Clinton Mistakes Wife’s Bosnia Trip

WASHINGTON (AP) – Former President Clinton has added to the falsehoods surrounding his wife’s tale of her trip to Bosnia 12 years ago. In Indiana on Thursday, Bill Clinton defended his wife’s mistake in claiming that she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia, accusing the media of treating her like “she’d robbed a bank” for confusing the facts.

The New York senator had repeatedly described a harrowing scene in Tuzla, Bosnia, in which she and her daughter, Chelsea, had to run for cover as soon as they landed for a visit in 1996. Video footage of the day instead showed a peaceful reception in which an 8-year-old girl greeted the first lady.

Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that she got the facts wrong in retelling the tale. Bill Clinton’s inaccuracies don’t involve long-ago memories, but misstatements about how his wife has handled the story.

THE SPIN:

“A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me,” Bill Clinton said in Boonville, Ind. “But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995.

“Did y’all see all that? Oh, they blew it up,” the former president continued. “Let me just tell you. The president of Bosnia and Gen. Wesley Clark – who was there making peace where we’d lost three peacekeepers who had to ride on a dangerous mountain road because it was too dangerous to go the regular, safe way – both defended her because they pointed out that when her plane landed in Bosnia, she had to go up to the bulletproof part of the plane, in the front. Everybody else had to put their flak jackets underneath the seat in case they got shot at. And everywhere they went they were covered by Apache helicopters. So they just abbreviated the arrival ceremony.

“Now I say that because what really has mattered is that even then she was interested in our troops,” he said. “And I think she was the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone. And you would of thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they all carried on about this. And some of them when they’re 60 they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 o’clock at night, too.”

THE FACTS:

Bill Clinton has many of the facts wrong.

His wife didn’t make the sniper fire claim “one time late at night when she was exhausted.” She actually told the story several times, including during prepared remarks on foreign policy delivered the morning of March 17.

It’s also not true that she “immediately apologized for it.” Clinton has never apologized for the comments and only acknowledged that she “misspoke” a week after the March 17 speech when video of her peaceful tarmac reception emerged.

It’s also not true that she was the “first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone” – a claim that Hillary Clinton has also made when talking about the trip. Pat Nixon traveled to Saigon during the Vietnam war and Barbara Bush went to Saudi Arabia two months before the launching of Desert Storm.

The trip also was not in 1995, but 1996.

Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer responded to the former president’s remarks Friday by saying, “Senator Clinton appreciates her husband standing up for her, but this was her mistake and she takes responsibility for it.”

She’s also told her husband to quit talking about it.

“Hillary called me and said ‘You don’t remember this. You weren’t there, let me handle it.’ I said, ‘Yes ma’am,'” Bill Clinton, who was in Indiana campaigning for his wife Friday, told reporters.

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From Welfare Shift in ’96, a Reminder for Clinton

(NYT) – In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.

As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported her husband’s decision, drawing the wrath of old friends from her days as an advocate for poor children. Some accused the Clintons of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.

Despite the criticism and anxiety from the left, the legislation came to be viewed as one of Mr. Clinton’s signature achievements. It won broad bipartisan praise, with some Democrats relieved that it took a politically difficult issue off the table for them, and many liberals came to accept if not embrace it.

Mrs. Clinton’s opponent in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, said in an interview that the welfare overhaul had been greatly beneficial in eliminating a divisive force in American politics.

Mrs. Clinton, now a senator from New York, rarely mentions the issue as she battles for the nomination, despite the emphasis she has placed on her experience in her husband’s White House.

But now the issue is back, pulled to the fore by an economy turning down more sharply than at any other time since the welfare changes were imposed. With low-income people especially threatened by a weakening labor market, some advocates for poor families are raising concerns about the adequacy of the remaining social safety net. Mrs. Clinton is now calling for the establishment of a cabinet-level position to fight poverty.

As social welfare policy returns to the political debate, it is providing a window into the ways in which Mrs. Clinton has navigated the legacy of her husband’s administration and the ideological crosscurrents of her party.

In an interview, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that “people who are more vulnerable” were going to suffer more than others as the economy turned down. But she put the blame squarely on the Bush administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress until last year. Mrs. Clinton said they blocked her efforts, and those of other Democrats, to buttress the safety net with increased financing for health insurance for impoverished children, child care for poor working mothers, and food stamps.

Mrs. Clinton expressed no misgivings about the 1996 legislation, saying that it was a needed — and enormously successful — first step toward making poor families self-sufficient.

“Welfare should have been a temporary way station for people who needed immediate assistance,” she said. “It should not be considered an anti-poverty program. It simply did not work.”

During the presidential campaign, she has faced little challenge on the issue, in large part because Mr. Obama has supported the 1996 law. “Before welfare reform, you had, in the minds of most Americans, a stark separation between the deserving working poor and the undeserving welfare poor,” Mr. Obama said in an interview. “What welfare reform did was desegregate those two groups. Now, everybody was poor, and everybody had to work.”

Mr. Obama called the resulting law “an imperfect reform.” Like Mrs. Clinton, he called for an expansion of government-provided health care, child care and job training to assist women making the transition from welfare to work — programs he says he helped expand in Illinois as a state senator.

Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing.”

Among some advocates for the poor, the growing prospect of a severe recession and evidence of backsliding from the initial successes of the policy shift have crystallized fresh concern. Many remain upset that Mrs. Clinton, once seemingly a stalwart member of their camp, supported a law that they contend left many people at risk.

“If there is no national controversy about welfare reform, we paid an awfully high price,” said Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who has known Mrs. Clinton since her college days, and who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr. Clinton signed the measure.

“They don’t acknowledge the number of people who were hurt,” Mr. Edelman said. “It’s just not in their lens. It was predictably bad public policy.”

Forcing families to rely on work instead of government money went well from 1996 to 2000, when the economy was booming and paychecks were plentiful, economists say. Since then, however, job creation has slowed and poverty has risen. The current downturn could be the first serious test of how well the changes brought about by the 1996 law hold up under sharp economic stress.

“We should have enormous concern about the lack of a fully functioning safety net for families with children,” said Mark H. Greenberg, director of the Poverty and Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.

In many ways, Mrs. Clinton has sought to moderate her liberal image since leaving the White House. But on welfare, she has faced the opposite problem: accusations from some liberals that she sold out their principles for a politically calculated centrism.

On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton is largely focused on the middle class. Since the departure from the Democratic race of John Edwards, who had made poverty a centerpiece of his campaign, there has been little debate about social welfare policy. But in promising on Friday to establish a cabinet-rank poverty-fighting position if she is elected, Mrs. Clinton reintroduced the topic and the question of her record.

