Kausfiles: A mostly political weblog.

What's Breitbart Got Next?

Andrew Breitbart of BigGovernment.com has stopped being subtle about hinting he has another scoop on order for next week. It's apparently not another ACORN story. Patterico speculates about what it is. ...

P.S.: Breitbart's a friend of mine, though I have some fundamental disagreements with him. I'd like to think I'd like him even if he weren't the kind of guy whose good side you want to stay on--because you have a feeling you and everyone you know might be working for him one day. (He has lots of entrepreneurial energy.) But I didn't realize he'd have the course of events all planned out like Hari Seldon in Foundation. ...

P.P.S.: There have been some few-bad-apples, look-who's-acccusing defenses of ACORN around the web. I dunno. ACORN has always seemed one big bad apple to me.**  Everything I've learned or read about them suggests they're not an outfit to be trusted--trusted with voter registration duties' for example. Does anyone think ACORN isn't out to register Dems and elect Dems (or people further to the left)? Would you trust them to deliver your elderly Republican grandmother's absentee ballot? ACORN also conspicuously organized to resist welfare reform after the big 1996 reform law was signed by President Clinton. I'm amazed that any national Democrat who claims to have learned any of the lessons of Clintonism, or even wants to be elected from a non-Berkeleyesque district, would have anything to do with them.

**--Other organizations that produce the same reaction: Fox News, UBS. ... 12:54 A.M.

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Obama's Dems: So It's Quotas and Welfare Again?

American voters say 55 - 36 percent that affirmative action should be abolished

Backfill: Jennifer Rubin explains how explicit race quotas in contracting survived the Supreme Court's 1995 Adarand decision, which many people (me too) thought had killed the practice. "Strict scrutiny" isn't what it used to be. ... No doubt Justice Sotomayor will clean up this mess.

 **--You wouldn't know if you relied on the L.A. Times, which apparently hasn't covered the CalTrans quota controversy (though its competitors have). ... 1:40 A.M.

Why was Pennsylvania relatively unscathed by foreclosures in 2008 while neighboring Ohio was hammered? A friend at a conference I recently attended pointed out the contrast. I don't know the answer, but it might be instructive. ... Update: Thanks to Tom Maguire, who forwards a newspaper article and a summary of three Fed studies on the topic. Regulatory differences are suspected. ... 1:54 A.M.

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Los Angeles Democrats have succeeded in using the state's fiscal crisis to recreate welfare, some thirteen years after the hated federal AFDC entitlement was abolished. The local Dem-controlled Board of Supervisors is proposing to pay mothers for "caring for their own children"--which was the original idea of the welfare program when it was inserted into the New Deal's cash-granting structure in 1935. It seemed to make sense--caring for children is a type of work, after all. Except that subsidizing non-working parenthood--especially single motherhood--turned out to be a recipe for epic social disaster (something that was predicted by not a few dissenting antipoverty activists back in FDR's day). In 1996, Congress finally decided the better policy was to require mothers receiving welfare to work, outside the home, even if that was more expensive than just mailing them checks. At the time, the favored liberal Democratic battle cry was a demand for more day care. But now the Dem Board of Supervisors'  proposes to cut the day care and just mail out the checks again, at least to all mothers with two children under age 6. (Message: Have a second kid and you don't have to go to work!). 

Doesn't Obama's HHS Department have some say in this? Does he really want to resume subsidizing the culture of dependent single motherhood? ... P.S.: If he plays his cards right he could come out for both welfare and quotas in the same week, and give the GOPs a fair shot. ... [via Drudge] 2:07 A.M.

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WaPo media critic Howard "I'm A Star--The Rules Don't Apply to Me" Kurtz, who failed to disclose that he is paid by CNN when he defended CNN in an online chat this week, promises to disclose in the future:

"That was an oversight and won’t be repeated."

