The Welfare Cunt-tree-men like JP Morgan's Dimon and Tesla's Musk Depend on the Government Trough While they Hate on the Poor . . . with a whole lotta hate from the democrats, too

"Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. In a Clinton administration, we're going to put an end to welfare as we know it," said then-Gov. Clinton in October 1991.

Republicans are hating on food stamps again. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt-ceiling bill expanded coverage of an existing work requirement to receive food stamps to include people aged 49 to 55, who were previously exempted. That wasn’t good enough for Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has called nonworking food stamp recipients “couch potatoes.” So before the bill cleared the House on Wednesday, 217–215, it was amended to accelerate to October 2024 the deadline for quinquagenarian recipients to get jobs. (Gaetz voted against the bill anyway.)

The paradox of the food stamp program is that it was originally designed to benefit three Republican constituencies: farmers, grocers, and wholesalers. (Even today, one of the program’s biggest supporters is Walmart.) Yet food stamps have come under near-constant attack since 1976, when Ronald Reagan, then challenging Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, disparaged a largely mythical African American “welfare queen” who “used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare.”

“The federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won,” Ronald Reagan said during his final State of the Union address, in 1988.

This wasn’t an economic critique so much as an indictment of bureaucracy run amok. Since at least the mid-1960s, Reagan and the GOP had often portrayed the poor—especially those in urban communities of color—as freeloaders and con artists, the bottom feeders of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, whose food stamps and welfare benefits supposedly bilked taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars.

These portrayals were usually couched in euphemisms and dog whistles. In 1961, Barry Goldwater lamented that public aid was “paid for children born out of wedlock.” Goldwater’s supporters (including Reagan) surely didn’t take this as a smear against young white Protestant mothers; no, this moral rot was understood as endemic among a specific community: black, inner-city mothers who were already suspect in the conservative cultural imagination.

According to Slate editor Josh Levin — whose new book “The Queen” tells the story of Taylor, her crimes and evolution into a national mythology and rhetorical cudgel for politicians — one Chicago Tribune reporter alone, George Bliss, the three-time Pulitzer winner who first exposed Taylor’s abuses, used “welfare queen” more than three dozen times.

“The phrase was a succinct distillation of an old idea,” Levin said in his office the other day, a short walk from the White House, whose chief occupant even now is criticized for painting swaths of marginalized people with broad brushes.

Between the fall of 1974 and the presidential election of 1980, this newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, used the phrase “welfare queen” in more than 80 different stories. Sometimes it was bold and large, in a headline; sometimes it was tucked into copy. Sometimes it was “welfare queen” in quotes; sometimes just Welfare Queen, without any colloquial smirk — as if it were a formal title in Chicago. Which, in a way, for several years, it was.

There was the Welfare Queen/ice cream vendor who reportedly stole $11,000 in public assistance funds; and the Welfare Queen convicted of stealing just $1,013. There was the University of Illinois at Chicago criminal justice student sentenced to four years in state prison in 1979 for defrauding Illinois of $118,000 in public assistance. But Chicago’s most notorious Welfare Queen was indisputably a Golddust, Tenn., grifter, possible baby trafficker, possible kidnapper and possible murderer named Linda Taylor. Her name was rarely printed without adjectives and snark attached. As in “Linda Taylor, the notorious Chicago welfare queen.”

According to old reports, she hated those nicknames.

But she didn’t have a choice.

She fit an image.

She did drive a Cadillac, she did wear furs. She floated around Chicago, maintaining multiple addresses, and by 1974, according to authorities, she fraudulently gathered at least $150,000 in food stamps and Social Security payments, not to mention plenty of welfare assistance and the veterans benefits of men she had never married. (The amount was likely much less.) There was nothing typical about Taylor or her actions, and yet she would come to embody an enduring and noxious cliche, the unworthy, scheming minority welfare swindler, living high off of government largesse and the hard-fought earnings of honest working-class Americans.

