Welfare factoid
Topics: Welfare
25 Mar 1995
From: "DG Ervan Darnell"
Clinton said yesterday that the welfare reform bill which just passed the
House is not "real reform". About that, he is right. The federal
government spent $308G in fiscal '94 on welfare ("hard" welfare, excluding
Social Security and Medicare) [1]. The feds spend about 60% of the total
[2]. Thus, the current reform which cuts $10G/year represents a cut of only
2%. Over this amount the Democrats are waving red flags about starving
children? If one includes SS and Medicare, it drops to cut of only 1%. The
Senate Republicans are already promising to moderate this extreme bill.
On Tuesday, Donna Shalala, HHS secretary, told MacNeil/Lehrer 'This reform
bill is merely to finance a tax cut for the rich and is not real reform.
The administration wants real reform but one cannot have real reform without
jobs and the Democratic alternative provides for jobs.' (paraphrased from
memory). The Democratic option is to pay more for child care while mothers
diddle with paper work to promise they are looking for jobs. In other
words, what the Democrats mean by welfare reform is more welfare. Any
reform which cuts benefits is not reform just by definition in their parlance.
The jobs claim is quite bogus too. The Republicans are at least pushing
toward the position that if you don't work, you don't eat. That seems like
a pretty good incentive to get a job to me. The Democrats instead say that
'jobs are the only answer to welfare' (Shalala again) and try to get there
by paying people not to work (first they pay you to have kids, then pay you
to not have a spouse, now they are paying you just to dump the kids on
government day care and party on the AFDC check). Note that the Democrats
are not making the humanitarian argument in this case, but are arguing only
that paying people more to not work will get more people to work. It just
does not get any sillier than that.
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[1] gopher://sunny.stat-usa.gov:70/00/BudgetFY96/Historical/bud96h03.txt
[2] U.S. Statistical Abstract.
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