In the interview, conducted last month, Mrs. Clinton said she had followed through on her promise to address what she viewed as shortcomings in the welfare law after being elected to the Senate in 2000. She said she had pressed for legislation that would have increased financing for child care for poor mothers by up to $11 billion, seeking to expand food stamps, and allowing welfare recipients to draw cash aid while attending school.

Those provisions were blocked by the Republican leadership.

“We’ve had to mostly spend our time since President Bush came in to office preventing bad things from happening,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Many welfare advocates dispute Mrs. Clinton’s characterization. Since entering the Senate, they say, she has shown a predilection for compromise at the expense of the poor.

When the overhaul bill came up for reauthorization, Sandra Chapin, a former welfare recipient affiliated with a coalition called Welfare Made a Difference, lobbied Congress to allow more women to attend college while they received aid. Mrs. Clinton “wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” Ms. Chapin said.

Ms. Chapin, now program director of the Consumer Federation of California, posted an e-mail message to a discussion board in February accusing Mrs. Clinton of having “had a hand in devaluing motherwork in this country, and no doubt sending thousands of children and their families deeper into poverty.”

In the interview, and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton said she had serious misgivings about some of the changes proposed to the welfare system as the issue percolated through Washington in the mid-1990s.

Her husband had taken office with a pledge to dismantle the old system. He embraced time limits for cash aid and allowing states to largely decide for themselves how to spend the money. He set out to expand job training, access to health care, child care and food stamps.

When the Republicans took over Congress after the 1994 elections, making Newt Gingrich the House speaker, they seized the initiative. Twice, they passed bills seeking to impose time limits on welfare benefits while cutting other aid. Twice, Mr. Clinton vetoed the bills, with the encouragement of Mrs. Clinton.

In August 1996, three months before Election Day, Congress sent the White House a third bill. This one imposed time limits on cash benefits and barred most legal immigrants from receiving welfare. But it maintained guarantees for Medicaid and food stamps and increased financing for child care. This time, Mr. Clinton signed.

“I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in her memoir.

Mrs. Clinton remained troubled by parts of the bill, she wrote in her memoir, particularly the provision barring welfare for legal immigrants. But “pragmatic politics” had to be considered. “If he vetoed welfare reform a third time,” she wrote, “Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall.”

Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of Children’s Defense Fund, an activist group that had given Mrs. Clinton her first job, blasted the Clintons as betraying the poor, opening a rift that Mrs. Clinton called “sad and painful.” Mrs. Edelman’s husband, Peter, quit his administration post.

In the years that followed, the number of those on welfare rolls plummeted by more than 60 percent. A study last year by the Congressional Budget Office found that from 1991 to 2005, poor families with children saw their inflation-adjusted incomes climb by 35 percent, as employment climbed.

In recent years, however, low-skilled women have struggled. The percentage of poor single mothers neither working nor drawing cash assistance surged from under 20 percent before the welfare overhaul to more than 30 percent in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service. During the same period, the number of children in poverty rose to 12.8 million from 11.6 million, according to census data.

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Bill Clinton Visits Puerto Rico, Rich in Culture and Delegates

(WP) – BARCELONETA, Puerto Rico, April 7 — The four sound trucks filed onto potholed streets at 8 o’clock Monday morning, weighed down by the 800-pound speakers rigged to their roofs. They drove past the pineapple plantations, past the black-sand beaches, past the multicolored tiendas downtown.

All morning, the trucks blasted the same short message, as if repetition might make it more believable: “Sí! Bill Clinton está aquí!”

Yes, a few hours later, Bill Clinton did come to this farming town 1,200 miles from the U.S. mainland, bringing with him the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign. The former president walked into the humid courtyard of a university to a drumroll from boys banging on steel garbage cans, past security guards in Hawaiian shirts and women dancing to salsa music, to make the case for his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It may have been the first U.S. presidential campaign rally in Puerto Rican history, but more are sure to follow. On June 1, the U.S. commonwealth will hold a Democratic primary that will help determine 63 delegates — more than the number awarded to 24 of the 50 states. About 2.5 million voters are eligible to participate in the primary, and both Hillary Clinton and her Democratic challenger, Sen. Barack Obama, are expected to visit the island to woo them.

The 4 million residents of Puerto Rico are not allowed to participate in the general election, so they plan to press their issues during their brief turn in the national spotlight. They want better health care, higher wages and a final determination of their murky status with the United States.

Most of all, they want to inject themselves into the national conversation — a process that started with Bill Clinton traveling Monday to five events across the island. He never came here as president — no U.S. president has visited in 45 years — but he spoke Monday as though he may be back soon.

“You might actually determine this election,” he told the crowd in Barceloneta. “If you vote for [Hillary] and give her a big margin, she’ll be the nominee and she will always honor your support.”

But on Monday, the culture gap between Clinton and Puerto Ricans, who were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, sometimes seemed insurmountable. When Clinton walked into the rally in Barceloneta, he sat on a stage and listened as four local politicians introduced him in Spanish. One introducer, among 18 local politicians at the event, turned away from the microphone and looked back at Clinton, eager to interpret for him.

“When I say ‘presidente,’ ” the mayor said, “that means I’m talking about you.”

Clinton flashed a thumbs-up and smiled wanly, but he looked distracted during the Spanish speeches. Then he walked to the microphone, shielding his eyes against the 90-degree sun. He rattled off a thank-you list of Spanish names and mispronounced two of them.

As about 1,000 people crowded under white awnings to escape the heat, Clinton proceeded to give a jargon-heavy speech in English about health care and energy efficiency. Nobody interpreted, and only a handful of audience members seemed to understand him. The crowd — raucous and dancing a few minutes earlier — remained mostly silent during the 10-minute speech. Some people left. Others chatted on their cellphones.

“What is he saying? Do we clap now?” asked Jerry Nieves Rosario, a college student who speaks only Spanish. “If I had known about this, maybe I would have stayed home.”

Anticipating that kind of reaction, local advisers spent the past week offering Hillary Clinton’s campaign a crash course in Puerto Rican politics. More than 80 percent of registered voters usually turn out for local elections here, and big political rallies held in stadium parking lots routinely attract more than 130,000, local politicians said. During mayoral campaigns, candidates often walk door to door while carrying boomboxes, dancing to music while meeting voters.

Politics is often referred to as the “national sport” in Puerto Rico — one that is played by three main teams. There are those who want the island to become a U.S. state, those who want it to become an independent country and those who support it staying a commonwealth. Clinton and Obama both hope to cater to all three with a neutral position: the promise of a status resolution, based on Puerto Rico’s preference.

Each candidate recently released a policy letter about Puerto Rico, and local politicians have spent weeks dissecting them to determine a preference. Clinton’s letter was three pages long; Obama’s was one. Clinton, by promising a status resolution by the end of her first term, became the popular choice for statehood supporters. Obama, by saying he would consider all three possibilities, tends to be popular among those who like being a commonwealth.

