Over at the main page, LithiumCola points out that Pieter Beinart is a fool. I would like to stress one point. Beinart wrote
"Older liberals remember .... They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn't happen."
Oh didn't it ?
Try telling it to the severely poor
Beinart is a lazy fool, as I argue after the jump.
I'm afraid Mr Beinart will be down to one example soon. The welfare reform was promptly followed by an amazing boom which no one predicted. Then he lost interest in the issue. Beinart decided that, since poor people did OK in the late 90s, welfare reform was a good idea.
What happened with welfare reform and without an extraordinary boom ? The number of Americans in "severe poverty" grew 26% from 2000 to 2005, that's what happened. "Severe poverty" is severe, "A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005."
So welfare reform worked great didn't it ? Now one might argue that the problem was that the economy was horribly bad from 2000 to 2005 (and the comparison is with 2000 not 1996) however the 2005 severe poverty rate was the highest in 32 years including the severe recession in 1982. The immense severe poverty rate was achieved with moderate unemployment.
All data from this McClatchy article
Beinart only concludes that welfare reform wasn't a disaster, because he only paid attention to what was happening to the poor for a few extraordinary years.