According to Slate editor Josh Levin — whose new book “The Queen” tells the story of Taylor, her crimes and evolution into a national mythology and rhetorical cudgel for politicians — one Tribune reporter alone, George Bliss, the three-time Pulitzer winner who first exposed Taylor’s abuses, used “welfare queen” more than three dozen times.

“The phrase was a succinct distillation of an old idea,” Levin said in his office the other day, a short walk from the White House, whose chief occupant even now is criticized for painting swaths of marginalized people with broad brushes.

A Chicago Tribune story by George Bliss calls Linda Taylor the “welfare queen” on Oct. 12, 1974.

By the mid-’70s — just as Taylor was becoming Exhibit A of the undeserving poor — more women of color were being granted access to the assistance benefits long denied to them. The previous decade had seen the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty, as well as uprisings in Chicago and around the country. “The image of poverty at the time became black,” Levin said. Taylor, who he believes was likely mixed race, was identified variously as black, white, Hawaiian and Mexican. Not that it mattered much. “Welfare had been racialized, and ‘welfare queen’ captured the concept of people getting something they didn’t deserve — worse, living better than you! These were rough economic times, paychecks weren’t buying as much. If you wanted to stoke contempt for people supposedly getting rich without lifting a hand, the time was right.”

As Levin notes in “The Queen,” Taylor’s “mere existence gave credence to a slew of pernicious stereotypes about poor people and black women” gaming the system.

Yet arguably it’s Ronald Reagan who gained the most.

He rarely said “welfare queen” in public. He referred to Taylor as merely “a woman in Chicago.” But her public-assistance crimes — which Reagan read about in news reports, then fastened into a fixture of stump speeches during the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns — became his go-to, ready-baked cautionary tale. Public assistance, he said, was wasteful, run by do-nothing bureaucrats. And the people it served? They were out there buying steaks and lobsters with food stamps. They were living in housing projects as plush as country clubs. And how were the ’70s treating you, struggling middle-class voter? Were you as well off as those people getting something for nothing?

As well as that woman in Chicago?

“Reagan didn’t go into great detail about Taylor’s background, because he didn’t have to in the 1970s,” said Rick Perlstein, the Chicago-based historian best known for his trilogy of books about the rise of conservative politics, including “Nixonland” and “The Invisible Bridge.” “Reagan only had to draw her as symbolically terrifying, with a clear implication she was not alone — there were a thousand Linda Taylors, waiting to bankrupt your city.”

Reagan would tell his supporters she used 80 aliases, 30 addresses, 15 phone numbers. That was true. But he would never mention the far worse crimes she was linked to. And he would never specify her race. He wouldn’t have to. Though Levin notes studies that the percentage of black Americans on public aid remained steady throughout the ’70s — though most Americans getting assistance, then and now, are white — welfare was portrayed in media reports for decades as a black entitlement.

“There was a moral panic in the mid-’70s,” Perlstein said. “Yet whenever (Reagan) pulled out Taylor — whenever he said anything the (political) opposition might use to shame him — he would frame the story in a way to absolve its listeners of embarrassment or racism. People talk of dog whistles and train whistles. Reagan would never call Mexicans ‘criminals.’ But he was naive about how a narrative affected policy.”

Some of the Tribune’s coverage of Taylor can read considerably more insensitive than Reagan’s infamous “welfare queen” speeches — one 1975 headline wondered if Taylor’s talent for grifting people was caused by voodoo.

That said, Reagan’s speeches are lessons in opportunism, distortion and at the very least, blinkered self-awareness — the former president’s own father, an alcoholic who had trouble holding jobs, found his steadiest work as a welfare administrator in Dixon, Ill. And ramifications were vast.

Reagan’s welfare queen energized and outraged voters and helped land him in the White House, where he then worked to cement the belief that the problem with welfare was actually the welfare bureaucracy itself. Which eased pressure on addressing a more nebulous problem, poverty.

And so, for decades, poor families were pulled off of public assistance, leading to the Clinton administration’s later actions to “end welfare as we know it.” Within a decade, the number of children living in poverty in this country more than doubled. Linda Taylor had been an unwitting salvo in what resembles a propaganda war against the poor.

