Washington Monthly has an interesting post on Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms. I admit, even though I lived through it I didn’t know much more than the sound bite version. The fuller version is that while he did allow Congress to drastically scale back welfare as it was known at the time, which was cash assistance to poor families with relatively few strings attached, he drastically scaled up the earned income tax credit, which ended up helping more people. The article ends by making an interesting case that the debate has actually shifted somewhat to the left since the 1990s, and there is actually somewhat of a bipartisan consensus that more is needed to fight poverty and help the poor develop job skills. At the same time, the poverty rate among children and minority children in particular is still shameful.

 

What did happen is that Clinton seized on one element of the conservative welfare reform agenda – work – and used it as leverage to create the broadest expansion of federal spending on poverty reduction since the New Deal. Welfare recipients should work, Clinton agreed, and the 1996 legislation set both a five-year time limit on benefits and imposed, for the first time ever, a requirement that recipients work to receive aid.

But Clinton also argued government’s obligation to “make work pay.” “No one who works full time and has children in the home should live in poverty,” said Clinton in 1996. It was a bargain that would win over the public, which soon shed its appetite for punishing the poor that conservatives had done their best to encourage. It also enabled Clinton to push through his ambitious agenda of new programs aimed at helping the working poor.

Clinton’s biggest win was the expansion of the EITC, which was framed as a precondition to passing welfare reform and which Congress passed in 1993. Today, the EITC is the federal government’s largest anti-poverty program, delivering $63 billion in benefits a year to nearly 28 million families. This makes it nearly four times the size of the federal block grants under Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) – the successor to AFDC. Researchers credit the EITC for dramatically increasing workforce participation for lower-income women (more so than the reform of AFDC). According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the EITC lifted 9.4 million people in working households out of poverty in 2013.