When Bill Clinton ran for president
in 1992, he passionately pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” In television
advertisements and in campaign rallies, Governor Clinton extolled, “welfare
must be a second chance, not a way of life.” [1]
An astute political observer and learned student of history, Clinton was well
aware of the unpopular perceptions of welfare recipients and he devoured wonky,
detailed studies of the welfare system. [2]
His appeal for reform was popular enough
to aid him in his election victory but he also genuinely believed the welfare
system was ineffective, demoralizing, and badly in need of restructuring.
Eventually, after vetoing two versions of
welfare reform legislation, President Clinton signed a welfare-to-work law in
July 1996 that ended welfare as an entitlement program and created a
block-grant program named Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). [3]
Nearly two decades later, the outcome of the law is mixed. On the one hand, the
law was arguably successful in boosting resources for job training and some
assistance for children and, in the short term, reducing welfare rolls while increasing
employment. On the other hand, TANF did not provide a sufficient safety net for
low-income families in the event of a recession, the law underfunded childcare,
and its work requirements, though somewhat flexible, were convoluted for many
states.
President Clinton’s fervent desire
to tackle welfare reform arose out of a widespread perception among members of
the electorate that welfare encouraged a culture of dependency. It was a concern
shared by Clinton, who said at the time of signing the 1996 bill, “a long time
ago, I concluded that the current welfare system undermines the basic values of
work, responsibility, and family, trapping generation after generation in
dependency.” [4]
A student of public policy and of the history of American domestic social
policy, Clinton was well versed in policy proposals such as those offered by
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued for an overhaul of the welfare
system in the late 1960s because he believed it contributed to the decline of
family integration and increased dependency. [5]
However, Clinton was also incredibly informed regarding the politics of
welfare. It was a lightning rod political issue that aided Ronald Reagan’s
ascension to the presidency and the rise of the conservative movement, which
capitalized on middle class Americans’ economic insecurity to stoke their fears
regarding low-income individuals. Public opinion polling at the time of
Reagan’s election in 1980 indicated rising public opposition to liberal
government activism. [6]
More than a decade later, a month after Republicans regained control of
Congress in Clinton’s second year in office, 56 percent of Americans told
pollsters “the welfare system does more harm than good because…it discourages
work.” [7]
The political and policy realities
heavily weighed on Clinton, a deficit hawk as president who was also concerned
about the roughly $14 billion annual cost of AFDC benefits. [8]
However, for millions of Americans, welfare as they knew it, or Aid to Families
with Dependent Children (AFDC), was literally a lifeline. According to a Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis, in 1995, AFDC “lifted 62 percent of
children - 2,210,000 million, in total –
out of poverty who otherwise would have been in deep poverty.” [9]
Further, a sizable 63 percent of the populace indicated they would only support
ending welfare benefits for Americans if they could get “decent jobs” and “job
training and education” in the transition. [10]
Liberal advocates for the poor, the leaders of the Children’s Defense Fund, and
even Senator Moynihan were deeply worried that a Republican Congress was not
interested in ensuring that enough children would be protected by the law or
that the transition to work – in the form of job training and child care –
would have adequate resources. It is partly for these reasons that Clinton
vetoed the first two welfare reform bills sent to him by Congress. [11]
Though he favored welfare reform, and
deeply disappointed his fellow moderate New Democrats when he did not pursue it
in his first two years in office, he desperately wanted to receive a bill he
could sign. For some in his administration and even in Clinton’s own thinking,
the third bill sent to him was not entirely satisfactory either. [12]
That is in large part because it contained a provision banning aid to documented immigrants. Eventually, Clinton though made the judgment that this
opportunity was the last, best chance he had to significantly restructure
welfare in America – a core priority of his domestic agenda – and his political
advisers convincingly persuaded him it would aid his reelection bid. On August 22,
1996, Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Act (PRWORA), which abolished AFDC and created the new program, Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families (TANF). [13]
The mission of this new program, as
outlined by Clinton, was to transform welfare into “workfare,” a term used by
then-Senator Joseph R. Biden in the debate on welfare reform in the Senate
floor prior to its passage. [14]
Although liberal Democratic members of Congress, such as Senator Edward M.