The Tribune wasn’t the first media organization to employ “welfare queen,” but the newspaper popularized the phrase. Then, according to Kate Walz, vice president of advocacy at Chicago’s Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, Reagan weaponized it. “We see the reverberations. We are continually having to explain why people are poor, why they are not undeserving, why it’s not as easy as telling people to pull themselves up by bootstraps. A lot of it goes back to (Reagan’s) narrative, when public benefit programs became slurs. It predates Reagan. But he perfected the idea.”

Levin is long and thin, with an oval face, and a pensive manner. With his sky blue button-down shirt and black-framed eyeglasses, he gives off an aura of NASA mission control wonkiness, circa 1967. He is not from Chicago; he grew up in New Orleans, and has been at Slate since 2003, moving up from editorial assistant to national editor.

Seven years ago, when the online magazine had an initiative that allowed staff to spend a month on a project, he started looking further into an old Jet article about Linda Taylor.

“I didn’t know there was a real person associated with the ‘welfare queen,'” he said. “But also, I was interested I didn’t know about it — I was interested in how something so consequential could be erased from memory and history.”

So did others.

The initial story he wrote about Taylor became one of Slate’s most popular pieces ever, and a few years later, Levin started the book. He dug exhaustively through real estate records, prison records, Cook County court files, Illinois state archives, FBI and Chicago Police Department papers; because Taylor had died at 76 in a nursing home in 2002, he spoke with Taylor’s children, people who knew Taylor, people who knew people who knew Taylor. She had been linked for years to a murder (though was never charged ); Levin linked her with two additional murders — people in Taylor’s orbit had a weird habit of dying just after she was named a recipient of their life insurance policies.

Levin also documented that, though reports tied Taylor to $150,000 in assistance fraud, the amount stolen was likely closer to $40,000, over several years.

He learned a lot about Chicago.

“Like many projects, you start in a place of ignorance, and the more you know, the more you feel you don’t know anything — that felt especially true in Chicago. The way power gets wielded in the city is remarkable.” One judge who had set Taylor’s bail eventually went to jail on corruption convictions; later, another judge who berated a different Chicago “welfare queen” for callous and amoral disregard was found to be fixing trials for money. As for the media, despite Taylor being a suspected kidnapper and murderer, despite links to child trafficking, “institutions slipped into a mode of using her to represent a group of vulnerable people. It’s not like the Tribune wasn’t sympathetic to the needy — the question of willfulness is hard to answer. But there was a lack of appreciating what downstream effects may be.”

Bliss, the reporter most associated with Taylor, was initially writing about the Illinois Department of Public Aid and its disinterest in welfare fraud. “But stories were increasingly about Linda,” Levin said. “Stories about the department don’t mention her, stories about her don’t mention the department. It lacked context — or a note that none of it was typical.”

Bliss was known for government corruption investigations. “He was no ideologue,” said Bill Mullen, a retired Tribune investigative reporter who was close to Bliss. “I couldn’t have told you if he was a Democrat or a Republican.” Bill Recktenwald, who worked with Bliss at the Better Government Association and the Tribune, doubts Bliss even came up with “welfare queen” himself: “George wasn’t a writer, he was a reporter who would return to the newspaper and sit on the edge of a rewrite desk, crafting a story.” Still, Mullen said, “the way the (traditionally conservative) Tribune handled Taylor probably fed into (anti-welfare) sensibilities. And George played along.”

The stories coincided with Reagan’s rise from the California governorship to national politics, and “welfare’s tax burden on the middle class was one leg of the (platform) that he had run long on,” Perlstein said. “He had a big line about people coming to California because welfare rules were so simple there — you could draw assistance after 21 days, he said. In fact, it took five years of residency, then 21 days. But that was typical of him.”