We've heard that tune before! ... P.S.: My beef with Kurtz isn't so much that he has a giant crippling conflict of interest (one that would never be tolerated for a Post reporter writing about, say, GM). It's that he has a giant crippling conflict of interest while he runs around chastising other journalists for minor conflicts of interest. Franklin Foer called him an "East German figure skating judge." He once tried to zing me for an Amazon Associates payment of $1.92 (which I'd overzealously disclosed). ... P.P.S.: The Post's Omblogger Andy Alexander produces a laboriously crafted corporate PR-style paragraph defending his employer--

An archival examination of his writings for The Post shows that when CNN has received a significant mention in his columns or stories, they typically end with this disclosure: "Howard Kurtz hosts's CNN's weekly media program, ‘Reliable Sources.'" [Weasel-word emphasis added.]

a) BS; b) What about stories trashing CNN's competitors (without 'significantly' mentioning CNN)? c) This isn't the sort of conflict--getting a paycheck from one of the companies you are covering--that disclosure is held to cure, according to the normal rules of journalism. ...

Update: Bill Wyman argues--and he has a good example--that what Kurtz doesn't write about matters just as much. ... 2:36 A.M.

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Imagine how cool President McCain would be in the Iran crisis. ... Would he go on TV to declare "we are all Moussavists now," or suspend all government activities while he parachuted into Tehran? ... 3:08 A.M.

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The Welfare Issue is Alive, Alive!

Sunday, February 15, 2009

1) A Times of London story highlights worries about the Thermidorian welfare reform backsliding in the stimulus bill. Sample:

Douglas Besharov, author of a big study on welfare reform, said the stimulus bill passed by Congress and the Senate in separate votes on Friday would "unravel" most of the 1996 reforms that led to a 65% reduction in welfare caseloads and prompted the British and several other governments to consider similar measures. 

2) I get an "Even ... liberal blogger" cite. Hahaha. Take that, Even the Liberal New Republic.

3) But the reference to liberalism isn't irrelevant, because the now-undermined welfare reform was the key to rebuilding confidence in (liberal) affirmative government. As Bill Clinton recognized, voters may well have been willing to let government spend, but they didn't trust  old style liberals not to spend in actively destructive ways, like subsidizing an isolated underclass of non-working single mothers with a no-strings cash dole. It's a 75-25 values issue. Work yes. Welfare no. Even if welfare spending was only a tiny portion of the liberals' spending agenda, it poisoned the rest of it. Only when Clinton's New Democrats  put an ostentatious "time limit" on welfare and required work did they regain the public confidence necessary to increase other kinds of spending (on work-related poverty-fighting benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit, day care and Social Security, for example.)

A reemerging "welfare" issue is a potential killer, in other words, for Obama's big remaining plans, especially health care. If Dems seem determined to reinstate dependency--or at the least blind to the dangers of dependency--voters aren't going to trust them to spend trillions on universal health insurance  and fortified pensions. It's hard to believe Obama doesn't realize this.

4) If not, he may soon. I don't think the debate about welfare has been settled by the stimulus' bill's passage. I think it has just begun. I'm not saying this in a morale-maintaining way--"this fight is not over," "Where do we go from here," etc." I mean that, in fact, there has so far been no debate about welfare the way there has been a debate about pork and Keynesian spending. Before the stimulus bill passed, its welfare provisions were hardly mentioned in the NYT and WaPo. They were just bubbling up from The Atlantic's 's website to a Newsday blog last Friday, as Congress was voting. 

Now that the bill has safely passed, even the liberal MSM may feel the obligation to mention them in public. Maybe even in actual print. Reporters have to cover something. More on pork? Welfare seems fresher.

5) In any case, the rump Congressional GOP and talk radio conservatives can force their hand. Why should opponents of the welfare-expanding provisions stop harping on them? Has Obama been asked about his welfare un-reform at a press conference yet? I don't think so. He will have more press conferences. It won't be an easy question to answer. (Reporters could also ask his HHS secretary ... Oh wait. Never mind.)

Welfare is a liberal sore spot that, if Republicans play it right, could become a bleeding open wound for the administration. Voters probably thought they'd settled the dole-vs.-work issue back in 1996. Obama will be fulfilling the crude GOP stereotype of his party if he even waffles on reopening it. 