Kennedy, chastised Clinton for ostensibly turning his back on the poor, the
president insisted his intentions were pure. [15]
From Clinton’s perspective, “welfare is hurting the people it was designed to
help.” [16] Further, according to public policy professor
and welfare expert Robert Stoker, there were more specific goals that were part
of this change too. “[The idea was to] end dependency on government benefits,
encourage self-sufficiency,” Stoker said, “[and to] reduce out-of-wedlock
pregnancy…[and] encourage the formation of two-parent families,” ideas that
arose out of Moynihan’s studies linking welfare to the “disintegration of the
family.” [17]
Indeed, the law eliminated welfare as an entitlement enforceable in federal
court, which is what AFDC was, and transformed it into a more state-based,
stricter program. The changes, while significant in that they truly did “end
welfare as we know it,” were not radical given that the Reagan administration
had set in motion policies that both heightened the work requirement aspect of
welfare and led to 42 states, by 1996, establishing waiver programs that
weakened the entitlement component of AFDC. [18]
Nevertheless, the PROWRA was consequential in that it was a fundamental shift
from the assurance of welfare as a federal guarantee to a block-granted, more
fiscally conservative program.
At its core, TANF is an assistance and
welfare-to-work program that provides block grants (grants that are not
terribly restrictive but feature broad aims) to states and in turn, states have
wide flexibility to determine the administration of benefits, though their
plans must be federally approved. This assistance today is typically on average
$400 a month though the amount varies state by state. [19]
However, in order to receive such assistance, adult recipients of TANF are
required to seek work. Recipients
must be engaged in a gainful “work-related activity” within 24 months or less
of receiving assistance – or risk losing their benefits – with a lifetime limit
of 60 months of benefits being in place. [20]
“Under welfare reform,” Molly Ball of The
Atlantic explained, “to get their block grants of federal TANF money,
states must show that 50 percent of welfare-receiving families – and 90 percent
of two-parent families – are involved in work activities.” In this arena,
states also were granted significant power as they had the ability to reduce the
time limit to below 24 months and could utilize “block grants in any way they
wish to accomplish the goals of welfare reform,” as Stoker described it. [21]
With regards to the work requirement, though discretion was granted towards
states, services like preparations for job interviews, community college
classes, and GED programs, in many cases, counted towards this requirement. [22]
TANF also incorporated what was deemed the “maintenance of effort requirement.”
According to welfare policy expert Mark Greenberg, “[this] requirement [was]
that a state must spend at least a specified amount of state funds for benefits
and services for members of needy families each year.” The maintenance of
effort requirement –financed by what are called “separate state cash assistance
programs” – is distinct in that it is separable from TANF funds and thus “not
subject to federal work requirements” but integral to the law’s ostensible
promise to provide sufficient resources for low-income families. [23]
In terms of the eligibility for receiving
TANF, much of the criteria – beyond the aspect of a requirement to look for work
or work-related activities – is in the power of a welfare caseworker. However,
more broadly, being an “able-bodied poor person with children to support” or
being a “poor pregnant woman” generally permits one to receive TANF. Numerous
categories of individuals are barred from TANF though, including even documented immigrants who are in the United States for less than five years, convicted
drug offenders, and, importantly, “people who refuse to cooperate with child support
enforcement.” [24]
This latter category is crucial to the law given that one of the welfare reform
law’s most critical aims was to crack down on so-called “deadbeat dads," as they were commonly referred to in the contemporary political lexicon, and to more
strictly enforce child support. It is for this reason that the law includes requirements
that states determine goals for “reducing illegitimacy,” that unmarried teen
high school drop-outs be barred from TANF benefits, that states establish
robust child support enforcement mechanisms that mandate that a mother provide
the name of the biological father of a child getting benefits, and that funding
for childcare be boosted at the outset. [25]
With regards to assisting welfare
recipients in seeking and gaining work, the PRWORA repealed the Job
Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) Training Program, created in the Family
Support Act of 1988, and led to the establishment of Welfare-to-Work Grants,
initially authorized in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. [26]
These grants, initially estimated at $3 billion, are provided by the U.S.