Actually, Reagan’s welfare tales were in keeping with a long tradition, said Heather Hahn, a senior fellow at the the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington where she specializes in public assistance and poverty. “The image of the undeserving poor dates at the very least to the Elizabethan Poor Laws of the 16th century, when the poor had to basically demonstrate their deservingness (generally to clergy who maintained welfare rolls). And it’s a thread running ever since through assistance programs. It’s also a reminder how powerful narrative is in shaping the consequences for how people live.”

After Linda Taylor, she said, the poor “had to jump through hoops to prove they weren’t Linda Taylor.”

Few could have been.

The details of Reagan’s story were so outrageous even Tip O’Neill, speaker of the House, told Reagan he doubted that welfare queen existed. But the Linda Taylor of Levin’s book was far, far more outrageous: She was born Martha Louise White, but tried on a dizzying array of identities, races, addresses. She had five children, kidnapped others and abandoned some, according to Levin’s book and the Tribune’s reporting. She worked as a spiritualist and once identified herself as a heart surgeon. She was Connie Reed, and Connie Harbaugh, and Constance Wakefield, and Connie Green — and many others. She was jailed for welfare fraud and perjury, but never charged with suspected kidnappings or murders. In the mid-’70s, the Tribune linked her to the 1964 abduction of Paul Fronczak, a day-old infant at the former Michael Reese Hospital in Bronzeville. The case remains unsolved, but someone using one of Taylor’s familiar aliases visited the hospital the day of the abduction; Taylor was also seen that day wearing a nurse’s uniform. (She was never charged with the crime.)

“Other than her children, no one had a long-term relationship with Linda,” Levin said. “The pattern was, she would blow into people’s lives, disturb everything in her path, then leave. So (when he talked with people who knew her), I would ask about the weeks or months that they knew her, and then inevitably I would tell them what she had done before and after the time they knew her. Nobody was even aware that she was dead.”

Taylor was a cipher, and Levin decided not to go far beyond that: By the end of the book, we don’t really know why she was the way she was. “If I’m making a critique of the way she was written about, I wanted to be careful not to make what I perceive are the same mistakes and assumptions. You want to say with clarity and rigor who this person was. But she’s just out of reach. It’s not a cop out — it’s honest.”

One footnote to this:

Taylor’s mental health, at various times, was questioned by doctors and lawyers, but remained outside of media accounts of her life. In comparison, in 1978, after rounds of shock treatments and time in a psychiatric facility, Bliss shot his wife to death and killed himself. In a front page story, then-Tribune editor Clayton Kirkpatrick said Bliss was a perfectionist who suffered from extreme depression, and “the terrible burden of mental illness compounded by an awareness of its presence ultimately proved too severe.”

Today, the legacy of the “welfare queen” is seen in the push for work requirements for public-aid recipients; it’s felt in shifts of terminology, from “safety net” to a more loaded “entitlement.” It’s heard in the “false narrative that people on public assistance don’t want to work,” said Hahn of the Urban Institute, “when the reality is most recipients are in low-wage jobs — often several low-wage jobs.”

[Linda Taylor, center, outside a home that she contends was willed to her by Patricia Parks, who died the week before, on June 22, 1975. Taylor was turned away, along with Ann Lewis, left, and their attorney Janet Nottingham.]

It’s felt in the dismantling of the welfare system itself.

But also, Levin said, nodding toward K Street outside his office, it’s seen in the way politicians used the 2015 killing of a woman in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant as proof that the undocumented are dangerous.

“A lack of interest in facts and statistics. The use of a single not-typical story was an example of what’s going on everyday, under our feet. It just all feels strangely familiar.”

[Goddamn, the many Jews in this piece talking about the welfare queen! And who said the media isn’t run and ruled by Jews?]

Newt Gingrich's proposal to put poor children to work because, he says, they're not learning the "work habit" in public housing projects has been condemned by critics as worthy of a Dickens novel.

Those who followed the GOP presidential candidate's tumultuous legislative career in Washington say Gingrich's latest foray into child welfare is not an anomaly.