Remember that Newt Gingirch rode the welfare issue to power after haranguing about "the liberal welfare state" for a few election cycles. The new welfare debate, if it happens, won't necessarily be that prolonged.  The main question is whether the Administration can effectively paper over the meaning  of what's in the stimulus. If not, Congress is still in session. It seems to me there is a real chance for Republicans to get it to "revisit" that part of the bill, as they say in Washington. Obama may decide he needs to excise the most poisonous part of the stimulus to save the rest of his New New Deal.

P.S.: No, the stimulus bill doesn't fully unravel welfare reform--after 1996, welfare is no longer an individual "entitlement," for one thing (a term of art that triggered a whole slew of court-enforced rights). The time limits and work requirements are still at least formally in place. States can still do what they want, in theory, within much broader limits than under the old AFDC program. Many states, with little money to spare, may still refuse to try to expand their caseloads (even if they now have an 80% federal subsidy to do it). A debate on the issue might, in fact, help ensure that states don't go crazy and recreate the bloated and socially disastrous welfare caseloads of the three decades before 1996.

More important, the debate would stop the Money Liberals in the Washington "antipoverty community"--e.g., Peter Edelman and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities crowd-- before they can complete the rest of their agenda, which does involve unraveling welfare reform (eliminating work requirements, for example). Preserving Clinton's biggest domestic achievement isn't something you should want "even" if you're a liberal who believes in affirmative government. It's something you should want especially if you're a liberal who believes in affirmative government. 3:20 A.M.

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Not Faster Enough

Friday, February 13, 2009 

MSM (in the form of Newsday) only now just waking up to the welfare-expanding, work-relaxing clauses hidden in the stimulus bill. ... It's not like it's the day of the vote. ... Newsday was tipped off by Ambinder's page, apparently. ... A couple more weeks of debate and, who knows, maybe the story would filter up to the New York Times (though it would still have to get past the paper's "meddling" editors.**). ... [Thanks to reader S.]

**-- "Every hour, a new set of instructions on what the story should say came from New York, believe it or not."--Dean Baquet. ... 3:33 P.M.

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Got Juice?

Marc Ambinder is now onto the stimulus' "get-more-people-on-welfare" provisions, even if nobody else is. He offers a summary of the issue and then a Dem response (even though his summary included Dem responses). A few points.

1) Ambinder writes

a number of conservatives and even liberals have written to me wondering why the GOP isn't making more of a fuss about this. The answers are fairly simple: they want to avoid being seen as poor-people bashers, they know that Americans still associate welfare with minorities, and there are different sensitivities they must consider when making political claims about the priorities of the first black president. [E.A.]

If Republicans are unwilling to defend work over welfare because we have a black president(!), they might as well all retire en masse now. Hard to believe even GOP consultants are dumb enough to give this advice.

2) See, the MSM doesn't care! Ambinder's anonymous Dem responder argues

A pretty clear lesson of the four-year long welfare reauthorization debate was that there wasn't much political juice left in the issue -- didn't exactly see it on page one much, did you? [E.A.]

Hmm. Maybe that's because the reauthorization debate didn't threaten to roll back reform, and the caseloads were down. Now a) the Dems are starting to roll back reform, in order to encourage states to b) get caseloads back up. ... And there's something fallacious (i.e. circular) about a liberal Dem citing MSM coverage as if the New York Times was an infallible oracle of the people, as opposed to an infallible oracle of liberal Dems. This is what you see when you look up "cocooning" in the dictionary! ...

3) Ambinder's anonymous Democrat says his party has always been suspicious of the "caseload reduction credit," fearing that states will just push people off the rolls in order to get the credit (whether or not those recipients find jobs).

