Nothing Bill Clinton Said To Defend His Welfare Reform Is True
Everything Bill Clinton said Thursday to defend his 1996 welfare reform law was false.
Clinton claimed that he left the program with plenty of money for poor people, suggested that it helped reduce black poverty and that it was only the mean, nasty Republicans from the George W. Bush era who gutted it and hurt the poor. Clinton’s distortions of economic history and his own record are so outrageous that — you will be shocked — it is difficult to believe he was being honest.
This is not true. Poverty dropped during the Clinton years not because of welfare reform, but because the entire American economy was being juiced by a massive stock market bubble. No credible economist even disputes this. The Clinton bubble was fueled by the aggressive financial deregulatory policies of Clinton and his Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan. When the stock market bubble burst, millions of people who previously would have received welfare fell into poverty.
Welfare reform was an intentional effort to curb financial assistance to poor people, on the grounds that many were simply too lazy to get a job. Clinton turned over a federal program to states, which were effectively allowed to slash welfare funding and impose new work requirements on people who received assistance. Even Republican co-architects of welfare reform concede that the program ended up hurting the poor.
This wasn’t an accident or an unintended consequence. The whole point of welfare reform was to kick people off the welfare rolls. Clinton had campaigned on it in 1992.
“When I ran for president four years ago, I pledged to end welfare as we know it,” he said on the day the bill passed.
“I have worked for four years to do just that.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-clinton-welfare-reform_us_5707cbf4e4b0c4e26a227a34?section=politics
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