice, Malanga tells the story of a welfare poster girl, Debra Autry, who had, in social-services jargon, “multiple barriers to work” and “been out of work and on public assistance from more than two decades.”

First they had Autry cleaning out government offices, but she didn’t like that. So she got a job at a Revco drugstsore (later bought out by CVS).

[S]he enrolled in the company’s program to learn how to become a pharmacy technician and eventually began working in that position, which typically pays between $25 and $30 per hour.

Well, that’s nice. Think of that: a former welfare recipient earning $60K a year. But there’s more.

Autry’s hard work inspired her children. Her daughter just earned a degree as a physical therapist, while one son is in college and another is working full-time. “I was on welfare because there were no jobs that interested me,” she recalls. “But once I had to go back to work, I realized there’s a future if you want to better yourself. It was the best decision I ever made.”

Don’t expect to be reading much about this in the New York Times, old chap. After all, this is another success of the Bush administration, and we wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.

Unfortunately, we are not yet home free on welfare. Writes Malanga:

Ominously, Democratic foes of welfare reform have gathered power both in Congress and in President Obama’s cabinet.

No doubt. No doubt there are careers, power, and the love of beautiful women at stake.

Like I say. The welfare state is cruel, corrupt, wasteful, unjust, and the people that support it are deluded.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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