“If a candidate just picked one status option or the other it would be too dangerous, because you alienate half of the voters,” said Kenneth McClintock, president of the Puerto Rican Senate and a superdelegate who supports Clinton. “They both want statehooders and commonwealthers. They need both.

“There’s going to be a lot of questions about the policies there. Puerto Ricans are smart voters. You can’t talk down to us. We know how democracy works. We do it better than you do, so you should follow our lead.”

For Bill Clinton’s visit, the campaign mostly acquiesced to the Puerto Rican model. He packed seven events, five of them public, into 30 hours on the island. Disc jockeys played at most of the venues. Dozens of local politicians made introductory speeches. On his right wrist, Clinton wore a woven friendship bracelet.

By arriving in Puerto Rico before Obama, the Clinton campaign hoped to solidify an already-strong advantage here. Clinton represents more Puerto Ricans as a senator from New York than any other stateside politician, and Spanish-speaking voters in Texas and California voted overwhelmingly for her. Obama’s campaign, meanwhile, has yet to recover from the indictment last month of Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vilá, his most prominent Puerto Rican supporter.

“With a few good Clinton events, some more local press, this thing could be pretty much locked up,” said Francisco Domenech, a Puerto Rican superdelegate who supports Clinton.

Domenech and other local Clinton organizers urged Bill Clinton to loosen up during his time on the island. Domenech described the mainland campaign tradition of a staid, 1970s classic-rock music introduction followed by a halting campaign speech as a recipe that is “just too tired and boring compared to things here.” McClintock, the Senate president, told the Clinton campaign how one U.S. politician managed to thrive in Puerto Rico: Appearing at a fundraiser for McClintock in San Juan, the late senator Paul Simon persuaded his wife to dance the macarena.

Barceloneta set the stage for that kind of party. Two local bands alternated songs while hundreds of Puerto Ricans clapped to the beat. The stage became a makeshift dance floor, with dozens of couples twirling in the heat.

Then Bill Clinton entered through a side door, glasses low on his nose, and the festivities abruptly stopped.

“You have to be ready to adapt to some craziness over here,” McClintock said. “It’s a different political world, and everybody is finally going to see it.”

What a cluster-fuck. Bill needs to either up his meds or get off them. No translator, lackluster speech, some of the audience left while others talked on their cell phones. Wow, that was special.

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Clinton laughs off Colombia questions

PITTSBURGH, (CNN) – Hillary Clinton used her trademark laugh Thursday to deflect a question about the $800,000 her husband earned in 2005 giving speeches for a Bogota-based group that supports the Colombia free trade agreement — the same trade deal she currently opposes.

Asked by CNN if those earnings represented a conflict of interest given that she has dipped into her family’s pocketbook to pay campaign bills, Clinton threw up her hands and laughed loudly for several seconds.

“How many angels dance on the head of the pin?,” she responded, continuing to giggle. “I have really, uh, nothing to … I mean, how do you answer that?”

The New York senator explained there are different sides to the argument over trade, and re-emphasized her own opposition to the trade deal, assailing the Colombian government’s “outrageous” record of “targeting labor leaders.”

“I am against the Colombia free trade deal,” she said. “It doesn’t matter who talks to me. It doesn’t matter any circumstances. I have been against it. I am against it. I will be against it absent the kind of changes in behavior that I have been calling for from the Colombian government.”

Earlier in the press conference, describing her husband’s advocacy for the trade deal, Clinton said: “Everyone is free to express their opinion.”

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Hillary’s NAFTA Pretensions

(DM) – Forget about her claim to have dodged sniper’s bullets in Bosnia, or that she was named after Sir Edmund Hilary, or that she met a woman who was denied health care and died.

All of these Hillary Clinton fibs and exaggerations are basically harmless. But her current attempts to lie about her record and to pretend that she always opposed free trade agreements and disagreed with Bill on NAFTA is a serious distortion of her record as she searches for blue collar support in Pennsylvania.

Hillary was a strong sup porter of NAFTA. Her official schedule reveals that she attended meetings designed to promote its passage and her memoir, Living History betrays no hint of any opposition to her husband’s key legislative accomplishment of his first two years in office — the ratification of NAFTA.

Hillary and I spoke frequently through all of 1993 and 1994 and together we plotted to help NAFTA ratification. She was deeply involved in the decision to enlist past presidents in supporting the bill and followed the vote count with heightening anxiety as it appeared closer and closer.

That she could totally reinvent her record, turn it around 180 degrees, and expect us to fall for it, shows her arrogance and her continuing belief that she can sell us on anything, no matter how obviously false.

Trade was no side issue in the Clinton administration; it was central to his key world view — that he had to lead America to compete successfully in the new global economy. His refusal to submit to protectionism or to legislation to reduce layoffs — his commitment to the free market — was a singular badge of courage in his presidency. For Hillary to indicate now so fundamental a disagreement with a policy so integral to her husbands’ presidency is transparently phony.

And when Hillary entered the Senate, before she started to run for president, she was a reliable vote for free trade, supporting a host of bi-lateral agreements negotiated by her husband and by the Bush Administration. She even took the lead in urging the admission of China to the World Trade Organization, the key counter-protectionist step of the past two decades.

Hillary spoke at a meeting to promote NAFTA in November of 1993. Participants told ABC News that Hilary was “100 percent pro-NAFTA” and expressed “not a hint of waffling” on the deal. In 1996, she said that NAFTA was giving Americans a chance to compete. “That’s what a free and fair trade agreement like NAFTA is all about. I think NAFTA is proving its worth.”

And in 2002, the AP reports that she told the Democratic Leadership Council praising Bill’s economic policies: “The economic recovery plan stands first and foremost as a testament to both good ideas and political courage. National service. The Brady Bill. Family leave. NAFTA. Investment in science and technology. All of these came our of some very fundamental ideas bout what would work. The results speak for themselves.”

Does she really believe that we are about to forget history and buy that Hillary was opposed to NAFTA all along?

NAFTA has worked very well. It has improved Mexico and the United States. Without it, we would be burdened by millions of more immigrants from Mexico. It was one of the stellar achievements of the Clinton administration. For Hillary to try to sell us on a revised history speaks to her confidence that she can make us believe anything.

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Bill Clinton: Manufacturing Can Return

ROANOKE RAPIDS, N.C. (AP) – Former President Bill Clinton, campaigning in a former mill town struggling with job losses, said Friday the United States can bring back the manufacturing industry – as long as the nation can enforce trade laws.

“We can bring manufacturing back to America now,” Clinton said on an outdoor stage, with the now-closed mill that was featured in the 1979 Sally Field movie “Norma Rae” looming behind him. “But we have to have a commitment.”

