People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [387]
In the summer of 1996 (apparently seeking the support of “centrist” voters for the coming election), Clinton signed a law to end the federal government’s guarantee, created under the New Deal, of financial help to poor families with dependent children. This was called “welfare reform,” and the law itself had the deceptive title of “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.”
By this decision, Clinton alienated many of his former liberal supporters. Peter Edelman resigned from his post in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, bitterly criticizing what he considered Clinton’s surrender to the right and the Republicans. Later, Edelman wrote: “His goal was reelection at all costs. . . . His political approach was not to calculate the risks but to take no risks at all. . . . His penchant for elevating shadow over substance has hurt poor children.”
The aim of “welfare reform” was to force poor families receiving federal cash benefits (many of them single mothers with children) to go to work by cutting off their benefits after two years, limiting lifetime benefits to five years, and allowing people without children to get food stamps for only three months in any three-year period.
The Los Angeles Times reported: “As legal immigrants lose access to Medicaid, and families battle a new five-year limit on cash benefits . . . health experts anticipate resurgence of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases. . . . ” The aim of the welfare cuts was to save $50 billion over a five-year period (less than the cost of a planned new generation of fighter planes). Even the New York Times, a supporter of Clinton during the election, said that the provisions of the new law “have nothing to do with creating work but everything to do with balancing the budget by cutting programs for the poor.”
There was a simple but overwhelming problem with cutting off benefits to the poor to force them to find jobs. There were not jobs available for all those who would lose their benefits. In New York City in 1990, when 2,000 jobs were advertised in the Sanitation Department at $23,000 a year, 100,000 people applied. Two years later in Chicago, 7,000 people showed up for 550 jobs at Stouffer’s, a restaurant chain. In Joliet, Illinois, 200 showed up at Commonwealth Edison at 4:30 A.M. to apply for jobs that did not yet exist. In early 1997, 4,000 people lined up for 700 jobs at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. It was estimated that at the existing rate of job growth in New York, with 470,000 adults on welfare, it would take twenty-four years to absorb those thrown off the rolls.
What the Clinton administration steadfastly refused to do was to establish government programs to create jobs, as had been done in the New Deal era, when billions were spent to give employment to several million people, from construction workers and engineers to artists and writers. “The era of big government is over,” Clinton proclaimed as he ran for President in 1996, seeking votes on the supposition that Americans supported the Republican position that government was spending too much.
Both parties were misreading public opinion, and the press was often complicit in this. When, in the midyear election of 1994, only 37 percent of the electorate went to the polls, and slightly more than half voted Republican, the media reported this as a “revolution.” A headline in the New York Times read “Public Shows Trust in GOP Congress,” suggesting that the American people were supporting the Republican agenda of less government.
But in the story below that headline, a New York Times/CBS News public opinion survey found that 65 percent of those polled said that “it is the responsibility of government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.”
Clinton and the Republicans, in joining against “big government,” were aiming only at social services. The other manifestations of big government—huge