USA Today has a very nice story on the effects of Clinton’s 1990s welfare reform. Contrary to the predictions of disaster, the tougher rules actually ended up being a step in the right direction. The rules made it more costly for those on welfare to stay there forever.
“Welfare caseloads nationwide have declined by nearly 58% since the landmark overhaul of the nation’s welfare system in 1996. ”
The promise of the legislation actually turned out to be true. I can recall that conservatives mildly supported the bill, “liberals” hated it, and mostly libertarians were doubtful that it would amount to much at all. My suspicion was that nothing was really being reformed at all, but this does seem to have been an incorrect analysis.
So, good for Clinton! What ironies political history hands us! And with Bush we find the welfare state recreated in the form of vast handouts to upper-income older people and military contractors.
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Don’t give him all the credit — the worst of his ideas (like Hillary’s “Health Care Plan”) were stopped by a Republican Congress, while the best of his ideas were conservative.
My understanding of 1990s welfare reform was that it was pushed by the Republicans for political reasons, and ultimately supported by Clinton for political reasons. With that said, the positive results that welfare reform apparently produced are encouraging.
Unfortunately, Republicans, then and now do not have the ideological consistency to take principled free market/Libertarian stands against programs that significantly benefit their constituencies, such as agricultural subsidies, the vast general web of business subsidies, and the funding of the military/industrial complex.
And with a somewhat different set of specifics, the Democrats are just as bad.
If we could somehow ensure Congress of one party and President of another: politicians would spend more of their time fighting each other and let us get on with life.
“Don’t give him all the credit — the worst of his ideas (like Hillary’s “Health Care Plan”) were stopped by a Republican Congress, while the best of his ideas were conservative.” -Posted by JIMB at July 18, 2006 10:21 AM
“If we could somehow ensure Congress of one party and President of another: politicians would spend more of their time fighting each other and let us get on with life.” -Posted by JIMB at July 18, 2006 11:36 AM
That’s it. Divided government. Spending $50 milion on an investigation into Clinton’s sex life was far better than the $hundreds of billions being spent on George’s empire building. Of course Clinton did continue the MidEast occupation and Iraqi embargo begun by Bush the first.
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