Clinton did not mention the North American Free Trade Agreement during the campaign event for his wife, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. The NAFTA trade pact was adopted while Bill Clinton was in office, but Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said she wants to change it.

Many have blamed NAFTA for accelerating the decline of North Carolina’s once-vibrant manufacturing sector.

The former J.P. Stevens plant that served as Clinton’s backdrop was the South’s first major unionized textile mill, and the inspiration for “Norma Rae.” The movie won Field her first Academy Award for her portrayal of a minimum-wage textile worker-turned-union organizer.

Textile mills once provided 5,000 jobs in Roanoke Rapids, but the last mill closed several years ago.

Hillary Clinton has criticized NAFTA while campaigning for blue-collar votes in North Carolina and elsewhere. She said this week she has a long record of differing with her husband on trade policies, including opposing NAFTA as her husband championed the trade deal and pushed for its passage in Congress.

But White House records show that when Hillary Clinton was first lady, she attended several meetings designed to build congressional support for NAFTA. She says she had reservations about the pact at the time, and made her feelings known in such gatherings.

Bill Clinton, who also spoke in Rocky Mount, said the nation can boost the manufacturing industry by keeping national security manufacturing jobs in the United States and ending tax breaks to those who may ship jobs overseas. He also said deficits to countries like China don’t allow the country to enforce trade laws.

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The Welfare System in The United States -Part 3

In the American vocabulary, “welfare” has often had a limited meaning, most commonly associated in public discourse with public assistance to mothers with dependent children. Yet government welfare can also be given a broader definition, as a general social safety net designed to support citizens in need.

Under this definition, “welfare” refers to government protections for workers’ incomes, which are often threatened by structural economic change under the free market system. In an economy in which workers rely on wages to support themselves, threats to income arise due to unemployment, sickness, old age, and loss of the family breadwinner.

In the United States, then, government welfare has been a collection of different programs that includes unemployment insurance, health insurance, old age pensions, accident insurance, and support for families with dependent children. In the twentieth century, many nations in Western Europe built what became known as the “welfare state,” a comprehensive system designed to protect citizens from the hazards of an industrial, captalist economy.

Compared with the European welfare state, the American welfare system is late developing, less extensive, haphazardly constructed, and reliant upon dispersed authority. While European nations instituted programs for old-age pensions and accident insurance near the turn of the twentieth century, the United States did not develop significant welfare programs until the 1930s under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Unlike the European welfare state, the American welfare system has never included universal health insurance or guaranteed family incomes. Significant groups of Americans in need have not been covered by government welfare programs. Moreover, the American old-age pension system is based on worker contributions, and thus does little to redistibute wealth.

While the European welfare state was consolidated in the coherent programs of social-democratic or labor parties, the American welfare system has lacked a comprehensive structure. It was initially built as a response to emergency, during the economic crisis of the Great Depression. The American welfare system is characterized by dispersed authority. Unlike the nationalized European systems, responsibility for welfare has been shared by federal, state, and local governments, which has often led to wide disparities in welfare eligibility and benefits in different regions of the country.

Throughout its history, the American distribution of government welfare has been closely connected to cultural attitudes toward the poor. Americans have commonly distinguished between the deserving poor, who become needy through no fault of their own and are entitled to public assistance, and the undeserving poor, who are responsible for their own plight and who could escape poverty by developing a strong work ethic. Separating the deserving poor from the undeserving has often proved difficult. Nevertheless, for much of American history, many needy people have been seen as undeserving of public assistance. Because of a deeply held cultural belief in the “American dream,” which holds that anyone can achieve economic advancement through hard work, Americans have characteristically attributed poverty to the moral failings of individuals.

In the American welfare system, the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor has translated into a division between social insurance and public assistance programs. Social insurance, which includes old age pensions and unemployment insurance, has been available on a universal basis to those who earn it through work. Public assistance, such as aid to dependent children and general assistance for the very needy, is targeted at the poor and requires financial and moral evaluations for applicants to prove their worthiness for aid.

The benefits of public assistance are typically less generous than those of social insurance. Recipients of public assistance have often been seen as undeserving of aid because they are not seen as having earned it through work. Public assistance has thus carried a social stigma . There is also a gender and racial dimension to the devaluation of public assistance in comparison to social insurance, as recipients of the former are disproportionately female and minority.

Welfare from the Colonial Period to the Progressive Era

Treatment of the poor in colonial America was based on the principles set forth in the Elizabethan poor law of 1601. According to this English law, each town or parish was responsible for the care of its own needy. The law distinguished between three categories of the poor: those who were unable to work due to sickness or age, who were to be given material aid; the able-bodied who were unable to find jobs, who were to be provided with work; and the able-bodied but unwilling to work, who were to be instilled with the work ethic. The two important legacies of this law were its stipulation that poor relief is a local responsibility and the burden that it placed on the needy to prove their worthiness for relief.

Operating on the principles of the Elizabethan poor law, American colonial governments took responsibility for providing for the needy in their localities, through so-called “outdoor relief”—material assistance granted on a case-by-case basis. Localities also auctioned off destitute persons to the lowest bidder , who would receive funds in exchange for caring for them. However, because they were seen as drains on government funds, strangers in need were often warned away from towns, even if they were sick or disabled.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, however, increasing urbanization, immigration, population growth, and unemployment led to a rising poor population and the need for a more systematic approach to welfare. Although outdoor relief continued to be practiced, states and municipalities supported “indoor relief” by building institutions to provide for the permanently poor and to instill the able-bodied with habits of work discipline.

In general, poorhouses were inadequately funded. Moreover, they were often poorly administered, and those who ran them were often corrupt. They lumped together different classes of poor in the same institution: the old, the sick, and the mentally ill were housed with the able-bodied unemployed. Under such circumstances, poorhouses were unable to provide adequate care for the needy or instill work habits in the able-bodied. In part, poorhouses were meant to be unpleasant institutions, as the threat of having to live in the poorhouse was intended to deter the poor from idleness. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most poorhouses were transformed into homes for the old-aged who had no one else to care for them.

By the end of the nineteenth century, many European nations were beginning to build a welfare state. A number of American reformers, believing that government welfare would have to be altered to reflect the new hazards of an industrial economy, sought to emulate the European example. While these reformers failed in their efforts to develop European-style provisions for old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, the Progressive Era (1900–1921) did see the early growth of the American welfare system. For example, from 1911 to 1921, forty-two states introduced workmen’s compensation legislation, which provided accident insurance to protect workers against job-related injuries.

In the Progressive Era, a powerful network of progressive middle-class women lobbied for mothers’ pensions, and thirty-nine states developed mothers’ aid programs from 1911 to 1921. Under these programs, states gave money to single mothers to help them defray the costs of raising their children in their own homes. The aid was meant to deter the use of child labor to help raise money for the family and to prevent the institutionalization of poor and fatherless children in orphanages, a common practice in the nineteenth century. However, in order to receive this aid, women had to prove that they were fit mothers with suitable homes. Often, the benefits given were inadequate, and the programs only reached a small portion of those in need—in 1931, only 93,620 of 1.5 million female-headed families received mothers’ aid.