Department of Labor to various community organizations and local entities in
municipalities across the country to assist welfare recipients in finding and
staying in work. “Competitive grants,” per the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, “can be awarded to private industry councils, local governments
(i.e. cities and counties), or nonprofit organizations.” [27]As
the PRWORA outlines, the work-related activities that TANF recipients must
partake in can vary greatly, including efforts to obtain a GED or graduate from
community college or skills courses. [28]
In fact, the Welfare-to-Work Grants can legally finance a variety of forms of
assistance for welfare recipients, including, “publicly funded jobs and other
wage subsidies, on-the-job training, job readiness or job placement and
education and training services, job vouchers, unpaid community service or work
experience programs, and job retention and supportive services, including
transportation,” according to the Department of Labor. [29]
These federal grants though coexist with a certain degree of discretion for
states as states, according to the analysis of Professor Stoker, “can establish
conditions and requirements for ‘individual responsibility plans’ linked to
TANF assistance.” [30]
Further, states can even partner with charitable, religious, and other private
sector organizations to aid TANF recipients in becoming part of a community
workforce. [31]
Many of these specific components of the
PROWRA were not explicit recommendations of President Clinton or the Democratic caucus in
Congress though Clinton and many Democrats ultimately embraced the
law. Indeed, much of the details of the law were established by the
then-Speaker of the House, Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich from Georgia. Indeed,
it was Gingrich who masterminded basing the law’s block grant formula on the
welfare caseload levels for AFDC and JOBS at 1994 levels – the year when “state
case workloads hit their peak.” [32]
Capping the block grant distribution formula at the highest caseload level was
no mistake on the part of this rabid conservative GOP leader. “Gingrich
understood he would eventually prevail in the battle to reduce welfare as a
proportion of our GDP and as a proportion of our government,” Professor Stoker
asserted, “[so] the idea [was] to cap expenditures at that level to get the
support of governors to implement the law and to let it all be controlled by
inflation.” [33]
Therefore, as Stoker noted, “nobody has to ever vote in favor of cutting
welfare” and states were thus given block grants that were quite high in
monetary value for recipients. [34]
However, the caseload cap was lowered to 2005 levels, and work requirements
were strengthened, in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, signed into law by
President George W. Bush. [35]
Four years later, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), an economic stimulus package signed into law by
President Barack Obama, neutered much of Bush’s law and instead created a TANF
emergency contingency fund that boosted federal support for the poor. [36]
Prior to Bush and Obama revising the law
though, it was Bill Clinton who actually set it into motion. Though Clinton
campaigned on reforming the welfare system, the decision on whether to sign or
veto the PROWRA was actually not an easy one for him. At one point, while
questioning advisers on whether he should give the bill his stamp of approval, President Clinton even said, “this is a decent welfare bill wrapped in a sack of shit.” [37]
Given that Clinton’s arch political nemesis in the Republican Party,
Speaker Gingrich, took the lead on crafting a welfare reform bill, it was
obvious Clinton had misgivings. Even when he announced his intention to sign
the bill into law, Clinton acknowledged “serious flaws” in the legislation. [38]
The disagreements between Clinton and the GOP were vivid. “Clinton believed
overhauling the welfare system…required lots of new money at the outset to help
recipients with job training and child care,” author John F. Harris noted,
“[but] Republicans resisted this…[leading] Clinton to veto [two] bills labeled
welfare reform.” [39]
Further, Clinton found the eventual law’s effective ban on documented immigrants
receiving welfare as being “unconscionable” and believed the GOP’s inclusion of
a “provision to eliminate nutrition supplements for low-income working
families” to be “ugly.” [40]
It was partly because of this latter provision that Clinton was deeply
concerned the final bill was not sufficiently supportive of care for children.
“He did not want,” wrote Taylor Branch, who extensively interviewed Clinton
over the course of his presidency, “any lasting effect of his presidency to
hurt children.” [41]
Advisers such as Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and several officials in the
Health and Human Services Department, including Peter Edelman, the husband of Children’s
Defense Fund head Marian Wright Edelman, strongly urged Clinton against signing
the final bill because it would be too painful for poor families. [42]
However, Clinton understood that this law
was his final, realistic chance at changing the welfare system the way he
promised he would and though he insisted privately he would be safe politically
either way, there is no doubt presidential election year politics played some
role. [43]
In fact, Clinton even told his then-political adviser Dick Morris, “I signed
the bill because I trusted you,” after Morris showed Clinton that his lead
against Republican nominee Bob Dole, the GOP Senate majority leader who advanced the bill in his chamber, would increase if he signed the bill. [44]
Nevertheless, Clinton’s experience and his studies of the welfare system
informed his final call to sign PROWRA. “The president’s welfare
audiences…pulsed with the…yearning for dignified work,” Taylor Branch wrote,
“[and he believed] nobody hated welfare more than the people on it.” [45]
Clinton also believed he could potentially overturn the worst parts of the law
after his reelection but on whole, he genuinely concluded that the law
“balanced work requirements with practical measures to foster opportunity from
hardship.” [46]
Clinton did not want to “leave the poor to their own devices,” as John Harris
describes it, but he thought the final bill would not necessarily do that as he
thought it included a sizable amount of financing for job training initiatives.