Why exactly should a state get credit towards the work participation standards just because they have fewer people on the caseload?  The evidence is pretty clear that it's not like 100% of people who leave welfare get jobs

A fair point--except that in this case it's the Dems who are preserving the caseload reduction credit. They don't want states to have to meet the "work participation standards" (i.e. make recipients work or train) so they've written the bill to let them to wriggle out of them using the "reduction" credit even when, as Dems intend, their caseloads start expanding. ... P.S.: As with "card check," Ambinder is a bit off on the details, in a spun-by-Dem-sources direction. He writes, confusingly,

States get "casework reduction credits" for the number of people they move off of the rolls; these credits help states meet a mandated 50% threshold for their TANF recipients to perform some type of work-related activity.   The idea here -- if I'm reading the bill correctly -- is that the caseload reduction credit would effectively be "updated" to account for economic emergencies. State would get more welfare funds without letting their threshold dip below 50%. 

But the effect of the Dem stimulus' "caseload reduction" finagling is precisely to let the mandated "work participation" standards dip below 50% of the caseload. Example: Suppose a state's caseload was 100 in 2005. Then it dropped to 85 in 2007 and 80 in 2008 before rising to 90 in 2009 and (thanks to the stimulus' new federal incentives for caseload expansion) 110 in 2010. The stimulus bill lets states pretend that the caseload has stayed at 80, giving them a "reduction credit" of 20%  from the 2005 baseline. This credit is deducted, point by point, from the 50% "work participation" requirement--meaning that our hypothetical state would only have to get 30% of its recipients into work or training activities. For the other 70%, it's "come on down and get your cash--and stick around since the feds are now paying most of the bill." 

4) Ambinder says

Democrats respond, forcefully, that in ordinary recessions, unemployment benefits might tide families over, but during a mini-depression, there are no jobs to push welfare recipients into.

That's true, in at least some cases--though DeParle reports that some state administrators say there are still jobs of the type welfare recipients typically take. But lack of jobs isn't a reason to loosen work requirements. It's a reason for the government to provide the jobs. Have the Dems never heard of "workfare"? Give recipients useful community service work, and if they do the work then they get the cash. Simple. They can hold their heads up.

Of course, Dems have heard of workfare--and they know that AFSCME hates workfare (fearing ex-recipients will do their jobs for less). But AFSCME is pushing on an open door. Money Liberals don't really need to be pressured into relaxing work requirements. They've never liked work requirements, including "workfare," and are always looking for an excuse to say "It's OK to come back on the dole." 

And the "mini-depression" is certainly no reason recipients can't be required to train (or if necessary go to school and get their GEDs).

P.P.S.: Stimulus welfare provisions a potential issue in the fight over Gillibrand's seat? We'll see about that juice. .. 12:58 P.M.

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Nastier, Please!

Thursday, February 12, 2009  

That was fast: 1) First video attacking the welfare-expanding provisions hidden in the stimulus package, from 24th State. Pointed and danceable! But not an attack ad directed at a specific, vulnerable Dem who voted for the bill. That's what we want. In my neck of the woods a vulnerable incumbent might be Jane Harman, for example. But you could pick any of Rahm's 2006 red-state recruits. Or a purplish Dem Senator (Bayh, Dorgan, Lincoln).  Do they want to defend against the charge that they voted to undermine Clinton's biggest domestic achievement? 

2) Senator Richard Burr, Republican from North Carolina, has cited the welfare provisions when justifying his opposition to the stimulus bill in the local press:

He said he did not like some provisions, such as an extension of the Davis-Bacon act and what he calls a rollback of the 1990s welfare reform, in the bill.

The Davis-Bacon Act requires people getting federal contracts to pay a prevailing wage, which Burr said is usually interpreted as the highest wages in an area. He said  the bill also hampers efforts to get people off the welfare rolls.

3) Quin Hillyer of American Spectator thinks the welfare issue is the last hope for sinking the whole package (his goal, not mine). He wants "hundreds of thousands of citizens" to flood Congressional offices with questions on the subject. Better call fast! ...