Progressives had the most success in instituting programs whose goal was protecting children. In 1912, the federal government established the U.S. Children’s Bureau to gather information on the treatment of the nation’s children. In 1921, Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Act, giving matching funds to states to build maternal and child health facilities to fight infant mortality. Despite their accomplishments, Progressives failed to develop an extensive American welfare system—that task was not accomplished until the New Deal.

The New Deal and the Establishment of the American Welfare System

The severity of the Great Depression created new demands for government relief. After the stock market crash of 24 October 1929, millions of Americans lost their jobs and found themselves without adequate means of financial support. Between 1929 and the summer of 1932, the unemployment rate skyrocketed from 3.2 percent to 24.9 percent. In the face of this economic crisis, President Herbert Hoover stressed that relief for the needy should be the responsibility of private, local, and state relief agencies. Yet the need for assistance was staggering and could not be met by the institutions Americans had traditionally relied upon to provide public aid. In 1932, Congress established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was authorized to lend $300 million in relief funds directly to the states. However, the true expansion of the American welfare system came during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, who took office in 1933. For the first time, the federal government committed itself to providing economic security for its citizens. By the end of the 1930s, the United States had become a world leader in social spending.

The first measures that Roosevelt took were temporary ones to relieve the immediate problems caused by the depression, though in doing so he became the first president to assert that the federal government should be responsible for the welfare of its citizens. In 1933, he appointed a dynamic administrator, Harry Hopkins, to lead government relief efforts and established the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). FERA provided funds to the states for the needy, both in the form of direct cash grants and on a matching basis. For the most part, the funds were distributed by the states with federal supervision. Work projects to provide jobs to the unemployed were administered by FERA, as well as the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)—both created in 1933. By February of 1934, FERA, the CWA, and the CCC combined reached 28 million people, 20 percent of the American population.

The economic crisis provided an opportunity for liberals to pass European-style social welfare legislation that they had unsuccessfully advocated for years. In 1935, Congress passed Roosevelt’s Social Security Act. This bill was designed to establish a more permanent system for government welfare. Roosevelt hoped that an expansive program of government security would protect Americans “against the hazards and vicissitudes of life.”

In the short term, the law provided old-age assistance in the form of immediate payments for the destitute elderly. For the long term, however, the legislation established Old Age Insurance (OAI), a pension fund for American workers aged sixty-five and over. Social security, as OAI came to be called, was a fully federal program that granted standard benefits throughout the country. While there was a popular movement in favor of noncontributory old-age pensions paid for directly out of general government funds, OAI worked on a contributory basis, with workers and employers paying equal shares into the system. While workers had to contribute in order to receive social security, benefits did not correspond to the contributions that workers made in social security taxes. The New Dealers decided to make social security a contributory program in order to appease the demands of employers and because they believed that if it were a separate program with its own tax funds, it would be protected from political attack in the future.

The Social Security Act established unemployment insurance, also on a contributory basis, by providing for a cooperative federal-state program to provide payments for a set number of weeks to workers who had lost their jobs. The act also established a system of federal matching funds for the states for needy children, ADC (Aid to Dependent Children). Since each of these programs was administered by the states, payment amounts and eligibility requirements varied widely throughout the nation.

Eventually synonymous with the word “welfare,” ADC was relatively uncontroversial at the time it was established. It was a less generous program and preserved its recipients’ dignity less than OAI or unemployment insurance, however. At first, ADC only extended benefits to children, not to caregivers—when this was changed later, the program became AFCD (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). While social security was universally available to eligible workers, ADC recipients were means-tested. Since the aid was not distributed on a universal basis, ADC recipients were often stigmatized. In order to receive assistance, state officials had to certify need and worthiness of aid. Mothers had to prove that they provided a fit home for their children and that they adhered to an acceptable code of sexual conduct in order to be eligible for ADC. Until 1961, fathers of children aided under ADC had to be completely absent in order for the mothers to receive aid. The procedures that state agencies adopted to determine need often involved substantial invasions of privacy. Social workers intensely scrutinized the budgets of mothers, and some agencies conducted “midnight raids” of the women receiving aid to check for overnight male visitors—if they found one, assistance was withdrawn.

The welfare legislation of the New Deal was based on a distinction between “unemployables” and “employables.” Unemployables such as the elderly, the disabled, and dependent children and their caregivers were to receive public aid without entering the labor market. Employables, however, were to be provided with jobs. In keeping with long-held American beliefs, the architects of the New Deal believed that it was morally damaging to substitute dependence on public aid for work. Therefore, the New Deal contained massive public works programs designed to provide work relief to the unemployed.

In 1935, Congress created the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Under Harry Hopkins, the WPA administered public works projects throughout the nation and employed workers of all skill levels at prevailing local wages. From 1935 to its elimination in 1943, the WPA employed between 1.5 and 3 million Americans at any one time, making it the largest civilian employer in the nation. During that period, it constructed or repaired 600,000 miles of road, built or rebuilt 116,000 bridges, and repaired 110,000 buildings. The CCC and the Public Works Administration (PWA) also provided jobs for public works during this period.

New Deal public works programs, however, were faced with the difficult problem of trying to reconcile the need to create jobs with the need to perform useful work in an efficient manner. Moreover, they were hampered by inadequate funding from Congress and could not rely on a fully developed federal bureaucracy to administer them. The WPA was unable to provide jobs for all of those who needed them and its wages were often insufficient. The WPA provision that it could only employ one family member indicated the prevailing gender expectation that men were to be the family breadwinners. Less than 20 percent of WPA workers were female.

While many New Dealers planned to make public employment a long-term federal commitment that could expand and contract with economic need, the public works programs were eliminated in 1943, as economic growth returned and the Roosevelt administration focused its attention on the war. In addition, New Dealers failed in their attempts to establish a system of national health insurance. Thus, while the New Deal did create a national welfare system, its programs were less ambitious than what many of its planners had anticipated.

In part, the inability of the New Dealers to develop a more extensive welfare system was due to resistance among conservative Democratic congressmen from the segregated South. Many in the South who would have benefited from such programs were unable to vote. Not only were virtually all African Americans disenfranchised, many poor whites were effectively prevented from voting by high poll taxes. Southern congressmen were instrumental in attaching limits to the programs that did pass, ensuring that federal welfare would not provide an economic alternative to work for the southern black labor force. For instance, southern congressmen saw to it that OAI excluded agricultural and domestic workers—60 percent of the nation’s African Americans were in either of these categories.

