ADD “WELFARE TO WORK” TO PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TO-DO LIST
Why add fixing welfare to President Trump’s list? Because President Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich put in a major fix in 1996 and Obama/Biden tore it apart. Now we have a welfare crisis, control of Congress and it can/should get fixed. It is another action that will save the taxpayers billions of dollars by putting people back to work.
There are masses of numbers associated with work, workers and welfare. My intent was to sort through it all and paint a numbers picture of the work, worker, welfare situation in America today. Numbers are the story and it is not a pretty picture.
LABOR PARTICIPATION RATE
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor force participation rate is an estimate of an economy’s active workforce. The formula is the number of people ages 16 and older who are employed or actively seeking employment, divided by the total civilian working-age population.
Background; when Obama/Biden took over in January 2009 the labor participation rate was 65.7%. That was the beginning of an 8-year steady decline until they departed the White House January 2017 with a participation rate of 62.8%’ about a 3% decline. Is 3% a big deal? Yes, it’s significant because in 2017 there were 165.2 million workers involved. Each percentage point represents 1.652 million workers time 3 percent equals an Obam/Biden loss of about 5 million workers. That was an element of Obama’s declared formula to “fundamentally transform America.”
President Trump got the participation rate up from the Obama/Biden low of 62.8% to 63.3% in his first two years in office. By 2019 pre-covid, that was an increase of over 800,000 workers.
During 2024 the U.S. labor force participation rate has ranged between a low of 62.5% (January) and a high of 62.6%. (October). And Biden kept telling us how successful Bidenomics has been and that he has added 15 million jobs. No, it didn’t happen, not even close. An increase of one tenth of one percent represents about 165,000, jobs, not 15 million.
PRESIDENT CLINTON AND SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH, 1996
In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The legislation substantially reconstructed the nation’s welfare system by giving state governments more autonomy over welfare services while also reducing the federal government’s role. Yes, President Trump, it can be done.
The Welfare-to-Work Act, as it became known, provided for the following:
- The act ended welfare as an entitlement program.
- Required recipients to begin working after two years of receiving benefits.
- Placed a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds.
- Sought to encourage two-parent families and to discourage out-of-wedlock births.
- Enhanced enforcement of child support.
- Stricter conditions for food stamps eligibility, reductions in immigrant welfare assistance, and recipient work requirements.
- And required state professional and occupational licenses to be withheld from undocumented immigrants.
As he signed the bill on August 22, 1996, President Clinton stated that the act “gives us a chance we haven’t had before to break the cycle of dependency that has existed for millions and millions of our fellow citizens, exiling them from the world of work. It gives structure, meaning and dignity to most of our lives”.
The Welfare to Work Act created a foundational principle of “personal responsibility”; it changed the culture of U.S. welfare. Now, 28 years later, we can/should do it again.
TANF, TEMPORARY ASSISTANCE FOR NEEDY FAMILIES
The Welfare to Work Act ended six decades of federal government control of the programs. In the process of dismantling the old model, President Clinton created something, different and critical to success; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, TANF, which changed the financing and benefit structure of cash welfare assistance. Instead of welfare being funded in an open-ended manner, welfare became funded by federal block grants to states, along with a requirement that states had to match some of the federal dollars.
TANF:
- Added work requirements for aid, shrinking the number of adults who could qualify for benefits.
- It created caps for how long and how much aid a person could receive.
- It instituted harsher punishments for recipients who did not comply with the requirements.
Following on, President Bush called on the Senate to take action to continue the historic progress of welfare reform and ensure that more Americans are able to achieve independence through work.
Did TANF work? In its annual report to Congress on the level of welfare dependency in the country, the Department of Health and Human Services found that 4.7 million fewer Americans were dependent on welfare three years after welfare reform was first passed in 1996. The percentage of the population dependent on welfare fell from 5.2% to 3.3% during that time. Yes, it worked and it can work again, President Trump.
WELFARE AND POVERTY, THEY ARE CONNECTED
As the rate of welfare dependency declined, the overall poverty rate in America fell. In the four years following enactment of welfare reform, 5.4 million fewer Americans were in poverty. Within those four years, the poverty rate for all individuals fell from 13.7% to 11.3%, the lowest rate since 1979.
2009: ENTER OBAMA/BIDEN WITH THEIR AMERICAN TRANSFORMATION SCHEME.
“Without authority, Obama moves workers back to welfare” were the headlines.
In a classic case of Executive Branch abuse of regularity power, Obama/Biden cut the legs off from the TANF program by informing the states that they could apply to the Secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services for a waiver of the work requirements contained in the law. That Obama/Biden move could have and should have been challenged by Congress and/or the Supreme Court because the work requirement was an essential element of the law and one that the statute specifically said cannot be waived. But it was not challenged.
The Obama/Biden initiative killed a 12-year-old successful program with the following negative ramifications:
- As previously pointed out, the U.S. labor force participation rate went down about 3% which meant that about 5 million able-bodied welfare recipients did not transition from welfare to work.
