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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsReforming Welfare and Gutting the Poor: A Bipartisan Platform
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/13762/reforming_welfare_and_gutting_the_poor_a_bipartisan_platform/President Obama and House Republicans have continued the process of gutting welfare which began during the Clinton administration. (Photo by: Charles McCain/Flickr/Creative Commons)
***SNIP
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), as welfare reform approaches its Sweet Sixteen, TANF's track record contrasts bitterly with that of its predecessor, AFDC, which Reaganite conservatives had savaged as undeserved entitlement:
"Over the last 16 years, the national TANF caseload has declined by 60 percent, even as poverty and deep poverty have worsened. While the official poverty rate among families declined in the early years of welfare reform, when the economy was booming and unemployment was extremely low, it started increasing in 2000 and now exceeds its 1996 level.
These opposing trends TANF caseloads going down while poverty is going up mean that a much smaller share of poor families receive cash assistance from TANF than they did prior to welfare reform."
This punitive approach to poverty has driven poor mothers of color further to the margins of the economy, making them even more politically invisible.
As Josh Eidelson noted at Jacobin, the work requirements are a clandestine release valve for the poor people that politicians want to get rid of, but are too tight-fisted to actually care for. As the welfare system coercively links people's benefits to (government-defined) work activities, participants have been tethered to a world of underpaid labor in which jobless poverty might sometimes seem preferable to low-paid, demeaning dead-end jobs.
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Reforming Welfare and Gutting the Poor: A Bipartisan Platform (Original Post)
xchrom
Sep 2012
OP
Kurovski
(34,655 posts)1. K&R. (nt)
cali
(114,904 posts)2. false equivalency at its finest
TANF is but one program. What about Medicaid? What about food stamps? I'm frickin' poor and I don't know how I'd survive without those programs. The republicans want to decimate them both with deep, severe cuts.
shove this dogshit false equivalency down a deep hole. I don't have a problem with criticizing the dems on these issues but I HATE the false equivalency LIE.
And it's a lie that doesn't belong on DU.
Dems and Reeps are NOT the same when it comes to the poor.
However, there is a trend across political, media, and corporate
America to invisibilize, disenfranchise, exploit, and imprison the poor as
serf-slaves while, at the same time, placing the tax burden on
them.