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If Jim Jordan, Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, hadn't sent out a message in honor of the 15th anniversary of the historic welfare reform bill of 1996, I would have missed it.
Which is pretty pathetic given that I cut my teeth in domestic policy in the wake of welfare reform in the 1990s and worked on the reauthorization of the bill while working in the Bush White House.
But in my defense, the anniversary hasn't exactly been on the frontburner in the news - which raises a related point. Extending welfare reform to most of the government's anti-poverty programs was a significant portion of the Ryan budget, and yet it, too, has received very little attention.
I think this shows how much welfare reform has gotten into the American bloodstream, and - more importantly - how small the issue seems compared to the entitlement reform in the budget.
Remember the images of poor children living on the streets and all of the controversy surrounding the bill, which many consider the main achievement of the Republican revolution of 1994?
All that pales in comparison to the consideration of having your Medicare benefits altered - doesn't it?
Given the far-reaching entitlement and tax reform aims of the GOP budget, no one has paid any attention to the welfare reform provisions in it.
Here is the text of Jordan's email:
15 years ago today, Congressional Republicans and President Clinton enacted welfare reforms that emphasized work as the path out of welfare dependence. That 1996 law replaced an older program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, also known as TANF. Clinton famously declared these changes would “end welfare as we know it,” and in fact millions of families have moved off TANF and into jobs and self-sufficiency. Despite these successes, more remains to be done.
According to a government report released this year, less than a third of work-eligible TANF recipients are actually meeting the program’s work requirements. More than half perform no work or job preparation at all. And while the 1996 reforms focused on TANF, there are actually more than 70 different federal programs that exist to provide assistance to low-income Americans.
That’s why earlier this year, members of the Republican Study Committee introduced H.R. 1167, the Welfare Reform Act of 2011. Our proposal builds on the reforms of 1996, applies new work requirements to the food stamp program, forces Washington to give taxpayers a clear picture of how much money they spend across all the different welfare programs, and returns the skyrocketing cost of welfare to its prerecession level once our economy has recovered.
I’ll close this week’s message with thoughts from two men who spent much of their careers focused on the issue of welfare:
“We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.” – President Ronald Reagan
“We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination.” – President Franklin Roosevelt
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