- The federal government essentially regained control of the welfare program and reverted back to the bad-old-days. Vote buying.
- Obama/Biden significantly added to the size of the Welfare/Poverty Identity Group voting block that, understandably, can be relied on to vote for the democrats.
- The Congressional Research Service reported that the number of able-bodied adults on food stamps doubled after Obama suspended work requirements.
- By 2016, a record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when Obama/Biden took office.
- Increased welfare does not solve the poverty issue. The Census Bureau put the number of Americans in poverty at 45.3 million as of 2013. That’s about 5.5 million more people in poverty than there were in 2008 before Obama/Biden took office.
- When the labor force participation falls, tax revenue falls and government revenue is reduced as welfare costs go up; the perfect formula for deficit spending and long-rang debt increases.
- Government spending on welfare increased 32% during the Obama/Biden first term.
WHAT DID BIDEN LEARN DURING HIS 8-YEAR TUTELAGE UNDER OBAMA?
Biden’s first budget submission in 2021 expanded welfare without work incentives setting the stage to trap a new generation of Americans into a cycle of dependency and thus poverty. In fiscal year 2022, the federal government spent$1.19 trillion on more than 80 different welfare programs. That represents almost 20% of total federal spending and a quarter of tax revenues in 2022. The Congressional Budget Office has projected $12.7 trillion in spending on these programs over the FY 2024-2033 budget window.
What did Biden learn from Obama? He learned how to advance the movement towards a welfare state. I am not suggesting that Obama/Biden want the U.S. to become a socialist society. But if one looks carefully at the widely-accepted formula for transforming to a socialist nation, consider the following:
What are Obama’s building blocks to “systematically transform America? They came from Saul Alinsky, 1909-1972, a Chicago-based organizer, community activist and political theorist. Considered the father of community organizers, he became Obama’s philosophical mentor; Obama quotes him often in his book.
It is enlightening to align Alinsky’s “eight steps from democracy to a socialist society” with what has happened to America under Obama/Biden leadership.
- Step one, healthcare: “Control Healthcare and you control the People.” Democrats campaigned in 2020 for “Medicare for all.”
- Step two, poverty: “Increase the poverty level as high as possible, Poor People are easier to control and will not fight back if the government is providing everything for them to live.”
Here are some 2022 quick facts about poverty provided by Poverty USA. The poverty threshold for an individual is a household income of approximately $13,000 per year, and it’s roughly $26,000 per year for a family of four. 37 million Americans are living in poverty, which makes the poverty rate 11.4%. There are over 11 million children in poverty.
- Three, debt: “Increase the National Debt to an unsustainable level.” Obama/Biden created more national debt in 8 years than all previous administrations in U.S. history combined.
- Four, gun control: “Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a Police State with total local control.” Gun control is a habitual Democrat priority subject.
- Five, welfare: “Take control of every aspect of their lives, food, livestock, housing, and income.” Government spending on welfare increased 32% during the Obama/Biden first term.
- Six, education: “Take control of what People read and listen to; take control of what Children learn in school.” That is currently happening across the nation in grades K-12 and in colleges and universities and hopefully fixing education is already on President Trump’s to-do list.
- Seven, religion: “Remove faith in God from the government and schools.” Almost there.
- Eight, class warfare: “Divide the people into the wealthy against the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with full support of
the voting poor.” This was the Democrat campaign plan in 2024, “Tax the rich”.
If you believe the Alinsky eight steps to socialism has some validity, and if you also believe the lid is already on the coffin, all that remains is to nail it down. President Trump, we need to act now to reverse these trends.
CONCLUSION:
The government is complicit in supporting those who can work but choose not to. Complicit how? By supporting a welfare system that can cause millions of Americas to literally sign up for and be captured in a (President Clinton’s words), “cycle of dependency.”
BOTTOM LINE WITH NUMBERS:
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in2024 there are about 209 million working-age men in America,
- About 89% of them, (186 million) have a job or are actively looking for a job.
- That tells us there are about 23 million men who do not have a job and are not looking for one.
- it is not an issue of not being able to find a job, 23 million have simply opted out altogether and are living on the government dole.
- Meanwhile, a federal count from November 2023 tells us that more than 770,000 manufacturing jobs were open and manufacturing workers are, on average, earning more than $30 an hour.
- The U.S. welfare system consists of 80+ federal programs providing cash, food, housing, medical care, social services, training, and targeted education aid to poor and low-income Americans. Too much. Too invasive. And for too many, obviously too tempting.
Americans are the most benevolent people on earth. We will always take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. But 80+ government welfare programs run by an enormous out of control bureaucracy can actually cause more harm than good. That is evidenced by comparing the Welfare-to-Work results from 1996 to 2008 against the Obama/Biden transformation formula.
America was built on a culture of hard work and generally we do not look favorably on those who can work but choose instead to sit on their ass and wait for their monthly welfare checks from we-the-working-people.
The statistical gains for Americans during the 1996-2008 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are not just proof of concept, they are proof of policy. The how to make Welfare to Work a reality again is there for the taking. Just make it happen President Trump.