Along with knowing that when Bernie Sanders says thinks like “the middle class of this country, over the last forty years, has been disappearing,” he is speaking truthfully and on my behalf, one flip side of Sanders economic progressivism is this fact about Hillary Clinton; she supported, and continues to support, a deeply flawed so called reform bill on welfare that her husband signed into law in 1996, which happened to be an election year.
And in the time since, actually in the time preceding the Clinton years since, we have seen little more than a growing class divide and an ever more asphyxiating squeezing of the middle class, all of which is shown here.
But specifically, as far as the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), as Alejandra Marchevsky and Jeanne Theoharis in the Nation remind us,
...study after study has shown that it has severely harmed poor families, and driven a historic number of black and Latino children into deep poverty.
Said authors also understand, as I do, that this bill was largely driven by politics and by a desire to gain votes by demonizing welfare, writing that the Clintons
designed a strategy to lure white voters back to the Democratic Party: capitalize on white disgust toward “dependent” black and Latina mothers on welfare within a liberal veneer that promised them a “hand-up, rather than a handout.”
Hillary also took an active role in cheerleading for this bill, as the authors, correctly, point out. And at the end of the day, the problems of poverty that the welfare system was intended to alleviate were not only not solved, they were compounded. Here is part of their analysis.
Yet, nearly two decades after the Clintons helped make PRWORA the law of the land, welfare reform remains a defining “antipoverty” policy—one that urgently needs to be discussed. Its legacy still ripples through the country, where families remain as poor as—or, in many cases, poorer than—before, but with one crucial difference: Today, the “reformed” welfare system provides little safety net, and no hand-up. Instead, it traps poor mothers into exploitative, poverty-wage jobs and dangerous personal situations, deters them from college, and contributes to the growing trend of poor mothers who can neither find a job nor access public assistance. It is our failed social policy—not simply the recession—that is responsible for crisis-level poverty in the United States.
And as for Hillary’s role, these two paragraphs are very much worth quoting.
No mere bystander, Hillary Clinton played an active role in the lead-up to welfare reform, advocating “harsher polices like ending traditional welfare,” as journalist (and Nation contributor) Liza Featherstone writes, “even as others in the administration, like Labor Secretary Robert Reich, proposed alternatives.” Indeed, in 1997 Clinton took credit for pushing for a welfare bill that would more closely monitor and punish women’s “poor parenting” behavior: “I’ve advocated tying the welfare payment to certain behavior about being a good parent. You couldn’t get your welfare check if your child wasn’t immunized. You couldn’t get your welfare check if you didn’t participate in a parenting program. You couldn’t get your check if you didn’t show up for student-teacher conferences.”
It bears mentioning that Hillary Clinton’s stereotypical welfare mother differed from Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen.” In Clinton’s version, reminiscent of Progressive-era uplift programs, poor women are deficient mothers who need “discipline” and “training” from tough yet beneficent politicians like her.
With history like this, I have a very hard time taking seriously the usual listing of pro-Hillary talking points about her being a champion for the poor, particularly poor women and children. As others have said, “if she wants to be the candidate who champions the needs of vulnerable Americans, of those at the bottom of the economy instead of the top, of people of color and mothers and children, then she’s going to have to wrestle with another legacy of her husband’s that, at least at one time, had her support: welfare reform.”
In the meantime, here is a reaction to the legacy of the welfare bill by Bernie Sanders, a reaction that is analyzed and found to be largely true.
One thing that sets Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders apart from opponent Hillary Clinton is that he opposed a 1996 law known widely as welfare reform.
The Vermont senator said the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which both Democratic President Bill Clinton and a bipartisan Congress supported, contributed to poverty today.
"What welfare reform did, in my view, was go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country," Sanders said at a Feb. 24 press conference in South Carolina. "During that time, I spoke out against so-called welfare reform because I thought it was scapegoating people who were helpless, people who were very, very vulnerable. Secretary Clinton at that time had a very different position on welfare reform. ... Now what happened as a result of that so-called welfare reform bill? Since legislation was signed into law, the number of families living in extreme poverty has more than doubled from 636,000 to 1.6 million."