Notwithstanding the fact that the current Windbag-in-the-White-House, has done his very best to take self-sufficiency out of the American lexicon, and, in fact, he has been far more successful at this endeavor than at his more beneficial ones, there are bright spots.
New York City is actually proves what a failure Liberal leadership is. Here, the citys welfare system has operated efficiently and effectively in recent years.
1. "The 1996 federal welfare-reform law, which time-limited aid and imposed a work requirement on many recipients, also gave the states wide latitude in designing welfare programs.... During their tenures, Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg not only reduced the welfare rolls; they transformed the nations capital of welfare dependency into a center of welfare reform founded on an ethos of personal responsibility.
[Obama has destroyed that 1996 reform, no longer requiring work...]
2. .... remember the costly misery of the pre-reform era.... irrational excess. The federal War on Poverty had flooded the city with social-services money to help the poor, and John Lindsay, who became mayor in 1966, enthusiastically spent it .... Lindsays first commissioner of social services, Mitchell GinsbergCome-and-Get-It Ginsberg, as the Daily News dubbed him.
3. ... welfare-rights advocates took him at his word. They scoured New York for potential recipients, held sit-ins, and issued ultimatums for even more government welfare money and fewer restrictions on getting it... Activist lawyers and liberal judges dilutedand, in some cases, overturnedrules that had kept the welfare rolls from dramatically expanding in the past.... The number of New Yorkers on welfare doubled during Lindsays mayoralty.
[Of course, this President is the national John Lindsay...his ads suggest parties to enroll recipients]
4. .... welfare explosion reflected a striking shift in social attitudes. Until then, the poor had come to New York to improve their lot. Some might need public or private aid, but to receive it was evidence of failure, even a reason for shame. The Roosevelt administration had intended the main federal welfare program, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), to be merely a temporary way for abandoned and widowed women with children to counter the severe hardship of the Great Depression.
Even so, FDR worried that the program could become a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit that sapped individual initiative.
[Obama's pride is that under him, more are on food stamps than work full-time in America]
5. ... the government found itself supporting unmarried mothers, just as husbands supported their wives. One of the few to grasp the danger of this trend was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose 1965 report "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" pointed out that 24 percent of black children were being born to unmarried mothers. But woe to anyone who warned of the social and financial ills that so many single-mother families might cause, as Moynihan discovered when cries of racism and sexism greeted the reports release.
6. Liberals mocked conservatives for their denunciations of welfare queenspoor mothers who purportedly drove Cadillacs to the welfare office to pick up government checks.
But in New York City, fraud was endemic and often egregious enough to be tabloid-worthy.... a woman who cashed welfare checks under 15 different names and for 73 fictitious children, reportedly collecting $450,000 between 1987 and 1995....
welfare recipients in Newark found 23 percent of them double-dipping into New York City funds....
a list of students enrolled at the City University of New York, the HRA was stunned to find that 12,000 of them were on welfareincluding 5,000 claiming to be too sick to work.
7. ....Giuliani dismissed the commonplace left-liberal view that low-wage jobs demeaned the workers who took them. Just the opposite: Dignity and hope . . . can be found in a job, the very best social program there is.
Giulianis philosophy was grounded in a very American optimism about individual initiative and personal responsibility....described the administrations belief that work and self-reliance are . . . something individuals must achieve with their own efforts with the help and support of government, contrasting that philosophy with the advocates contention that the circumstances of the poor were determined by vast forces beyond their control.
8. Giuliani made four major reforms to the citys welfare system. First, recognizing that fraud was extensive, he required recipients to identify themselves on fingerprint scanners, and he instituted home visits to verify the information on application forms.
Giuliani also refused to believe, as the advocates did, that most welfare recipients needed training before they could find respectable jobs and that many were unable to work at all. Instead, he operated under the assumption that what prevented the urban poor from finding work was welfare itself, which isolated them from mainstream life. To break that isolation, he insisted on a new work-first ethos for the welfare system: except for those with extreme disabilities, everyone, including mothers of young children, would have to work in exchange for temporary government help. Giuliani proceeded to strengthen the loosely enforced Work Experience Program, or workfare, as everyone soon called it, which required recipients to work in city parks or offices in exchange for benefits.
A third reform, led by the enterprising Turner, transformed the welfare bureaucracy so that it constantly emphasized work. Welfare offices became Job Centers, and caseworkers directed applicants to vendors specializing in finding employment for them.
That led to Giulianis final reform: paying these vendors not for the number of people they served but for the number who found jobs and kept them for at least three months.
9. These changes had dramatic effects. By the end of Giulianis second term, the welfare rolls had shrunk by 650,000 people. Just between 1996 and 2000, the share of single mothers who were in the citys labor force grew from 16 percent to 42 percent. And the decline in overall poverty rates outpaced that of the rest of the country, giving the lie to those who had prophesied Dickensian horrors."