[47]
Ultimately, the decision, though politically motivated to some extent given the
negative stigma associated with welfare, was the result of much consternation,
solicitation of advice, and academic study. Clinton’s core belief that the
welfare system “had trapped many recipients in cycles of dependency and
failure, robbing them of self-esteem and offering no clear path to
self-improvement” – a belief rooted in his experience as governor of Arkansas –
meant he could not say no, from his perspective, to welfare reform. [48]
The final decision to sign the bill, though politically popular nationally, did
not sit well with liberals in Congress, including Clinton allies like New York Congressman Charles Rangel. In fact, Clinton's decision even led to the resignations of three progressive
undersecretaries at the Health and Human Services Department, including Peter Edelman. [49]
Clinton though was right that the welfare
system was imperfect, at best. For one, there were concerns about the toll that
AFDC was taking on the national debt. The president devoted himself to deficit
reduction in his first year in office and rode the wave of fiscal
responsibility towards eventually balancing the federal budget. A 1994 U.S.
Census study warned specifically of AFDC’s budgetary effects. “The country’s
funding resources,” the study said, “are not unlimited, and there are many
demands on them…[as] assistance programs must compete with all other uses of
taxpayers’ funds.” [50]
Further, the same exact Census publication, published in the same year
Republicans retook control of Congress, specifically made the case for
increasing work incentives in welfare. Citing extensive evidence, the study
asserted, “both economic theory and empirical research indicate that such
programs as AFDC adversely affect the work choices of the eligible population.”
[51]
“Programs [like] AFDC…must contend with the fact,” the authors of the study
wrote, “that economic support has negative incentive effects to the extent that
recipients are encouraged to rely on the program and not take steps to become
self-supporting.” [52]
It was examinations like these, rather than the GOP’s decades-long effort to disgracefully chastise “welfare queens” and stigmatize the poor for laziness, that Clinton
trusted. It was not that welfare recipients did not prefer work – various
studies and Clinton’s own interactions with them made clear they did – but the
system, as it was designed, made it both difficult to find work and too easy to
become accustomed to the culture of “dependency.”
Therefore, there were some clear benefits
to welfare reform – benefits that were evident within the first few years after
it was signed into law. On the one hand, though Professor Stoker is largely
critical of the law from a liberal perspective, he credits the welfare reform
law as “one of three reasons” why welfare rolls declined and employment increased
during the late 1990s. [53]
In a 2006 New York Times op-ed, at
the time of the 10th anniversary of the law, Clinton heralded the successes of the law. “Welfare rolls have dropped
substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million [in 2006],” Clinton
penned, “[while the] Welfare to Work Partnership, which my administration
started to speed the transition to employment, [led to] 20,000 businesses
hir[ing] 1.1 million former welfare recipients.” [54]
In making the case for the law, Clinton pointed to reductions in child poverty,
larger funding for child care in the form of child support enforcement and even
Head Start funding, the Access to Jobs Initiative, “which helped communities
create innovative transportation services to enable former welfare
recipients…to get to their new jobs,” and the “welfare-to-work tax credit,
which provided tax incentives to encourage businesses to hire long-term welfare
recipients.” [55]
Clinton’s words are backed up by evidence. The National Bureau for Economic
Research (NBER) found that welfare reform was successful in boosting job growth
while reducing welfare caseloads. “The reforms,” the NBER found, “were
successful in reducing welfare caseloads…[while] employment rates for
low-skilled mothers increased.” [56]
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also concluded that “TANF’s early
years witnessed unprecedented declines in the number of families receiving cash
assistance – and unprecedented increases in
the share of single mothers working, especially those with less than a high
school education.” [57]
This evidence makes clear that there was some good that resulted from welfare reform.