Despite the broader ambitions of New Dealers themselves, the legacy of the New Deal was the two-tiered system established by the Social Security Act: a social insurance program that included old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, with benefits for workers of all social classes; and a public assistance program, ADC, targeted at the poor, that was less generous in its benefits and attached a humiliating stigma to its recipients. While the New Deal failed to establish a complete welfare state, the expansion of the American welfare system in this period was nevertheless dramatic. The amount of money the federal government spent on public aid increased from $208 million in 1932 to $4.9 billion in 1939.

From the War on Poverty to Welfare Reform

In the 1940s and 1950s, federal and state governments continued to assume the major financial and program role in providing welfare. The welfare system did not undergo significant expansion, however, until the 1960s. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson, acting on the plans of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, launched the “War on Poverty.” This public campaign had the ambitious goal of defeating poverty in the United States. However, its planners believed that economic growth would solve much of the problem, and so they avoided implementing expensive and controversial measures to fight poverty such as direct income maintenance and New Deal–style public works programs. Instead, the War on Poverty focused its energies on job training and education, launching programs such as Head Start, the Job Corps, and Upward Bound.

While the programs of the War on Poverty failed to match the extravagant rhetoric of the program, the American welfare system did expand. In 1965, Congress established the Medicare and Medicaid programs to provide medical assistance for the aged and for welfare recipients, respectively. Through these programs, a quarter of Americans received some form of government-sponsored medical insurance. Food stamps became more widely available and free to the poor: while, in 1965, the food stamp program provided only $36 million in aid to 633,000 people, by 1975 it granted $4.6 billion in aid to 17.1 million recipients. President Richard Nixon was unable to get Congress to pass the Family Assistance Plan in 1972, which would have provided a guaranteed minimum income to all families. However, Congress did pass Supplemental Social Security (SSI), which established an income floor on benefits paid to the aged, blind, and disabled.

Existing programs such as social security and Aid to Families with Dependent Children experienced tremendous growth during this period. Social security payments increased in amount and reached more people, as a greater percentage of the population became elderly and lived longer. The expansion of the welfare system substantially reduced poverty during this period, particularly among the elderly. From 1959 to 1980, the percentage of the elderly below the poverty line dropped from 35 percent to 16 percent.

In 1960, the AFDC program cost less than $1 billion and reached 745,000 families. By 1971, it cost $6 billion and reached over 3 million families. The expansion of AFDC was due in part to the concentration of poverty among certain demographic groups, such as African Americans and women. Due to the mechanization of southern agriculture, many African Americans moved northward into urban areas where the unemployment rate was high because of a decrease in factory jobs. The “feminization of poverty” left many women in economic need due to an increasing divorce rate, increasing out-of-wedlock births, and increasing rates of child desertion by fathers.

The expansion of AFDC was also due to a growing “welfare rights” consciousness that encouraged those eligible to receive aid and sought to remove the social stigma associated with it. This consciousness was promoted by groups such as the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), a War on Poverty agency charged with seeking the “maximum feasible participation of the poor” in its programs. From 1968 to 1971, the Supreme Court decided a number of cases that expanded welfare rights. It struck down state residency requirements for AFDC eligibility, eliminated the rule that the father had to be entirely absent for aid to be given, and granted legal due process to those requesting welfare.

Although social security remained a much larger program than AFDC, AFDC became more controversial. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the expansion of the AFDC program fueled fears of a growing “welfare crisis.” As inner cities suffered the effects of de-industrialization and high unemployment, poverty increasingly came to be associated with African Americans living in urban centers, who were often referred to in public discourse as an “underclass” living in a debilitating “culture of poverty.” The public image of the AFDC recipient increasingly became that of the “welfare mom”—presumed to be an unwed African American. Here, the stigma of being poor and the stigma of single motherhood were combined to create a potent racial stereo type.

A new conservative critique of welfare gained increasing prominence by the 1980s. For leading conservatives such as Charles Murray and George Gilder, liberal social policy was itself responsible for keeping people in poverty. According to this critique, welfare programs kept recipients dependent on the state for support. Conservatives advocated reducing or abolishing AFDC payments, in order to provide poor people with the necessary incentive to become self-sufficient through work.

The conservative critique of the welfare system gained strength from an increasing distrust of the federal government. Changing gender expectations also help explain the new call for AFDC recipients to earn their living through work. The demand that the needy advance through work was a familiar one, but it had generally been applied only to men. Whereas in the New Deal single mothers were considered unemployable and kept out of the labor market, by the end of the century women were assumed to be a natural part of the labor force.

President Ronald Reagan acted on the growing conservative critique by slashing government welfare programs during the 1980s. Between 1982 and 1985 total funds spent on unemployment insurance went down 6.9 percent, food stamps went down 12.6 percent, child nutrition programs were cut 27.7 percent, housing assistance 4.4 percent, and low-income energy assistance 8.3 percent. While the Reagan administration decreased the money it spent on public assistance to the poor, it increased the budget of social security. Thus, while conservatives had success in reducing public assistance programs, existing social insurance programs that reached the middle class continued to enjoy substantial political support.

In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president with a campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” However, he spent much of his energy in his first years in office in an unsuccessful attempt to extend the welfare system by providing all Americans with health insurance. After the 1994 election, a group of conservative Republicans took control of Congress and advocated the passage of welfare reform legislation. They were led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who pledged in his “Contract with America” to “replace the welfare state with the opportunity society.”

In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, designed to reduce the number of people receiving public assistance. This act repealed AFDC and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Whereas AFDC had an open-ended federal commitment to provide matching funds to the states, TANF stipulated a set amount of money earmarked for parents with dependent children to be given to states by the federal government, shifting much of the responsibility for care of the needy back to the states. The act encouraged states to use a significant proportion of their funds not for cash payments but for job training, job placement, and education. The law stipulated that no family has a right to government assistance: states have no obligation to provide relief to needy families. States were given a number of incentives to cut their welfare caseloads. Under the new legislation, TANF care-givers were eligible for only five years of benefits over the course of their lives.

Those cut from the welfare rolls were expected to get a job in the private sector and support themselves with wages. However, states were under no obligation to address obstacles that many welfare recipients faced to working, such as low skills, lack of transportation, and the need for child care, though many states did choose to implement programs to address these obstacles. The jobs that were typically available for former AFDC recipients were low-wage service industry jobs that still left them below the poverty line. In 1997, median wages for workers who had left welfare were reported to be 20 percent of hourly wages for all workers.

The legislation succeeded in reducing the amount of people receiving aid for dependent children from 4.4 million at the time the law passed to 2.4 million in December 1999, though some of these reductions should be ascribed to the booming economy of the late 1990s. However, it was unclear how the system would work in more difficult economic times—for even if the need for assistance escalated, the federal government would not increase the amount of funds it granted to the states.

