Q and O provided this Classic Quote of the Day:
Robinson writes “Clinton’s welfare reform and crime bills were harmful to blacks. Clinton wasn’t exactly the poster child for black empowerment.”
Good grief, that woman could not be more wrong. First, Clinton signed those welfare reforms into law very reluctantly. He’d campaigned on it, not really expecting anything like that to ever land on his desk. He didn’t touch it his first three years in office. It was the Contract With America that pushed welfare reform up to the front and center and got the job done. Still, he did eventually sign it and it may well end up the best part of his legacy. He deserves some credit for that.
Second, they worked phenomenally well, bringing millions of people out of poverty. Child poverty hit all-time lows for black children by 2001. People in the bottom fifth of the economy enjoyed much better gains than anyone except those in the top fifth. Rising tide, much?
According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study released this month, the bottom fifth of families with children, whose average income in 2005 was $16,800, enjoyed a larger percentage increase in income from 1991 to 2005 than all other groups except the top fifth. Despite the recession of 2001, the bottom fifth had a 35 percent increase in income (adjusted for inflation), compared with around 20 percent for the second, third and fourth fifths. (The top fifth had about a 50 percent increase.)
I leave you with this quote:
This, then, is where we find ourselves today, ten years after reform: a record number of poor single mothers off the dole and the majority of them gainfully employed; less poverty among single mothers, especially black single mothers, as well as their kids; children adjusting well enough; and state governments taking care of their own. The situation is so far from what experts predicted that, as New York University political scientist Lawrence Mead has put it, it brings to mind the Sovietologists at the fall of the Soviet Union.