The positive effects of the law arose primarily in the first several years of
its implementation. PROWRA reduced welfare rolls, increased employment, and promoted
a unique array of flexible educational and job training options and initiatives
that helped TANF recipients find work, as extensively aforementioned.
Nevertheless, the years that have passed
since the Great Recession have clearly exposed those “serious flaws” with the
law that Clinton spoke of when he signed it in 1996. When consulting with his
advisers whether or not to sign PROWRA, Clinton received some prescient advice
with regards to the downsides of the bill. “Economics adviser Laura Tyson,”
wrote Taylor Branch, “mounted a sophisticated defense of welfare on Keynesian
grounds…conclud[ing]that welfare, more than other entitlement programs, reacted
early to signs of general economic stress with finely calibrated payments that
stimulated recovery…[and was a] vital tool against recession” in the event of a
financial meltdown. [58]
Tyson’s fear that block-granting welfare, thus giving much latitude to states
in allocating benefits, would weaken financial support for poor families – thus
risking greater poverty for them in the event of an economic crash – came to
fruition. “The 1990s reforms,” Bryce Covert wrote in Think Progress in February 2014, “have hampered [welfare] from
rising to meet Americans’ needs.” [59]
A significant reason for this is the
recession, as Covert concluded when he wrote that the law “failed to keep up
with the spike in need form the recession,” pointing to the fact that “the
number of unemployed people doubled between 2007 and 2009 but TANF’s rolls only
rose by 13 percent, and in some states they actually fell.” [60]
In a December 2012 analysis of TANF, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
(CBPP) further asserted, “TANF’s response to the recession demonstrated just
how weak a safety net it has become.” [61]
“Because TANF reaches so many fewer families AFDC did,” the CBPP wrote as it
criticized states for providing levels of funding that were insufficient for
the poor, “it provides substantially less protection against poverty and deep
poverty.” [62]
The study pointed to the fact that in 2011, just 27 percent of families in
poverty actually received TANF benefits. [63]
Ultimately, as Dylan Matthews noted in a Washington
Post analysis, the recession combined with states not providing enough
funding amid this economic calamity for low-income individuals meant that
“welfare reform led to a huge spike in extreme poverty.” [64]
TANF expert Liz Schott accurately described the negative effects of TANF when
she told The Atlantic in 2012 that “in
the late 90s, the economy was strong and many people [left welfare] for
work…[but] when the economy turned down, unemployment rose and people lost
jobs…[and] when the big recession came, caseloads only rose a little bit.” [65]
It is because of these reasons that the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009 included various measures
to temporarily boost welfare spending. These provisions are partly ideas from
President Obama’s most progressive first-term economic adviser, Christina Romer, who insisted they were
necessary because the laws on the books were not sufficient to help the poor in
the event of a recession. The fact that ARRA needed to include a TANF emergency
contingency fund, an increase in SNAP funding, a promise that the federal
government “would pay 80 percent of recession-related costs” for TANF, and a
guarantee that states with expanding welfare caseloads would not be punished by
the federal government all indicate that TANF was insufficient for poor families. [66]
Further, the block granting of childcare, when combined with the work
requirement for the parents of impoverished children, resulted in significant
underfunding of children’s needs, as their parents sought work, in many states.
[67]
This conundrum was reflected well in liberal filmmaker Michael Moore’s
controversial 2002 documentary, Bowling
for Columbine, which showed how in his home state of Michigan, where the
grant for childcare was rather ungenerous, children would be separated from their
parents and sometimes not have a safe place to go without adequate education or day
care funding in the state. [68]
Lastly, the work requirements in welfare, though expansive in terms of the
range of activities that were covered, were confusing for states. In her
research and reporting, The Atlantic reporter
Molly Ball found that “being counted as working is not as simple as checking
one of those boxes; it’s a complicated formula that allows some activities only
for a certain number of hours per week, or a certain number of weeks per year.”
