I wonder what Ms. Murillo’s boyfriend will think if he ever sees the following printed in the pages of the New York Times:
Esmeralda Murillo, a 21-year-old mother of two, lost her welfare check, landed in a shelter and then returned to a boyfriend whose violent temper had driven her away. “You don’t know who to turn to,” she said.
I figure he’ll beat her up or throw her out. Or, maybe, first the one and then the other. Maybe she will then join the many women struggling to feed their kids by shoplifting, selling their food stamps and relying on school lunches to feed their kids, donating pint after pint of blood, diving in dumpsters, or just going hungry.
What’s the conservatives’ answer for Ms. Murillo? That she should have chosen better boyfriends or a more reliable husband? What if something bad happens to her or her kids? Are they going to wish they’d let her collect some aid so she could keep her family safe? Are they going to say “tough luck, she and her kids got what they deserved”?
Is this what they want? Women shacking up with abusive men just to get their kids off the street?
Because this is the kind of thing that is happening all over this country. People are being forced into dangerous situations. They are resorting to crime. And, in fairness, this all started with Bill Clinton:
Critics of the stringent system say stories like these vindicate warnings they made in 1996 when President Bill Clinton fulfilled his pledge to “end welfare as we know it”: the revamped law encourages states to withhold aid, especially when the economy turns bad.
The old program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, dates from the New Deal; it gave states unlimited matching funds and offered poor families extensive rights, with few requirements and no time limits. The new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, created time limits and work rules, capped federal spending and allowed states to turn poor families away.
“My take on it was the states would push people off and not let them back on, and that’s just what they did,” said Peter B. Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the law. “It’s been even worse than I thought it would be.”
I’m not arguing that Aid to Families with Dependent Children didn’t need an overhaul. It needed to fix its incentive system and focus more on getting people back to work. But, as might be expected when dealing with Newt Gingrich’s Republicans, no decent and humane bill was on offer. Clinton vetoed the worst bills and signed the best one he could get. Then he told us he would fix the biggest problems with the bill later. That still has not happened.
Welfare Reform looked like it was working surprisingly well for a long time because the economy boomed in the years immediately after the law was enacted. Everyone patted themselves on the back. But you can’t judge anti-poverty measures by how they work in boom times. You have to see how they work when unemployment is high and the federal and state governments are feeling a budget pinch. And, right now, we have a lot of people who are just destitute. And there are millions of kids who are paying the price for an ethic of tough love.
I don’t think anyone has a concept of the “crime” wave we are about to see. Desperation breeds all kinds of behavior, most of which is opportunistic.
Nah, there’s data on this. The crime rate continues to decline nationwide, despite the recession and the bifurcated recovery.
Also, too, I disagree with Booman that there ever existed a halcyon time in America where a person called “Esmeralda Murillo” was ever treated especially decently by this country’s government and its institutions. I don’t think “we used to be better than this” at all. I think women have always faced an often indifferent fate.
I can’t figure out how the NYT can front page a piece like this with one breath, and then be a rabid austerity proponent with the next, but I can’t say I’m surprised by it either. A lot needs to change across all our relevant institutions before problems like these actually get fixed, rather than just talked about sadly.
I don’t think the claim is that there was a time it was good to be out of work, etc., or that working-class people have ever been held in high regard by this country’s institutions broadly put. But by the time you got to the Great Society, there was a lot in place that really was good for people, and assumed a basic human dignity. That really did change beginning with Reagan and peaking (I might argue for the social policies) with Clinton.
There were a lot of great, microscopic policies in the Great Society that nobody remembers because LBJ escalated the Vietnam War.
I agree there was never a halcyon time when we were all racially enlightened and eager to give our tax dollars away. But there used to be a national consensus that women with children shouldn’t be dumpster diving.
You know they will say just that.
We know what conservatives will say: Government can’t force individuals to make good decisions.
And the programs that were touted as doing short-term good for Ms. Murillo actually did their recipients long-term harm by promoting a culture of perpetual dependence and making us expect the government to do the kinds of charitable work that we should be doing ourselves.
Liberals have had decades to address this argument convincingly and we’ve failed. We lost our credibility on this issue and haven’t done much to get it back.
Tough love? Please. There’s no love or decency involved here. There’s no way the righties won’t say exactly what they’ve always said: Bullshit about “personal responsibility”, meaning impunity for the corporate/financial crooks and pain and death for the rest.
“Welfare reform” is one of several reasons I can’t join the Democratic adulation for Clinton. To me, he’s final proof that we can’t count on the Dem party to save us. It can’t seem do much better these days than holding than sometimes not letting it get much worse.