As House Speaker in the mid-1990s, Gingrich proposed banning welfare benefits for children born to unmarried young women and using the funds to build orphanages for youngsters whose parents were failing them.

At the time, criticism and condemnation rained down on Gingrich.

And so how easy was if for Cunt Trump and Racist South African Elon 110 IW Musk to steal steal steal from the other propagandist America haters — Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Obama, Biden, Trump A (asshole) and Trump B (bastard)?

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, says the economy is still in the soft landing phase, “but there’s a lot of turbulence out there.”

“Tariffs, they’ll definitely have pluses and minuses, you see consternation around the world,” Dimon said on Wednesday in a conversation with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the tech company’s annual summit in Las Vegas. There’s also uncertainty about what going to happen with President Trump's proposed tax plan, he said.

Dimon also expressed concern about geopolitics and the effects of the turbulence on the economy. “I personally think the most important thing happening in the world is what's happening with Ukraine and Russia, and the Middle East. I know that's about the future of a free democratic world.”

Regarding spending in the U.S., “consumers at the low end are basically spending down,” he said, explaining that that means saving money by taking actions like canceling a trip or going to a less expensive restaurant. “People at the high end, their money is down a lot, but they are a lot wealthier; think of homes and stock prices over the last 20 years,” he explained.

But Dimon also wanted to make an important point for all of the leaders in the audience: “The bottom 20% [of earners in the U.S.] didn't get a pay raise for 25 years; they’re dying younger. Their schools aren’t good and they live in crime-ridden neighborhoods.”

Continuing Criminal Enterprise, the real welfare-taxpayer queens: On January 16, 2009, Bank of America received $20 billion and a guarantee of $118 billion in potential losses from the U.S. government through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). This was in addition to the $25 billion given to the bank in the fall of 2008 through TARP.

Thousands of employees returned to the Food and Drug Administration's headquarters Monday to find overflowing parking lots, long security lines and makeshift office spaces without chairs and other basic supplies.

Thousands of employees returned to the Food and Drug Administration's headquarters Monday to find overflowing parking lots, long security lines and makeshift office spaces without chairs and other basic supplies.

The FDA is the latest agency scrambling to meet the Trump administration's return-to-office mandate, part of a flurry of actions — including firings and buyouts — intended to radically shrink the federal workforce. Monday was the first day that all rank-and-file FDA staffers were required to report to offices, including the agency's 130-acre campus just outside Washington.

The Associated Press spoke with more than a half-dozen FDA staffers who described long lines to park and clear security, followed by hours of hunting for space and supplies in offices that were not designed to accommodate the agency's full workforce. The staffers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.

One staffer described "chaos and lost work hours" for commuting, security lines and shuffled office space.

The FDA is the latest agency scrambling to meet the Trump administration's return-to-office mandate, part of a flurry of actions — including firings and buyouts — intended to radically shrink the federal workforce. Monday was the first day that all rank-and-file FDA staffers were required to report to offices, including the agency's 130-acre campus just outside Washington.

The Associated Press spoke with more than a half-dozen FDA staffers who described long lines to park and clear security, followed by hours of hunting for space and supplies in offices that were not designed to accommodate the agency's full workforce. The staffers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.

One staffer described "chaos and lost work hours" for commuting, security lines and shuffled office space.

The cunt media all lined up, that fucking AP, uh, lying about an effort to limit fraudulent claims?

WASHINGTON (AP) — In an effort to limit fraudulent claims, the Social Security Administration will impose tighter identity-proofing measures — which will require millions of recipients and applicants to visit agency field offices rather than interact with the agency over the phone.

Beginning March 31st, people will no longer be able to verify their identity to the SSA over the phone and those who cannot properly verify their identity over the agency’s “my Social Security” online service, will be required to visit an agency field office in person to complete the verification process, agency leadership told reporters Tuesday.

The change will apply to new Social Security applicants and existing recipients who want to change their direct deposit information.

Retiree advocates warn that the change will negatively impact older Americans in rural areas, including those with disabilities, mobility limitations, those who live far from SSA offices and have limited internet access.