[69]
Restrictions like these led to a torrent of Republican and Democratic governors
alike writing to the Bush and Obama administrations urging them to make work
requirements more flexible. In the summer of 2012, Obama obliged, as the Health
and Human Services Department (HHS) issued guidance to states that clarified
that states could receive waivers to the work requirement as long as they
demonstrate that the plans they would put in place instead “would increase…the
amount of welfare recipients working.” [70]
The fact that a bipartisan consensus of governors rallied around this change
before it was enacted, ultimately embraced by the Obama administration, indicates
that the definitions of work requirements, especially as it relates to time
allotted for work, in the welfare reform law were too constricting. (Ironically, one of the GOP governors who signed one of these aforementioned letters was Massachusetts' Mitt Romney, who, in the heat of the 2012 presidential campaign, went on to dishonestly portray Obama as "gutting" the welfare law's work requirement.)
When President Clinton signed welfare
reform into law, he did so knowing that there would be both upsides and
downsides to such a huge change in American domestic social policy. Indeed, the
PROWRA had such a split effect, initially being a big boon to welfare
recipients and the economy at large but eventually, because of its
block-granting mechanism and failure to foresee the financial crisis, being too
restrictive in support for the poor.
[1] The Living Room Candidate – Commercials: Second Chance
(Clinton, 1992). http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1992.
[4] Harris, 234.
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Age of Reagan – The Gilder Lehrman Institute of
American History, www.gilderlehrman.org.
[7] National Survey of Public Knowledge of Welfare Reform
and the Federal Budget, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. December 30,
1994. http://kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/national-survey-of-public-knowledge-of-welfare/.
[8] Kids Would Be Victims of AFDC Cut, The Chicago Tribune. Rose, Henry.
September 1, 1995. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-09-01/news/9509010069_1_monthly-afdc-afdc-program-afdc-benefits.
[9] TANF Weakening as a Safety Net for Poor Families,
Danilio Trisi and LaDonna Pavetti, Ph.D. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
March 13, 2012. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3700.
[10] Kaiser Family Foundation, kff.org.
[11] Harris, 233.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] C-SPAN Archives, Senate Floor Debate on Welfare Reform
Bill, August 1996. Remarks by Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., D-Delaware. www.c-span.org.
[15] Ibid.
[16] President Clinton’s Remarks Announcing Intention to
Sign the Welfare Reform Bill, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6QOuoqeOFQ.
[17] PROWRA: Federal welfare reform. Stoker, Robert P.
Spring 2013.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20]
Ibid.
[21] What Obama Really Did to Welfare Reform, The Atlantic. Ball, Molly. August 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/what-obama-really-did-to-welfare-reform/260931/; Stoker.
[22] Stoker.
[23] The TANF Maintenance of Effort Requirement, Mark
Greenberg. 2002. http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/archive/0035.pdf.
[24] Stoker.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Federal
Welfare-to-Work Grants: New Opportunities to Create Jobs and Assist
Non-Custodial Parents. June 9, 1998. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1945.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Stoker.
[30] Stoker.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Harris,
238-239.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Harris, 233-34.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.; Harris, 234-249.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Harris, 239.
[45] Branch, 371.
[46] Branch, 368-69.
[47] Harris, 234-36.
[48] Harris, 233-34.
[49] Branch, 371.
[50] The Poverty Measure and AFDC, U.S. Census, 1994. https://www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/methodology/nas/files/afdc.pdf.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Stoker.
[54] How We Ended Welfare, Together, The New York Times. Clinton, Bill. August 22, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/opinion/22clinton.html?_r=1&.
[55] Ibid.
[56] The National Bureau of Economic Research: Welfare
Reform Has Led to More Work but Less Education. http://www.nber.org/digest/jan09/w14466.html.
[57] Policy Basics: An Introduction to TANF – Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities. Schott, Liz. December 4, 2012. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=936.
[58] Branch, 368.
[59] The Failure of Welfare Reform Hits New Records, Think Progress. Covert, Bryce. February
21, 2014. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/02/21/3316531/welfare-reform-failure-record.
[60] Ibid.
[61] CBPP.org
[62] Ibid.
[63]
Ibid.
[64] Fact-checking Bill Clinton on the economy, The Washington Post. Matthews, Dylan.
September 6, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/06/fact-checking-bill-clinton-on-the-economy/.
[66] Stoker.
[67] Ibid.
[68] Bowling for Columbine, Moore, Michael.
2002.
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