Bernie Sanders is right: Bill Clinton’s welfare law doubled extreme poverty

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

Primaries across the South over the next few days give him what might be the best chance he'll get. Hundreds of thousands of Southern families are living on less than $2 in cash a day as a result of legislation President Bill Clinton signed in 1996, according to new research by Johns Hopkins University's Kathryn Edin and University of Michigan's Luke Shaefer.

In South Carolina this week, ahead of that state's primary election on Saturday, Sanders brought up the 20-year-old law in a press conference. "What welfare reform did, in my view, was to go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country," he said on Wednesday, noting that Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, supported the legislation.

(snip)

The profound and enduring consequences of that law, and of the rest of Clinton's policies on poverty, are only just becoming clear. It is a complicated legacy. Economists credit Clinton's decisions with reducing poverty overall and helping many people find work. Yet recent evidence suggests that financial conditions have worsened for those who could not find work — the poorest of the poor.

(snip)

"People who were able to find work, either because they live in places where work was available, or because they were better qualified than the average welfare recipient, have done pretty well." said Christopher Jencks, an expert on poverty at Harvard University. "People who can’t find work are where they were before they had welfare at all. That’s a big problem. People have no means of support for themselves or their children."

In 2004, Jencks was one of the authors of an article that declared, "Welfare reform is now widely viewed as one of the greatest successes of contemporary social policy."

"I was wrong," he said.

(snip)

As a result, a certain kind of grave poverty has reappeared in the United States. Sanders said that the number of people living in extreme poverty has doubled under President Clinton's reforms. If anything, that was an understatement. Edin and Shaefer's research shows that the number of people living on $2 a day or less in cash has increased more than twofold, to 1.6 million households.

(snip)


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/27/bernie-sanders-is-right-bill-clintons-welfare-law-doubled-extreme-poverty/

[Cali_Democrat]

1. Actually I blame George W. Bush for the poverty, not Bill Clinton. nt

[Uncle Joe]

2. Bill Clinton's Welfare Reform passed it to the states and too many people; the weakest and most

vulnerable fell through the cracks.

[Cali_Democrat]

4. George W. Bush's financial crisis and his tax cuts for the wealthy are what really hurt poor people.

In my opinion.

You go ahead and attack the last Democratic President.

I'll attack Geroge W. Bush.

[Uncle Joe]

5. I've attacked Bush the Least on a legion of issues, but he wasn't responsible for the Welfare Reform

Act of 1996.

[Cassiopeia]

12. The reason those things hurt poor people is because the Clinton's

fought for and removed their safety net.

[PatrynXX]

13. 4 yrs in office vs 8

neh Clinton owns more of it. nevermind he continued Bush's Policy's just like Obama did with Jr's..

[Marr]

14. That's because you care more about the party than the issue. /nt

[kgnu_fan]

3. K&R

[Uncle Joe]

6. Thanks for the K&R, kgnu_fan.

[Octafish]

7. Chicago School of Austerity

The author was a Chicago Boy helping implement the privatization scam for Pinochet, ITT and the globalist crowd:

President Clinton and the Chilean Model.

By José Piñera

Midnight at the House of Good and Evil

"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.

That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.

Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:

Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.

Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).

I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.

“The mother of all reforms”

While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.

So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”

But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.

[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm

Democratic solutions work because they are Democratic, not capitalist.

[Enthusiast]

8. Wow!

[dchill]

10. +1,000,000 - Not holding my breath...

waiting for ANYTHING privatized to work for anyone but the privatizers.

[Uncle Joe]

15. Thanks for the addition, Octafish.

[senz]

19. Maybe this is why Hillary wants so badly to get back into the WH.

To finish the job.

Thank you, Octafish. This is significant and I hope it gets greater coverage before we elect another Clinton.

I love your sig line and have argued it for years to those who don't understand the basis of our Constitution.

[Enthusiast]

9. Kicked and recommended!

[TIME TO PANIC]

11. K & R!

[senz]

16. Bernie has ALWAYS cared about this issue.

He called Welfare Reform “the grand slam of scapegoating legislation,” noting that it “appeals to the frustrations and ignorance of the American people along a wide spectrum of prejudices.”

And he was right.

[AzDar]

17. K & R

[Ferd Berfel]

18. Clinton's Welfare sabatoge was horrendous (and Republican-like) but wasn't the only damage done