Obama Is Gutting Welfare Reform

 Currently, Obama and his people are touting this Romney ad as being a complete lie:



But, is it?


In 1995, before welfare was reformed, there was nearly 10 million individuals and their families receiving  checks.  Back then, all you needed to do to stay on welfare was to go to your local welfare office and tell them that you have been looking for work.  Because of that simple requirement, this country literally created a "permanent" and "growing" class of welfare recipients.  But, in 1996, welfare was replaced with TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families); signed into law by Bill Clinton.  With that, the rolls started to shrink.  Today, there are just about half as many welfare recipients as there were in 1995.  To put that into a better perspective, it is estimated that, by now, the welfare rolls would have been more than triple without the TANF reform.

Key to the success of TANF was the "working requirement" of the law.  If a job was available, you had to take it in order to receive payments, and, acceptable jobs were clearly defined in the law. This became a wake-up call for those who would otherwise prefer to stay on welfare.   Logically, people started looking for work on their own because, if they were going to have to work anyway, they wanted a decent job with decent pay.

Now zoom forward to the Obama Administration.  Using his assumed executive power to do so, Obama had his Health and Human Services (HHS) department send a letter to the states advising them that they could seek waivers on what had been clearly defined as "work" in the original law.  With those waivers, states could fall back on the old "looking for work" as a standard for receiving welfare assistance.  Here's the exact words in that HHS letter that actually does that:

"...job search/readiness programs count toward participation rates..."

In essence, those words gut the law and return welfare back to the system that was in place in 1995, and, Romney is right to expose it as doing so.  In theory, and under what HHS has said, something like dieting could be easily defined as a "job search/readiness" program.  And, believe me, liberal states like California or New York just might do something like that.  Especially, if liberal politicians think they can secure votes in doing so.

Here's the HHS letter: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/policy/im-ofa/2012/im201203/im201203.html#