Why Welfare Reform Fails its Recession Test - Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich

[swag]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/04/AR2009120402604.html

We all like to imagine that there'll be something to stop our fall if we hit hard times. Mulugeta Yimer, for example, is a 56-year-old Alexandria cabdriver who escaped poverty and persecution in Ethiopia 20 years ago only to be clobbered by the recession. Business is way down, and he's facing possible foreclosure on his home. He says he is averse to government handouts, but when he contemplates what might be in store for his wife, who works part-time at a convenience store, and their two young children, he muses wistfully, "There's always welfare, isn't there?"

Actually, no. When President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law, he didn't just end welfare as we knew it. For all practical purposes, it turned out, he brought an end to cash help of any kind for families with children in much of the country. While welfare reform was long ago declared a success in some quarters, it was deeply flawed from the beginning. The recession has shown how seriously unprepared it left us for hard times.

Conservatives had been attacking the old welfare system for decades, claiming that it fostered dependency. Many liberals found it unsatisfactory as well. Welfare checks weren't big enough to lift families out of poverty, and the system did little to help recipients get or keep jobs. When Republicans gained control of Congress and welfare rolls swelled in the early 1990s, these attacks gained momentum, and in 1996, Clinton ended the legal right to cash assistance and imposed a five-year limit on federally financed help to any given family.

Welfare reform also provided the states with nearly complete discretion over how to administer benefits. Most states responded with gusto, reducing welfare rolls nationally by two-thirds in just a few years.

So when the Great Recession came along, the government safety net for families with children was in tatters. The United States was no more prepared for massive unemployment than New Orleans had been prepared for its levees to fail. Some important government programs, including unemployment insurance and food stamps, have started to rise to the challenge and have even begun to lose their stigma among former members of the middle class. Unemployment insurance now covers 57 percent of those who have lost their jobs, as opposed to less than 40 percent before the recession -- although their benefits amount to less half their former wages. Reliance on food stamps has expanded even more dramatically. While the average benefit still isn't enough to meet people's basic nutritional needs, the program now serves 36 million people, double the number when Clinton left office and up by a quarter in the past year.

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[MisterP]

1. it's because neoliberalism is messianic and utopian: it promises peace and prosperity

through liberal capitalism and technology, contrasting lush South Korea with drab North, famine agaist grinning kids chomping down on pesticide-soaked, GMed tomatoes the size of watermelons; the cornucopia will never run out, all we have to do is improve the System so it redistributes better

of course, it's all crap: humanity is dependent on the planet's other species, 1 billion First Worlders demand beef and fruit and 6 billion Third Worlders level forests and expand farms for food and export, the 1800-present boom was lubricated by the Carboniferous, Park Chung-hee patently ignored the IMF, and Mexico turned to crap ever since the neolibs took over in 1982: Honduras and the Dominican Republic resemble Japan as much as Somalia does

therefore, when welfare was dismantled--going even beyond Welfare Pays for Cadillacs and Sloe Gin Reagan--they expected that capitalist system would sustain increasing numbers of workers and keep them from falling through the cracks, because only gub'mint interference could ever cause a contraction

of course they'd never acknowledge that capitalism encourages exploitation, and therefore trends towards it without state interference: simply "increasing competitiveness" doesn't necessarily help

poverty and the example of Fordlandia simply do not exist to neolib cultists, from Bjorn Lomborg to Milton Friedman to 1890s promoters of desert irrigation to that guy proposing that we legislate away gravity if we're going to interfere with natural law by imposing a minimum wage: it can't even CONCEIVE that a boom market could go sour, especially if regulation, programs, and subsidies are being slashed

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Yes, the neoliberals ignored the fact that no formerly poor country has

achieved all-around prosperity (as opposed to gigantic gaps between rich and poor, as in China and India) through neoliberal means.

The U.S., Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea were all terribly protectionist and spent heavily on education and infrastructure.

[swag]

3. Ace goin', Clenis.

We all knew this sucked at the time.

And we hold a grudge, and have to rub it in.