And we think judges should not also be shot in parking lots along with the Doge fucks? Fuck you, then.

A federal judge on Wednesday declined to block the White House Department of Government Efficiency's efforts to take over the U.S. Institute of Peace while a legal challenge to President Trump's actions targeting the nonprofit organization moves forward.

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell swiftly moved to consider whether to void the removal of several board members just days after some of them received an email from the White House Presidential Personnel Office informing them that they had been terminated. She was also asked to block staff with DOGE from having access to the Institute of Peace facilities.

Howell, who sits on the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., convened a hearing Wednesday afternoon after five of the removed board members — Ambassador John Sullivan, Judy Ansley, Joseph Falk, Kerry Kennedy and Mary Swig — filed a lawsuit Tuesday that challenged their firing and what they said was an "unlawful assault" on the Institute of Peace, which was established by Congress in 1984.

In addition to the board members, the institute's president, George Moose, was also fired by ex officio board members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice Admiral Peter Garvin. Kenneth Jackson was then installed as the acting president of the Institute of Peace.

[Fucking Jews Jews everywhere! Howell was born in 1956 in Fort Benning, which was renamed Fort Moore during the Biden administration, but is now named Fort Benning again. She is the daughter of an Army officer and is Jewish.^[3] She attended elementary and secondary school in six states and Germany.]

Rats, and if you do not see the rats in these Jews’ faces, then you are antisemitic!

You rat infested Cunt-Tree-Tis-Of-Thee, all you cocksuckers who believed the fucked up democrats and those of you who kissed the festering feet of Rapist in Chief Trump. Die, all of you:

These are you fucking white nationalists, Jewish feet suckers, you fucking democrats and republicans:

Several websites under Pentagon jurisdiction have removed thousands of pages documenting the history of people of color, LGBTQ people, women and others from marginalized backgrounds and their contributions to the American military. Multiple pages about Robinson were taken down, including a page about Negro League players talking about serving in the military. But as of Wednesday afternoon, at least one page about Robinson, in a series about athletes who served in the military, had been reinstated.

“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department," Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said Wednesday in a statement. "Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly.”

Trump is bombarding the Ivy League. This college just hired a staunch ally as its top lawyer.

Matt Raymer, the former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee who has backed ending birthright citizenship, will serve as Dartmouth’s general counsel.

[Our Lord Jesus Christ chose the Jewish race as his Incarnate choice. That honours the Jews and affirms their special status in time and history. — Matt Raymer]

Jan. 24, 2025, that fucking cocksucker, Raymer: If you were wondering how long it would take for Democrats to sue the Trump administration, we have an answer. With the ink barely dry, eighteen Democrat state attorneys general, four additional Democrat state AGs, and a collection of outside groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union all filed federal lawsuits over President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. Their argument, that the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship for practically anyone born here, is flatly wrong as a matter of law. The courts should use this opportunity to get it right.

The 14th Amendment — ratified after the Civil War and ensuring that former slaves were U.S. citizens — provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The plaintiffs focus on the first part, but barely glance at the second, arguing that, with few exceptions (such as the children of foreign diplomats in the United States), anyone born in the United States is “subject to its jurisdiction,” simply by virtue of being within its borders.

+—+

Clinton and Gore, other welfare cheats:

[16 years ago, as both were loving the Epstein trips.]

Presidents are usually effusive, grandiose, and triumphant when they sign major legislation that will form a huge part of their legacy. In 1996, Bill Clinton’s announcement that he’d sign a bill ending "welfare as we know it" was not that.

It was defensive and at times openly apologetic for what was about to happen.

"Some parts of this bill still go too far," he conceded. "This bill still cuts deeper than it should in nutritional assistance, mostly for working families with children."

He probably didn’t know then how true those words would one day turn out to be. Clinton, and now his wife, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, has run hot and cold over the years on the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) — what is now colloquially referred to as "welfare reform."