CJ Mobile: Saving Welfare Reform
Look at where we are now.
Look at who the President is.
New York City is actually proves what a failure Liberal leadership is. Here, the citys welfare system has operated efficiently and effectively in recent years.
1. "The 1996 federal welfare-reform law, which time-limited aid and imposed a work requirement on many recipients, also gave the states wide latitude in designing welfare programs.... During their tenures, Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg not only reduced the welfare rolls; they transformed the nations capital of welfare dependency into a center of welfare reform founded on an ethos of personal responsibility.
[Obama has destroyed that 1996 reform, no longer requiring work...]
2. .... remember the costly misery of the pre-reform era.... irrational excess. The federal War on Poverty had flooded the city with social-services money to help the poor, and John Lindsay, who became mayor in 1966, enthusiastically spent it .... Lindsays first commissioner of social services, Mitchell GinsbergCome-and-Get-It Ginsberg, as the Daily News dubbed him.
3. ... welfare-rights advocates took him at his word. They scoured New York for potential recipients, held sit-ins, and issued ultimatums for even more government welfare money and fewer restrictions on getting it... Activist lawyers and liberal judges dilutedand, in some cases, overturnedrules that had kept the welfare rolls from dramatically expanding in the past.... The number of New Yorkers on welfare doubled during Lindsays mayoralty.
[Of course, this President is the national John Lindsay...his ads suggest parties to enroll recipients]
4. .... welfare explosion reflected a striking shift in social attitudes. Until then, the poor had come to New York to improve their lot. Some might need public or private aid, but to receive it was evidence of failure, even a reason for shame. The Roosevelt administration had intended the main federal welfare program, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), to be merely a temporary way for abandoned and widowed women with children to counter the severe hardship of the Great Depression.
Even so, FDR worried that the program could become a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit that sapped individual initiative.
[Obama's pride is that under him, more are on food stamps than work full-time in America]
5. ... the government found itself supporting unmarried mothers, just as husbands supported their wives. One of the few to grasp the danger of this trend was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose 1965 report "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" pointed out that 24 percent of black children were being born to unmarried mothers. But woe to anyone who warned of the social and financial ills that so many single-mother families might cause, as Moynihan discovered when cries of racism and sexism greeted the reports release.
6. Liberals mocked conservatives for their denunciations of welfare queenspoor mothers who purportedly drove Cadillacs to the welfare office to pick up government checks.
But in New York City, fraud was endemic and often egregious enough to be tabloid-worthy.... a woman who cashed welfare checks under 15 different names and for 73 fictitious children, reportedly collecting $450,000 between 1987 and 1995....
welfare recipients in Newark found 23 percent of them double-dipping into New York City funds....
a list of students enrolled at the City University of New York, the HRA was stunned to find that 12,000 of them were on welfareincluding 5,000 claiming to be too sick to work.
7. ....Giuliani dismissed the commonplace left-liberal view that low-wage jobs demeaned the workers who took them. Just the opposite: Dignity and hope . . . can be found in a job, the very best social program there is.
Giulianis philosophy was grounded in a very American optimism about individual initiative and personal responsibility....described the administrations belief that work and self-reliance are . . . something individuals must achieve with their own efforts with the help and support of government, contrasting that philosophy with the advocates contention that the circumstances of the poor were determined by vast forces beyond their control.
8. Giuliani made four major reforms to the citys welfare system. First, recognizing that fraud was extensive, he required recipients to identify themselves on fingerprint scanners, and he instituted home visits to verify the information on application forms.
Giuliani also refused to believe, as the advocates did, that most welfare recipients needed training before they could find respectable jobs and that many were unable to work at all. Instead, he operated under the assumption that what prevented the urban poor from finding work was welfare itself, which isolated them from mainstream life. To break that isolation, he insisted on a new work-first ethos for the welfare system: except for those with extreme disabilities, everyone, including mothers of young children, would have to work in exchange for temporary government help. Giuliani proceeded to strengthen the loosely enforced Work Experience Program, or workfare, as everyone soon called it, which required recipients to work in city parks or offices in exchange for benefits.
A third reform, led by the enterprising Turner, transformed the welfare bureaucracy so that it constantly emphasized work. Welfare offices became Job Centers, and caseworkers directed applicants to vendors specializing in finding employment for them.
That led to Giulianis final reform: paying these vendors not for the number of people they served but for the number who found jobs and kept them for at least three months.
9. These changes had dramatic effects. By the end of Giulianis second term, the welfare rolls had shrunk by 650,000 people. Just between 1996 and 2000, the share of single mothers who were in the citys labor force grew from 16 percent to 42 percent. And the decline in overall poverty rates outpaced that of the rest of the country, giving the lie to those who had prophesied Dickensian horrors."
CJ Mobile: Saving Welfare Reform
Look at where we are now.
Look at who the President is.
