G.O.P. Insists Making Poor People Work Lifts Them Up. Where’s the Proof?
“Indeed, the administration’s ultimate goal is to attach work requirements to the entire social safety net. In the words of the president, ‘We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity.’ History, however, has proved that this doctrine, too, is mostly wrong. We have been here before, more than 20 years ago, when the embattled President Bill Clinton embraced the Republicans’ ‘welfare to work’ strategy and replaced the federal program to aid poor families with children with a rash of state-managed programs that imposed stringent work requirements on beneficiaries.”