Welfare Reform: Two Decades of Success
Did the 1996 law throw 3.5 million American children into third-world poverty? No.
By Robert Rector — August 17, 2016
Two decades ago, on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a landmark welfare-reform bill (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act) into law. At the time, liberals proclaimed that the bill would slash the incomes of one fifth of American families with children and push 2.6 million people into poverty. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) famously predicted the bill would leave children scavenging in the streets, “sleeping on grates, picked up in the morning frozen.”
In reality, welfare reform cut welfare caseloads by over 50 percent. Employment of the least skilled single mothers surged, and the poverty rates of black children and single-parent families rapidly dropped to historic lows. Doomsday prophets were discredited, and welfare reform has remained enduringly popular.
Recently, however, Moynihan’s wail about “children sleeping on grates” has been revived. The Left now contends that welfare reform has thrown 3.5 million children into “extreme” third-world-style poverty, living on two dollars per day. This remarkable claim is quickly becoming liberal orthodoxy. The Washington Post and the New York Times have promoted it. Bloomberg News breathlessly informs readers that millions of Americans now have incomes lower than the “disabled beggars of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.”
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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/439075/print
