In their piece Fred Block and Frances Fox Piven faulted Hillary for adopting the false narrative that public assistance promotes dependence, and the poor should be incentivised to lift themselves out of poverty simply by sharply limiting public assistance for those who need it most.
Letter to Hillary Clinton: Let’s Talk About Poverty
By Fred Block and Frances Fox Piven
Second, the welfare system is supposed to operate as the ultimate safety net to protect families who are not covered by our flawed unemployment insurance system. Over the past three decades, as stable and well-paying jobs have been replaced by irregular and low-paid ones, the need for such a safety net has grown, especially since many of the people in this precarious labor force are ineligible for unemployment insurance. When the banks crashed in 2008, overall unemployment soared above 10 percent. Many of those thrown out of work were either ineligible for unemployment benefits or had exhausted them. (Incidentally, our unemployment insurance system is also broken; it provides benefits to an ever-declining share of the unemployed.) In earlier recessions, the unemployed with children turned to AFDC as an alternative source of support; historical data show the rolls rising along with unemployment. But the TANF rolls barely expanded during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and despite the Obama stimulus legislation. State governments were still incentivized to save on outlays, and they simply refused to allow new people to sign up. And since there was no longer an entitlement that could be enforced by courts, many desperate families were forced to make do in a deep recession without any government help beyond food stamps.
Hillary, the basic rhetoric that the Republicans used to push through the 1996 welfare legislation was the claim that giving poor people assistance actually hurts them by discouraging self-reliance and self-discipline. In their worldview the kindest thing one can do is to deny assistance because it forces people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
In 1995 Congressman John Mica of Florida took the floor of Congress and said:
Mr. Chairman, I represent Florida, where we have many lakes and natural reserves. If you visit these areas, you may see a sign like this that reads, “Do not feed the alligators.” We post these signs for several reasons. First, because if left in a natural state, alligators can fend for themselves. They work, gather food, and care for their young. Second, we post these warnings because unnatural feeding and artificial care creates dependency. When dependency sets in, these otherwise able-bodied alligators can no longer survive on their own. Now, I know people are not alligators, but I submit to you that with our current handout, non-work welfare system, we have upset the natural order. We have failed to understand the simple warning signs. We have created a system of dependency.
The logic of this argument—that well-intentioned assistance produces perverse consequences—does not just cut against welfare programs. It works just as well against unemployment insurance, Social Security, food stamps, veteran’s benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare—in short, every program that Democrats support.
While these Republican arguments are fundamentally wrong, they exert a lot of influence for three reasons. First, people in this country do value independence and self-reliance and so the claim that government assistance might undermine this has some appeal. Second, talking about the poor as being similar to wild animals taps into deep currents of racial animosity that continue to be an important undercurrent in our culture. Finally, people on our side of the aisle have generally ignored these arguments; Democratic politicians have failed to challenge them as both empirically wrong and deeply damaging. In short, the future of all of our public sector programs requires directly refuting the Republican claims that government assistance hurts recipients. You once told us, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It follows logically that all of us need assistance from time to time and that there is nothing shameful about that kind of dependence. For this reason, we urgently need to rebuild the social safety net so that we are assisting more of those stuck in poverty while also assuring that the automatic stabilizers will protect us all from deeper economic downturns.
Hillary needs to repudiate this harsh and false narrative that she used as a politically useful triangulation. Bernie on the other hand has never tried to triangulate his position to appease conservatives.
Bernie Sanders Takes on Clinton Welfare Legacy as He Woos Iowa Unions
By Josh Eidelson
August 6, 2015
Bernie Sanders says both Clintons made a mistake on welfare reform.
In an phone interview Thursday with Bloomberg, the Democratic presidential candidate said that history will not look kindly on the 1996 overhaul of the New Deal anti-poverty program, which then-President Bill Clinton enacted over the objections of many liberal Democrats, including Sanders, who was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives at the time. Sanders' chief rival for the Democratic nomination, front-runner Hillary Clinton, wrote in her 2003 book, Living History, that she supported the bill, despite some concerns, because she “felt, on balance, that this was a historic opportunity to change a system oriented toward dependence to one that encouraged independence.”
Clinton wrote that she "worked hard to round up votes" for the her husband's legislation, which imposed time limits on welfare benefits and work requirements on beneficiaries.
In his own book in 1997, Sanders called the bill “the grand slam of scapegoating legislation…" Now a U.S. senator from Vermont, he doubled down on that assessment in his interview with Bloomberg. "I think that history will suggest that that legislation has not worked terribly well," he said, arguing that too many politicians would rather target the poor than poverty.
"I mean, that’s what Ronald Reagan’s ‘welfare queen’ was all about," he said, referring to the former Republican president. "It was the illusion that we’re spending huge sums of money on people who are cheating, who are taking of the welfare system and so forth,” he said.
"And what I said then is what I believe to be the case right now," Sanders added. "We need to figure out why people are in poverty. We need to get people out of poverty… Instead of giving tax breaks to billionaires, we should make sure that every person in this country lives in dignity.” He added, “What I do see is very often, people trying to pit the middle class against low-income people - often people of color - and that is called scapegoating and I strongly object to that.”
According to the most recent Census figures, the U.S. poverty rate in 2013 was 14 percent up from 11 percent in 1996, when the Clinton welfare bill was enacted.
Unlike Hillary Bernie has never triangulated trying to curry favor from conservatives by scapegoating the poor. In 1997 Sanders refused to join Republicans in making life harder for Americans who are struggling the most in our winner take all economy. Bernie Sanders has consistently stood up for the poorest and least influential groups in our society, including people of color.