Clinton’s Welfare Mothers

If you have read some of my rants on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, you would quickly realize that I don’t like most of the Republican leaders. You might even think that I do like President Clinton. Well, I don’t. Much. Never have and never will.

Bill Clinton is a gutless pragmatist who got himself elected by out-flanking the Republicans on issues like welfare reform and balanced budgets. I don’t think he is a bad president. He may well be regarded, some day, as a successful administrator who was bitterly harassed by a bunch of Lilliputian partisans. He is certainly a better president than Reagan was: he is more competent, more astute, and a better leader. But he is also in favour of capital punishment, and he signed legislation dumping hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients into the dustbin of economic Darwinism.

Whatever happened to those welfare mothers? They all found jobs, right? Well, some of them probably did, but not because of welfare reform. Has anybody noticed that this problem is waiting for the next recession to explode? And it will explode. If (or when) the economy finally does go into even a minor recession, and unemployment rises, we will see poverty on a scale unimagined since the Great Depression. And Clinton, and the Republicans who drafted the legislation, won’t even get blamed. You know who will get blamed? President Dole or President Quayle or President Gore, or whomever.

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