Ten years after signing the bill, Bill took an enthusiastic victory lap in the pages of the New York Times. "Welfare reform has proved a great success," he declared. And at first, it seemed like he was right. Evidence seemed to indicate that it really did increase employment, and worst-case scenarios liberal critics predicted didn’t come to pass.

Table of contents

I. A brief history of welfare in America
II. The failures of pre-reform welfare
III. Why Bill Clinton signed

Implementation:
IV. At first, welfare reform seemed to be working
V. But later research changed that

Failure:
VI. Welfare reform increased deep poverty
VII. The disaster that is block granting

What is to be done?
VIII. How Democrats have turned on welfare reform

But another 10 years later, the mood changed again. Days before the New York Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton, who once urged her husband to sign the bill, told WNYC that "we have to take a hard look at it again." New research had showed that in fact welfare reform fell short in the depths of the Great Recession — substantially increasing deep poverty and leaving families who can’t find work without any cash safety net.

The Clintons’ statements have mirrored the overall reputation of the bill over time, especially among Democrats. In 1996 the party was all but unanimous about the fact that something had to change with welfare. There was heated debate over whether the changes were acceptable, including within the Clinton administration itself, but ultimately most congressional Democrats voted for the law on the same mixed grounds that Clinton signed it: It wasn’t perfect, but it was a necessary step toward reform.

Now it is a cross Hillary has had to bear during her presidential run, and a topic on which Bernie Sanders and his left-wing intellectual supporters could, and did, attack her mercilessly.

The idea behind welfare reform back in the '90s was that something was deeply broken about the system and needed to change. That was correct. But something else is deeply broken now, and it too needs to change.

Keeping people out of work was a feature, not a bug, of the original welfare program

Food stamps were first conceived as a subsidy to business during the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Agriculture Department had been purchasing surplus crops from farmers and distributing them to hungry families. Food wholesalers and retailers, including the supermarket chains that were just starting to appear (and that marketed themselves as heavy discounters) objected to being cut out of the deal. Food stamps were the resulting compromise. Instead of the government purchasing the surplus food, wholesalers did. The wholesalers sold the food to retailers, who in turn sold it to individuals able to make their purchases with government-issued stamps.

Today’s Republicans fulminate about nonworking couch potatoes who collect food stamps (never mind that most recipients work already; in households with children, 75 percent do unless they’re disabled or elderly). But back in 1939, being unemployed was the reason you went on food stamps; as with most New Deal social welfare programs, the idea was not to punish jobless people, but to help them. Christopher Bosso, a political scientist at Northeastern University and author of the forthcoming Why SNAP Works, told me that eligibility for the New Deal program often depended on the recipient’s being enrolled locally in a relief program: no welfare, no food stamps. (SNAP, or the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, is what food stamps were renamed in 2008, in a half-hearted effort to reduce the stigma, which didn’t take.) The very first recipient, a machinist in Rochester, New York, named Ralston Thayer, was Gaetz’s worst nightmare: 35, able-bodied, and unemployed. “I never received surplus foods before,” Thayer told reporters, “but the procedure seems simple enough, and I certainly intend to take advantage of it.”

Food stamps disappeared as the economy recovered during World War II. In the 1950s, Senator George Aiken, a Vermont Republican, agitated for food stamps’ revival, but the Eisenhower administration wasn’t interested. These were prosperous years when, as Michael Harrington would observe in his 1962 book, The Other America, the poor became invisible, even to liberals. That began to change under President John F. Kennedy, partly because of Harrington’s book, and by 1964 food stamps had been legislated back into being. The Food Stamp Act’s preamble stated as its purpose, first, “to strengthen the agricultural economy”; second, “to help achieve a fuller and more effective use of food abundance”; and only third (oh, yeah), “to provide for improved levels of nutrition among low-income households.” Even so, Republican opposition (combined with resistance from Southern Democrats) nearly tanked the bill. Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts, the Democratic House speaker, finally secured support by tying it to aid for cotton and wheat farmers. {New Republic)