Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support held a hearing on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and its role in providing assistance to struggling families. The Obama Administration’s witness, Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, Carmen Nazario, included in her testimony a request to extend for a year the TANF Emergency Fund at a cost of $2.5 billion. This would extend a $5 billion program created in the Stimulus package last year that severely undermines …
Yesterday the Senate beat back an amendment offered by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) to the tax extenders bill that would have continued for another six months a policy aimed at undoing welfare reform. The policy was originally created as part of last year’s infamous Stimulus package in the form of the TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) Emergency Fund. It was supposed to be a “temporary” measure, however, the President in his 2011 budget and now Congress are actively looking for ways to extend it. This anti-reform fund pays states …
This past weekend a brouhaha developed across the nation over remarks Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) made in 2008 about then-candidate Barack Obama, as reported in the book “Game Change” by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Putting aside whether his vocabulary was appropriate for a senator, in private or public, there is an interesting case being made in his defense. It essentially goes like this: Harry Reid’s rhetoric is excusable because of his voting record. As Harold Ford said on the Today program on Monday: “If his voting record raised …
The front page of the Washington Post yesterday features a story by Paul Schwartzman about a couple in Indiana who were laid off from an RV plant and are receiving unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to the tune of about $700 a week ($268 for her and $390 for him). Buried deep into the story on the third page of the article it mentions that the wife, Kelly Nichols, actually got offered a job as a bookkeeper for a chiropractor. It paid $8 an hour for 28 hours a week. Kelly …
Sunday’s Washington Post reports that the District of Columbia is considering changing its welfare program to restore real work requirements for able-bodied individuals receiving cash assistance. The change is expected to save $6.2 million in the District’s budget. This is a wise move and one that other states and counties should consider making, in light of the budget shortfalls many of them face. According to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, 16,000 households in the District receive cash benefits from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. Despite the federal …
Dr. Lee Edwards, a Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought, gave a lecture at the Heritage Foundation that asked the question: Is Conservatism dead? One could make a strong case that it is. Conservatives suffered a crushing defeat in the 2006 elections and, more recently, the 2008 elections. However, things have been worse. Much worse. The 1964 election of Lyndon Johnson by a landslide caused critics to ring out that Conservatism was dead. Liberals had a 2-1 margin in the House and Senate. A greater margin than even today. Yet, the …
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report Wednesday on preliminary data for 2007 birth rates in the United States. Among those statistics, a new historic high — 39.7 percent of babies born in America are to unmarried women. Even worse, 71.6 percent of out-of-wedlock births are to African American women. This should be alarming to read considering the negative societal implications for children born and raised in single parent households. It is well documented that compared with children born to married couples, those born outside of marriage …
Congressmen Tom Price (R-GA) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) should be commended for introducing a bill this week that will eliminate a little noted provision passed in the stimulus bill which severely undermines the success of the historic 1996 welfare reform law. H.R. 1277, the Welfare Reform Restoration Act, repeals Section 2101 of the stimulus bill which creates a new $5 billion program that encourages and rewards states for increasing the size of their caseloads. The stimulus bill reverts welfare back to the broken system it once was that trapped a …
“So my whole goal over the next four years,” President Barack Obama said Monday night at the end of his first prime-time White House news conference, “is to make sure that whatever arguments are persuasive and backed up by evidence and facts and proof, that they can work, that we are pulling people together around that kind of pragmatic agenda.” The question, the last of 13 President Obama fielded, had to do with the future of bipartisanship after the “stimulus” fight — and how he intends to work with Republicans …
From the beginning we’ve warned you that President Barack Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan will not stimulate the economy, but will instead permanently expand the size and power of the welfare state. There is perhaps no better example of this than the provisions in the bill which abolish the successful welfare reforms passed on a true bipartisan basis by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Heritage senior research fellow Robert Rector has the gory details: Under the old AFDC program, states were given more federal funds if their welfare caseloads were …