4)  Congressional Democrats, in their handouts, routinely bury the welfare news (if it's mentioned at all) under more popular talk of unemployment insurance and "Making Work Pay" tax cuts. The one internal Dem flyer I've seen refers only cryptically, at the very bottom of the page, to "keeping ... Temporary Assistance for Needy Families [the basic welfare program] from being overloaded." No mention of expanding it even where it's not necessarily "overloaded" and relaxing work and training requirements. It's entirely possible many Congressional Democrats don't know how bad the bill's welfare provisions are. .. 

5) Meanwhile, the silence in the NYT's news pages and in WaPo (and on the evening news) has been kind of deafening, no? Even Jason DeParle, in a piece specifically about welfare ("The 'W' Word") managed to not even mention the stimulus bill's actual welfare-expansion provision. If I were paranoid I'd say it's almost as if the MSM was in on the conspiracy! ... 9:09 P.M.

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Time to Unleash You Tube Again?

National Review says there's "not much" Republicans can do about provisions in the stimulus intended to expand welfare caseloads and undermine the work requirements of the landmark 1996 welfare reform law. That may be true. But there is something National Review's readers--and others who'd like to defend welfare reform--can do.

During the immigration debate of 2007, an emailer suggested that one way readers might influence Congress would be to "go ahead and mash up some negative ads" on the issue and post them on You Tube. Readers responded, and some of the ads were quite good. I think they had an impact--not by swaying public opinion, but by striking fear into heart of legislators by demonstrating what they might face in their reelection campaigns if they voted for the Bush-McCain semi-amnesty bill. The bill died.

It wouldn't be hard to do the same thing with the anti-welfare-reform provisions in the stimulus bill. Again, the idea would not be to influence the public. The idea would be to directly terrify Democratic legislators worried about their reelections by giving them a taste of how their vote might play. (It helps that many politicians are generally terrified of You Tube and other new information technologies they can't control.) Obama aide Rahm Emanuel, for one, is known to be sensitive to the political potency of "wedge" issues like welfare and immigration.

As with immigration, the basic text of the ads practically writes itself: "In 1996, Congress passed the landmark. .. . Caseloads fell by 70 percent. ... Now Congressman X wants to undo that success ..." etc. But I don't have the skill or creativity to do the job of putting one of these ads together, let alone to do the job well. Some of you do. 

It's probably too late. The House is scheduled to vote on the stimulus package ... er, tomorrow.** But things move fast these days! And even if the bill passes, if there is enough of a stink embarrassed (or terrified) legislators might change it. Anyway, it seems worth a shot. 

If you build them, I will link.

**--I'm assuming the welfare provisions are still in the bill. [Update: They are, I'm told. $5 billion to expand welfare.] They were in both the House and Senate versions. ... My goal isn't to use the welfare issue to sink the stimulus, if that were even possible. It is to get the welfare provisions removed or reversed. Your goals may vary. 

More: Why would Republicans make an issue of marsh mice when they have welfare, a proven hot button (for good reason)? Hello?. ... They could even be bipartisan about it, noting that it's Clinton's achievement that's being undermined. ... P.S.: Maybe it's no accident-- the GOPs secretly want the welfare provision to pass and hope the resulting caseload boom will be a good issue to run on in 2010. They're saving their best shot for later. But that would be unpatriotic! It would also demonstrate an uncharacteristic amount of long-term thinking. ... 11:34 A.M.

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Turning Over the Rock

Robert Rector and Katherine Bradley note that the anti-welfare-reform provisions in the stimulus bill aren't as bad as I'd feared. They're worse. They attempt replicate the fiscal mechanics of the old welfare (AFDC) "entitlement," but with a bigger incentive to welfare expansion:

For the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseloads. Indeed, the new welfare system created by the stimulus bills is actually worse than the old AFDC program because it rewards the states more heavily to increase their caseloads. Under the stimulus bills, the federal government will pay 80 percent of cost for each new family that a state enrolls in welfare; this matching rate is far higher than it was under AFDC.

12:58 P.M.