Bibliography

Amenta, Edwin. Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998.

American Social History Project. Who Built America?: Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society. 2ded. 2 vols. New York: Worth, 2000.

Gordon, Linda, ed. Women, the State, and Welfare. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Gordon, Linda. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935. New York: Free Press, 1994.

Katz, Michael B. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

———. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Levine, Daniel. Poverty and Society: The Growth of the American Welfare State in International Comparison. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Patterson, James T. America’s Struggle against Poverty in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Piven, Francis Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare. Updated ed. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Trattner, William I. From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America. New York: Free Press, 1999.

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The Welfare System in the United States – Part 1

How welfare began in the United States

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, local and state governments as well as private charities were overwhelmed by needy families seeking food, clothing, and shelter. In 1935, welfare for poor children and other dependent persons became a federal government responsibility, which it remained for 60 years.

MINNEAPOLIS—Several hundred men and women in an unemployed demonstration today stormed a grocery store and meat market in the Gateway district, smashed plate glass windows and helped themselves to bacon and ham, fruit and canned goods.
—from the New York Times, February 26, 1931

The 1920s in America seemed like an age of endless prosperity. Construction boomed, business flourished, and the stock market soared. Then on October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed. The crash sent shock waves throughout the economy. Banks failed. Businesses closed. Millions found themselves out of work. The Great Depression, which would last through the 1930s, had begun.

When the Great Depression began, about 18 million elderly, disabled, and single mothers with children already lived at a bare subsistence level in the United States. State and local governments together with private charities helped these people. By 1933, another 13 million Americans had been thrown out of work. Suddenly, state and local governments and charities could no longer provide even minimum assistance for all those in need. Food riots broke out. Desertions by husbands and fathers increased. Homeless families in cities lived in public parks and shanty towns. Desperate times began to put into question the old American notion that if a man worked hard enough, he could always take care of himself and his family.

The effect of the Depression on poor children was particularly severe. Grace Abbott, head of the federal Children’s Bureau, reported that in the spring of 1933, 20 percent of the nation’s school children showed evidence of poor nutrition, housing, and medical care. School budgets were cut and in some cases schools were shut down for lack of money to pay teachers. An estimated 200,000 boys left home to wander the streets and beg because of the poor economic condition of their families.

Most elderly Americans did not have personal savings or retirement pensions to support them in normal times, let alone during a national economic crisis. Those few able to set aside money for retirement often found that their savings and investments had been wiped out by the financial crash in 1929. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois made this observation in 1936:

“The impact of all these forces increasingly convinced the majority of the American people that individuals could not by themselves provide adequately for their old age, and that some form of greater security should be provided by society.

Even skilled workers, business owners, successful farmers, and professionals of all kinds found themselves in severe economic difficulty as one out of four in the labor force lost their jobs. Words like “bewildered,” “shocked,” and “humiliated,” were often used at the time to describe increasing numbers of Americans as the Depression deepened.”

Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt focused mainly on creating jobs for the masses of unemployed workers, he also backed the idea of federal aid for poor children and other dependent persons. By 1935, a national welfare system had been established for the first time in American history.

Welfare Before the Depression

A federal welfare system was a radical break from the past. Americans had always prided themselves on having a strong sense of individualism and self-reliance. Many believed that those who couldn’t take care of themselves were to blame for their own misfortunes. During the 19th century, local and state governments as well as charities established institutions such as poorhouses and orphanages for destitute individuals and families. Conditions in these institutions were often deliberately harsh so that only the truly desperate would apply.

Local governments (usually counties) also provided relief in the form of food, fuel, and sometimes cash to poor residents. Those capable were required to work for the town or county, often at hard labor such as chopping wood and maintaining roads. But most on general relief were poor dependent persons not capable of working: widows, children, the elderly, and the disabled.

Local officials decided who went to the poorhouse or orphanage and who would receive relief at home. Cash relief to the poor depended on local property taxes, which were limited. Also, not only did a general prejudice exist against the poor on relief, but local officials commonly discriminated against individuals applying for aid because of their race, nationality, or religion. Single mothers often found themselves in an impossible situation. If they applied for relief, they were frequently branded as morally unfit by the community. If they worked, they were criticized for neglecting their children.

In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt called a White House conference on how to best deal with the problem of poor single mothers and their children. The conference declared that preserving the family in the home was preferable to placing the poor in institutions, which were widely criticized as costly failures.

Starting with Illinois in 1911, the “mother’s pension” movement sought to provide state aid for poor fatherless children who would remain in their own homes cared for by their mothers. In effect, poor single mothers would be excused from working outside the home. Welfare reformers argued that the state pensions would also prevent juvenile delinquency since mothers would be able to supervise their children full-time.

By 1933, mother’s pension programs were operating in all but two states. They varied greatly from state to state and even from county to county within a state. In 1934, the average state grant per child was $11 a month. Administered in most cases by state juvenile courts, mother’s pensions mainly benefited families headed by white widows. These programs excluded large numbers of divorced, deserted, and minority mothers and their children.

Few private and government retirement pensions existed in the United States before the Great Depression. The prevailing view was that individuals should save for their old age or be supported by their children. About 30 states provided some welfare aid to poor elderly persons without any source of income. Local officials generally decided who deserved old-age assistance in their community.

A National Welfare System

The emphasis during the first two years of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was to provide work relief for the millions of unemployed Americans. Federal money flowed to the states to pay for public works projects, which employed the jobless. Some federal aid also directly assisted needy victims of the Depression. The states, however, remained mainly responsible for taking care of the so-called “unemployables” (widows, poor children, the elderly poor, and the disabled). But states and private charities, too, were unable to keep up the support of these people at a time when tax collections and personal giving were declining steeply.

In his State of the Union Address before Congress on January 4, 1935, President Roosevelt declared, “the time has come for action by the national government” to provide “security against the major hazards and vicissitudes [uncertainties] of life.” He went on to propose the creation of federal unemployment and old-age insurance programs. He also called for guaranteed benefits for poor single mothers and their children along with other dependent persons.

By permanently expanding federal responsibility for the security of all Americans, Roosevelt believed that the necessity for government make-work employment and other forms of Depression relief would disappear. In his address before Congress, Roosevelt argued that the continuation of government relief programs was a bad thing for the country:

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. . . .

A few months later, on August 18, 1935, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. It set up a federal retirement program for persons over 65, which was financed by a payroll tax paid jointly by employers and their workers. FDR believed that federal old-age pensions together with employer-paid unemployment insurance (also a part of the Social Security Act) would provide the economic security people needed during both good and bad times. (My highlighting and italics.)

