Politifact: Fact-checking Bill Clinton’s Philly defense of his controversial crime bill

[GeorgiaPeanuts]

http://www.politifact.com/pennsylvania/statements/2016/apr/08/bill-clinton/fact-checking-bill-clintons-philly-defense-his-con/

Our ruling

In a heated exchange with protesters in Philadelphia, Bill Clinton defended his 1994 crime bill saying "because of that bill, we had a 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate, and listen to this, because of that and the background check law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people of gun violence."

Experts and studies haven’t reached consensus on what caused the historic drops in crime. But they do roundly agree that it can’t all be attributed to Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. In fact, most suggest the crime bill’s role in the drop was negligible. We rule the claim Mostly False.

[Bread and Circus]

1. I do wonder what it is due to...because the statistics are quite remarkable.

[jfern]

3. Most of the crime drop was because of the ban on leaded gas

[jfern]

2. Mostly false, and mostly having a serious race problem

[peacebird]

4. HuffPo also calls Bill completely wrong

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-clinton-welfare-reform_us_5707cbf4e4b0c4e26a227a34

Here’s what he told protesters at a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia:

“They say the welfare reform bill increased poverty. Then why did we have the largest drop in African American poverty in history when I was president? The largest in history. What happened was, all these Republicans got into — the Supreme Court elected President Bush 5 to 4, then all these Republicans took over state legislatures. We left ‘em with enough money to take care of all the poor people who couldn’t go to work on welfare. We left ‘em with the money they had before the welfare rolls went down 60 percent. The Republicans took it away, and [these protesters are] blaming me.”
This is not true. Poverty dropped during the Clinton years not because of welfare reform, but because the entire American economy was being juiced by a massive stock market bubble. No credible economist even disputes this. The Clinton bubble was fueled by the aggressive financial deregulatory policies of Clinton and his Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan. When the stock market bubble burst, millions of people who previously would have received welfare fell into poverty.

Welfare reform was an intentional effort to curb financial assistance to poor people, on the grounds that many were simply too lazy to get a job. Clinton turned over a federal program to states, who were effectively allowed to slash welfare funding and impose new work requirements on people who received assistance. Even Republican co-architects of welfare reform concede that the program ended up hurting the poor.

[Cheese Sandwich]

5. That's good.

Even though politi-fact seems kind of weak to me, it's nice they gave this a mostly false. It probably should have been all false.