The ACA will have thousands of Ms. Murillos, and everything that Booman wrote about welfare reform will be said about health care insurance reform in a few years. We’re also never going to persuade anyone to support our policies if we accuse them of being morally corrupt. Most of the people who supported welfare reform should be our natural allies based on their economic interests.
I can’t for the life of me see how the ACA is going to throw more people on the street than would be if there were no reform at all. Nor can I see any way it is equivalent in substance or spirit to Clinton’s welfare reform, so-called.
The President compromises, and the critique may be that he does so too easily, but that’s a difficult one to prove because there is no actually-existing alternative. Obama is by his own emphatic insistence a creature of the system, but he’s not simply a tool of it. Politically, there’s no great destination at which to arrive, only, rather, momentum this way or that. Momentum under Obama is going decidedly in a good direction. People are going to get covered under this thing who would not otherwise be.
I was thinking of the dynamics of the legislative process:
One could argue that by Clinton’s taking the initiative, we ended up with a better deal than we would have done if Republicans had defined the starting point. Or we could argue that capitulation as the first move made a progressive shift on the issue all but impossible. In either case, I see an analogy with the ACA (the Republican proposal for health insurance reform that was too right wing for Clinton).
We’ll see what happens. GOP’ers are busy gutting Medicaid at the state level. How is it going to cover more people when the ACA totally kicks in?
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Coming across some sensible analysis of America’s woes, those responsible and deep-rooted causes. Yes, the failed political system of Congress in Washington is a focal point where investments (and companies and jobs) go.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Niall Ferguson? Really? That racist POS?
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Interesting, I came across this Bloomberg video and he made some balanced remarks how US corporations discard labor and destroys the economy. Makes the point US education is below par, doesn’t provide skilled laborers and points to a failed political system in Washington. I didn’t hear him imply it was Obama’s fault or the Democrats. He does have all the elitism of geing tutored at British private schools. He has been attacked for his views on the British empire, rewriting history. I wasn’t aware he divorced his first wife Susan Douglas and the racist has married Ayaan Hirsi Ali, my favorite Dutch Somalian refugee. Must be a new strange outing as neo-racism.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."It isn’t that we used to be better than this. The American system was built on inherent inequality. Some groups were ALWAYS excluded from the national pie & full citizenship rights — slavery, Jim Crow, Social security only passed after FDR excluded mostly minorities, farm workers, etc; Medicare pegged the eligibility age at 65 at a time when minorities had a lower lifespan.
The only reason it seems really shocking today is that the plutocrats have decided to ditch the pretense and dismantle the COMMONWEAL wholesale, damn whoever gets screwed. A very sobering comment on Jonathan Cohn’s website on April 5 sums it up for me:
“today’s America is very different from yesterday’s: (1) we are ethnically, economically, religiously, and every otherly way a much more diverse nation, so my tribe is much less likely to be your tribe, making me less willing to pay taxes to support public benefits that most likely will go to members of another tribe, and (2) we are in an economic decline rather than an economic ascent, making me less inclined to be charitable to the less fortunate, who are likely to be members of another tribe anyway. Republicans understand this change, and they use it to their advantage.”
I’m with Bazooka Joe. I think a big difference is the feminist movement, which empowered women to try and be independent. Before it wasn’t the government that helped, they just sucked up the abuse because, “Where else am I going to go?”
It’s a bit of a tangent, but Santorum said: “It didn’t just cut the rolls, but it saved lives; giving the poor something dependency doesn’t give: hope.” I don’t know how many of you have read The Hunger Games, but it’s interesting that Eric Bolling found it to be a conservative message. Aside from the fact that the author explicitly stated she wrote it in protest of the Iraq War, President Snow (the dictator) says, “Hope, is the only thing stronger than fear.”
So fuck you, Rick Santorum.
There are a lot of single mothers out there trying to get by on not enough money, thats for sure. How to raise a family and work at the same time? No wonder many are at their wits end. I suppose many rely on relatives to help out with the children while they work. What about those with no reliable relatives? Vouchers for decent day care might be one approach. What about a collective approach– pairing up willing single parent families in order to share the load — call them super-families. Someone should start a “Match.com” website to help poor single-parent families make the connection. I wonder if something like this could help? The government need not even be involved, although a little government cash could help grease the wheels… It could be run by churches or other civic minded private groups.
Yep. After universal health care, we need universal day care. But shit, we can barely protect universal k-12 education at the rate we’re going.