In addition to old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, the Social Security Act established a national welfare system. The federal government guaranteed one-third of the total amount spent by states for assistance to needy and dependent children under age 16 (but not their mothers). Additional federal welfare aid was provided to destitute old people, the needy blind, and crippled children. Although financed partly by federal tax money, the states could still set their own eligibility requirements and benefit levels. This part of the law was pushed by Southern states so they could control the coverage made available to their African-American population. (Doesn’t surprise me that the South would interdict their own laws for the ‘colored peoples’. My comment as well as italics and highlighting.)

This is how welfare began as a federal government responsibility. Roosevelt and the members of Congress who wrote the welfare provisions into the Social Security Act thought that the need for federal aid to dependent children and poor old people would gradually wither away as employment improved and those over 65 began to collect Social Security pensions. But many Americans, such as farm laborers and domestic servants, were never included in the Social Security old-age retirement program. Also, since 1935, increasing divorce and father desertion rates have dramatically multiplied the number of poor single mothers with dependent children.

Since the Great Depression, the national welfare system expanded both in coverage and federal regulations. From its inception, the system drew critics. Some complained that the system did not do enough to get people to work. Others simply believed the federal government should not administer a welfare system. As the system grew, so did criticism of it, especially in the 1980s and ’90s.

In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton, a Democrat, ran for president promising to “end welfare as we know it.” In 1996, a Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed a reform law that returned most control of welfare back to the states, thus ending 61 years of federal responsibility.

For Further Reading

Burg, David F. The Great Depression, An Eyewitness History. New York: Facts on File, 1996.

Handler, Joel F. The Moral Construction of Poverty. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1991.

Just thought you’d like to know the history of an act that was meant to help people but, after time, has crippled this country financially. Also thought you should be aware of the fact that Social Security, in and of itself, was NOT intended to be the do all – end all retirement plan for anyone – yet that’s what most people believe.

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In Defense of Conservative Talk Radio

The most anti-conservative rhetoric against conservative talk radio these days is coming from supposedly free-market conservatives. It’s disgusting.Author Mark Helprin’s grenade in The Wall Street Journal stands out. Yesterday, he launched an attack on conservative radio hosts who oppose presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain. Helprin sneered that their “major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip.”

It’s one thing to hear such petty snark coming from the left. Outraged that conservative talk radio has succeeded in the marketplace while liberals have bombed, and unnerved that new media outlets have upended mainstream journalism’s monopoly apple cart, liberals have long crusaded against the medium. Bill Clinton blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on the “many loud and angry voices” in conservative talk radio that “spread hate.” Democrats continue to deride “Republican noise machines” and are working in Congress to marginalize, regulate and stifle influential talkers — most recently by threatening to reinstitute the Orwellian Fairness Doctrine.

But now, we have establishment Republicans parroting liberal ad hominem rhetoric: Talk-radio hosts are talentless blabbermouths. Their listeners are mind-numbed robots. Or, as supposed free-market conservative and McCain supporter Phil Gramm put it in his broadside against talk radio in the Washington Post last week: “They say they have principles, but some of it is their ego and power, too. They’re well-known, and they’re used to having power.”

Funny. These trash-talking GOP politicians and pundits had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to help kill Hillary Clinton’s massive government health care takeover in 1994. They had no problem when conservative talk-radio hosts used their “ego and power” to galvanize support for the Republican revolution, two Bush presidential campaigns and the war in Iraq.

In major metropolitan U.S. cities, conservative talk radio offers rare relief from liberal orthodoxy — and local talk show hosts have spearheaded effective activism. KSFO in San Francisco led the Gray Davis recall brigade. KVI in Seattle was instrumental in launching the successful fight against Hillarycare and in support of an initiative abolishing government racial preferences.

Were they nothing more than empty-talking hairdressers then?

The Republican talk-radio bashers did start having problems when many national hosts harnessed popular grassroots opposition to help kill last year’s Bush/McCain/Kennedy illegal alien amnesty bill. GOP Rep. Lindsey Graham dismissed them as “loud folks.” In other words: They were making a difference. Then-Sen. Trent Lott lamented that right-wing talk-radio hosts were a “problem.” In other words: They were effective. McCain’s defenders have made common cause with the likes of ethnocentric, open-borders groups like La Raza in redefining all conservative talk-radio opposition as unacceptable “hate” beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse.

In other words: They must be shut up. Bill Clinton approves.

Those who most stridently criticize talk radio know the least about it. It is not one monolithic bloc. Disagreements among top conservative hosts are legendary. They have different interests, varying styles, and divergent strengths and weaknesses. Do they do what they do primarily for money, ego and power? It’s an embarrassingly class-warfare-tinged cheap shot.

In any case, if you’re a true free-market conservative, it’s not supposed to be a crime to make a profit. There’s no shame in making a living by sharing information and opinions — or in meeting unmet demands in the marketplace of ideas.

I’ve done it for 16 years in the newspaper, TV and blogging businesses. And I can tell you this: Talk radio has been instrumental and invaluable in the dissemination of conservative principles. Ask any author who hasn’t been able to get a fair hearing in the national press, but who has watched his Amazon.com ratings soar after a mention by a talk-radio host. Ask any local columnist grateful for a chance to see his or her reporting receive wider attention.

Helprin accuses conservative talkers who oppose McCain of rooting for a liberal presidency because their “influence and coffers swell on discontent” and they are “nostalgic” for the Clinton years. Translation: They’re all just greedy self-promoters who care more about themselves than the good of the country. Gramm leveled the same attack: “They’re people who put their dogma in front of the interests of the country.”

Cocooned conservative establishment snobs denigrate talk-radio hosts for preaching to the choir. But these same critics have no problem using the medium to market their own work. Ask their publicists. The message of the anti-conservative conservatives dissing talk radio: Self-interest for me, but not for thee.

No need to wait for a Clinton to take the White House. Clintonism is alive and well among conservative talk-radio haters on both sides of the aisle.

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Clinton’s campaign chief backs Obama

COLUMBUS, Ohio – (AP) – The man who served as national manager of former President Clinton’s 1992 campaign plans to endorse Sen. Barack Obama, an aide to Obama said Wednesday.Obama’s campaign planned a 1 p.m. conference call Wednesday to announce the endorsement by David Wilhelm, who later became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, according to an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement would be made public later in the day.

Wilhelm planned to tell reporters that Obama can build a coalition of Democrats, independents and Republicans needed to win the general election.

Wilhelm is a superdelegate who was previously uncommitted in the race. His endorsement helps Obama in the race for delegates, in which he pulled ahead after Tuesday’s sweeps of primaries in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Clinton remains considerably ahead in superdelegates, which are party officials, elected officials and others who can vote however they choose at the nominating convention.

If the race for pledged delegates based on outcomes in caucuses and primaries across the country remains tight, superdelegates could decide the nomination.

Obama leads the delegate race with 1,224 to 1,198 to Clinton, according to the latest count by The Associated Press.

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