Is Trump About to Blow up Welfare? Is Now the Time?

Source: Learn Liberty

It must be noted that corporate welfare is at least as large as regular welfare. But Mr. Trump is right. The welfare system is widely abused. It is too prominent in American life. Obama helped facilitate and reinvigorate a culture of welfare, even encouraging people actively to ditch self reliance for food stamps etc. They targeted Appalachia particularly.

In 2012 we wrote;

The Obama administration is actively combating what it calls derisively “mountain pride” in its effort to get more people on food stamp rolls.

In the eyes of the central planners in the Obama administration the mountain people are being foolish by not taking advantage of the government assistance so many others in this country take without the blink of an eye. I sense that the administration believes that the dumb hillbillies just don’t know what’s best for them. This is the “peasant problem” many on the far left often talk of. Poor peasants are inherently conservative and wary of outsiders. How to break people of this, of their love of the land, family and religion has been a point of heated debate in such circles for a very long time.

Self-sufficient people are also more than just reactionaries in the eyes of some, they are dangerous. They live “off society’s grid.”

“Mountain pride” in the eyes of the SNAP administrators is the thinking of simple backward hicks. What in God’s name do they have to be proud of anyway? They’re poor right? They need to get on the welfare bandwagon. I mean why wouldn’t they?

Thing is life is hard. Too often. And no child should go hungry in this country. So food stamps, though clumsy, full of fraud and anti-productive from an economic standpoint, generally can’t be just taken away wholesale. (It is unlikely that Trump would want to do this anyway.) But more of the welfare responsibility should be shifted into the non-profit world and away from the army of government employees who administer welfare as we know it. This is where the real opposition to any reform comes from. Think people get upset when their cheese is moved in the private sector? Try moving government cheese.

This is all supposed to come post-tax reform which at this point is still very much in the air. So this welfare reform talk is just one step beyond a trial balloon at this point. Regardless, welfare is an area on which Trump should focus. It is full of fraud. It is too often counter productive. And this goes for corporate welfare too.

(From The AP)

Overhauling welfare was one of the defining goals of Bill Clinton’s presidency, starting with a campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it,” continuing with a bitter policy fight and producing change that remains hotly debated 20 years later.

Now, President Donald Trump wants to put his stamp on the welfare system, apparently in favor of a more restrictive policy. He says “people are taking advantage of the system.”

Trump, who has been signaling interest in the issue for some time, said this past week that he wants to tackle the issue after the tax overhaul he is seeking by the end of the year. He said changes were “desperately needed in our country” and that his administration would soon offer plans.

For now, the president has not offered details. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said more specifics were likely early next year. But the groundwork has already begun at the White House and Trump has made his interest known to Republican lawmakers.

Paul Winfree, director of budget policy and deputy director of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, told a recent gathering at the conservative Heritage Foundation that he and another staffer had been charged with “working on a major welfare reform proposal.” He said they have drafted an executive order on the topic that would outline administration principles and direct agencies to come up with recommendations.

“The president really wants to lead on this,” Winfree said. “He has delivered that message loud and clear to us. We’ve opened conversations with leadership in Congress to let them know that that is the direction we are heading.”

Trump said in October that welfare was “becoming a very, very big subject, and people are taking advantage of the system.”

Clinton ran in 1992 on a promise to change the system but struggled to get consensus on a bill, with Democrats divided and Republicans pushing aggressive changes. Four years later, he signed a law that replaced a federal entitlement with grants to the states, placed a time limit on how long families could get aid and required recipients to go to work eventually.

It has drawn criticism from some liberal quarters ever since. During her presidential campaign last year, Democrat Hillary Clinton faced activists who argued that the law fought for by her husband punished poor people.

Kathryn Edin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who has been studying welfare since the 1990s, said the law’s legacy has been to limit the cash assistance available to the very poor and has never become a “springboard to work.” She questioned what kinds of changes could be made, arguing that welfare benefits are minimal in many states and there is little evidence of fraud in other anti-poverty programs.

Still, Edin said that welfare has “never been popular even from its inception. It doesn’t sit well with Americans in general.”

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at Heritage, said he would like to see more work requirements for a range of anti-poverty programs and stronger marriage incentives, as well as strategies to improve results for social programs and to limit waste. He said while the administration could make some adjustments through executive order, legislation would be required for any major change.

“This is a good system,” he said. “We just need to make this system better.”

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