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In reply to the discussion: It's getting real hard to tell just who destroyed the economy... [View all]daredtowork
(3,732 posts)reforming "welfare as we know it".
This is always a big bipartisan crowd pleaser from people who have never been there and equate taking away welfare with forcing people to get a job. But what welfare reform actually did was create massive instability and, IMHO, a regime of torture, for the most vulnerable layers of society. But these are also the people at the base of our society because they are the ones that end up taking the minimum wage service jobs: not just the "out of sight out of mind" janitor jobs, but positions of caring and trust like eldercare and assisting the disabled. These are the people we've repeatedly run through a psychological and mental ringer ever since Clinton's "reform".
Clinton did it to score political points, but the repeating cycles of poverty he guaranteed led to situations like Baltimore today.
People in this thread are going back to place most of the blame on Reagan because they are mostly concerned with the decline of the middle class. But when that middle class truly sinks into poverty (as opposed to "less affluent middle class" - the face the ravages of Clinton that created the trap didn't allow people to bounce back.
A recent example I just found out about yesterday. The State finally figured out no landlord will take $336/month in rent so I am on a list to request an increase in my General Assistance LOAN (yes, it's a LOAN here - when people get their janitorial job, they are immediately saddled with debt to the State). HOWEVER, if I take it, food stamps will be reduced because that increase counts as income even if it is going directly to a landlord "vendor" as rent.
Bureaucratic crap like that. The poverty bureaucracies filled with people making a living off of other people who are poor - instead of just giving direct jobs to the poor people - and then miring their lives in enough red tape to drag them to the bottom of the ocean. Reduce food if my rent in the Bay Area is more than $336/month? Seriously?
Anyway, Clinton is at the root of that. And I've seen threads offering an escape hatch for Hillary: she's not responsible for what her husband did. However, she takes funding from New Dems, her friends are New Dems, and her speeches use work-not-welfare wink wink nudge nudge keywords like New Dems. While she may realize her husband got the ball rolling in a terrible direction for women and children that she can't take back now, in her heart she believes that "those" people on welfare need a negative incentive to go to work rather than to be given a fair ladder back into the mainstream.