Behind Romney's Welfare Attacks, America's Top Poverty Denier

[highplainsdem]

Source: Mother Jones

In recent weeks, a Mitt Romney campaign ad has flashed across television screens blasting President Obama on the issue of welfare. The ad claims Obama "gutted" the requirement in the 1996 welfare reform law that recipients look for work in exchange for government support. Media fact-checkers quickly debunked Romney's attack—PolitiFact rated it "Pants on Fire"—and Obama's campaign lashed back with a TV ad of its own. Yet Romney stuck with the welfare attack on the stump, and Romney aide Ashley O'Connor said the ad was the campaign's most potent of 2012.

Romneyland didn't whip up the bogus welfare attack on its own. It relied instead on the work of Robert Rector, a senior researcher at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, DC.

Few Americans outside the Beltway will recognize Rector's name. But it's worth knowing that, for a national campaign spot, Team Romney turned to a man who holds controversial, and in some cases inaccurate, views of poverty and economics. Rector has claimed that that poverty doesn't impact children, you're not really poor if you have air conditioning or a car, and that the very idea of welfare lifting Americans out of poverty is "idiotic."

Rector is the focus of a new opposition research document by the Bridge Project, a liberal nonprofit group digging into the personnel, policies, and funders in the conservative movement. The Bridge Project is affiliated with American Bridge 21st Century, a super-PAC that researches Republican candidates. (Unlike American Bridge, the Bridge Project does not disclose its donors.) The two groups are the brainchild of David Brock, the ex-conservative journalist who founded the watchdog group Media Matters for America. Bridge Project spokesman Chris Harris says it's "critically important" for Americans to know where political leaders get their information. "As this report shows, not only are conservatives' welfare attacks downright false, but they come from a man with a long history of minimizing the struggles of the poor and villainizing the very idea of government assistance for those who need it," Harris says.

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Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/mitt-romney-welfare-obama-robert-rector

[PatrynXX]

1. takes an idiot to known an idiot

go figure.

usually it's you've got either the a/c or a car. but that doesn't really matter. thats just before one loses the home. nowadays having a cell phone is enuf. just to make sure you can get a job.

[jwirr]

2. Lifting the poor out of poverty is not the only goal of welfare. Welfare maintained my four person

family for years while I the only breadwinner took care of my severely disabled daughter (45 years for about $.37 and hour) saving taxpayers a bundle of money (about $2700 a month). There are also many disabled and elderly persons who are maintained and would never be able to lift themselves out of poverty. Rector is an idiot.

[AlbertCat]

3. But welfare lifts too-big-to-fail companies out of "poverty"

[starroute]

4. Rector's been at this for quite a while

I found this in my saved files -- as well as a reference to members of ACORN having showed up at the Heritage Foundation to harangue him in 2002. It seems like these folks just can't keep from lying.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-thinktank.htm

In a 1994 congressional hearing, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation unveiled one of the most repeated sound bites of the 90s: "Since the onset of the War on Poverty, the United States has spent over $5.3 trillion on welfare. But during the same period, the official poverty rate has remained virtually unchanged." This is totally false; the poverty rate fell from 19 to 11 percent between 1964 and 1973. And the U.S. has spent only $700 billion on AFDC and food stamps since 1962. To get his inflated $5.3 trillion figure, Rector's "war on poverty" had to include solidly middle class programs like student loans, school lunches, job training, veterans pensions and Medicaid, three-fourths of which goes not to the poor but the elderly and disabled.