Welfare Reform Paved Trail For Obamacare Repeal: New at Reason

How thoroughly has the Washington press corps forgotten the lesson of Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform? Thoroughly enough that at the top of its front page on May 8, The New York Times reported that the Republicans overhauling Obamacare “have been largely silent about one of the most remarkable aspects of what their legislation would do: take a step toward dismantling a vast government entitlement program, something that has never been accomplished in the modern era.”

The Times reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, might have checked his own newspaper’s online archive, suggests Ira Stoll. The August 23, 1996, Times front page reported, “In a sweeping reversal of Federal policy, President Clinton today ended six decades of guaranteed help to the nation’s poorest children… With his signature, at a Rose Garden ceremony, the President eliminated a pillar of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal social welfare program.”

Maybe to Peters, who graduated from the University of Michigan in 2002, 1996 doesn’t qualify as the “modern era.” Or maybe he or his editors at the Times are taking a post-modern approach to journalistic accuracy. But to a pre-modern fellow such as Stoll, who actually was in Washington in 1996 covering the welfare-reform story as it was happening, the story is precisely relevant to today’s political and policy debates over the possible rollback of Obamacare.

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