Like I said in my earlier post today, I’m not a big fan of President Bill Clinton. In today’s New York Times Bill has an op-ed celebrating his welfare legacy. The last few Clinton years were years of an expanding economy that (finally) increased wages even for those at the bottom of the economic ladder - people whose wages hadn’t moved up in decades (and haven’t moved up since). Clinton trumpets his triumph, “[s]ixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work” - and I feel compelled to ask, what about the other 40%? I also feel compelled to ask about the lot of those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder during the Bush years, with an economy producing stagnant or declining wages for the vast majority of Americans, including the middle class. During the same years, working Americans lost healthcare coverage in whole or in part from company cost cutting - and a higher percentage of working Americans today lack health coverage. What of the increase in poverty, and child poverty, during these years?
Clinton acknowledges the problems in his welfare legislation with the aside, “[o]f course the booming economy helped” - you betcha it did! He also acknowledges what has happened, and not happened, since,
“The recent welfare reform amendments, largely Republican-only initiatives… disallowed hours spent pursuing an education from counting against required weekly work hours….. And perhaps even more than additional welfare reform, we need to raise the minimum wage, create more good jobs through a commitment to a clean energy future and enact tax and other policies to support families in work and child-rearing.”
Let me be clear. The old welfare system was truly horrible and I agree with the conservative critique that it harmed people morally, making them dependent on handouts and destroying self-esteem. But I part ways with conservatives, and Clinton, when they changed the law and failed to provide a viable alternative for a tremendous number of people.
- They failed to provide universal quality childcare so that parents could work to provide for their families, and still be responsible parents. Affordable, quality childcare is a problem for the middle class (and needs to be addressed) as many parents will tell you - but for those with even fewer resources, in lower rung jobs that often are much less flexible, this is an obvious stumbling block to success in becoming independent.
- They failed to provide a living wage - turning welfare families into working families living in poverty. In some cases families actually got less than they had before they started working. A living wage isn’t a welfare issue - it’s a moral issue - and a wage that everyone who works deserves.
- Policies often reduced or eliminated healthcare for welfare families that became working families - in part because their new jobs didn’t provide healthcare. Here too I believe that universal healthcare is needed for the general population.
In childcare, wages and healthcare - the basics - Clinton’s change of welfare law exposed many, if not most families to worse conditions. I believe people should work for their living but, once working, they should be entitled to “make a living.” Bill Clinton should have fought harder to do better - the Americans whose lives he changed deserved a better shake - and that’s something the legacy Clinton trumpets shouldn’t ignore.
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