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If the election were held today, would Republicans retake the House? Michael Barone finds the Dem generic ballot plunge "astonishing," though he acknowledges it might be ephemeral. ... P.S.: Ramesh Ponnuru argues

Republicans would probably be better off if they spent less time pointing out the Democratic plan's flaws and more time talking up their favored economic fixes.

I dunno. If Barone is right, they're doing OK pointing out the flaws. (It's their fixes that are unappealing.) If the GOP's leaders had pointed out the Welfare Restoration provisions a little earlier, for example, they might have had a much bigger impact. ... P.P.S.: Remember when, during the Bush Social Security debate, responsible types urged Pelosi to present a Democratic alternative? She refused, and stuck to attacking the Bush plan. It worked. ... 12:52 P.M.

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Slouching toward 1994: The Corner reports that the Senate has dropped a requirement that employers who get stimulus money use the E-verify hiring system to screen out illegal workers. ... Update: But it's in the House bill, and could still be included in conference. Krikorian has more:

 If Reid and Pelosi do strip the E-Verify provisions from the bill, they'd give Republicans an easy-to-explain reason to vote no: "The Democratic leadership rejected bipartisan measures to ensure that the jobs created would go only to Americans and legal immigrants, and we're not going to mortgage our great-grandchildren's future to create jobs for 300,000 illegal aliens."

Stimulus jobs for illegals! Restore welfare as we knew it! Maybe I'm wrong about where the electorate's anti-Dem hot buttons are located, but it sure seems as if Reid and Pelosi are determined to unearth them and push them. ... You almost think they're not bringing up gays in the military because it won't turn the voters sufficiently against them. ... By the time they get to "card check" in the summer they'll have rubbed the public raw, no? ..  12:39 P.M.

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It's not nice to piss off Heather Mac Donald. ... 12:36 P.M.

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The Money Liberal Conspiracy At Work

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 

As promised, here are the gory mechanics of the liberal conspiracy to expand welfare rolls through an insufficiently publicized provision in the stimulus bill:

Under the welfare reform regime established in 1996, states were basically required to engage 50% of their caseload--mainly single mothers--in some kind of "work activity" (workfare, job search, training, etc.). But there was a problem with this half-the-caseload requirement: What about would-be recipients who got off the rolls entirely when the states found jobs for them--or who were diverted into jobs before they ever signed up for welfare?  Shouldn't states be able to count these "successes" toward the 50% requirement? You wouldn't want to give states an incentive to somehow keep these people on welfare in order to count them. Thus was born the "caseload reduction credit," which let states count the net decline in their caseloads against the 50% work requirement.

Fair enough. But because caseloads declined dramatically after 1996--they've gone down by two-thirds--the "caseload reduction credit" effectively absolved many states of the requirement to get half of their caseloads working. When Congress reauthorized welfare reform it updated the baseline to 2005. States could still take the credit for any reductions after that date. Many did so, as caseloads continued to fall.

Now, though, Congressional Democrats want to encourage states to expand their caseloads, offering billions of federal dollars in the "stimulus" package as an incentive to do so. But wait, if states expand their welfare caseloads as the Dems want, they'd lose the "caseload reduction credit," since their caseloads would not, in fact, have been reduced. They might then have to start enforcing the "work activity" requirements on those caseloads. Can't have that! That might discourage states from expanding welfare, for one thing, since enforcing work requirements costs money, and states have no money. And Congressional Money Liberals** never liked work requirements much in the first place. The last thing they want to do is increase them. (Their whole theory is that the many single-mom recipients are "hard-to-employ" types with "multiple problems" who basically need to be supported on the dole.) What's a good Money Liberal to do?

Answer: Rewrite the law, in the stimulus package, to let states expand their caseloads but pretend, for "caseload reduction credit" purposes, that the caseloads have declined. Specifically, the revision would allow states take the credit they would have gotten based on their caseloads in 2007 or 2008 even if their caseloads soar (as the Dems would like) in 2009 and 2010.

In other words, they can expand their caseloads but still use the now-fictitious "reduction credit" to avoid the law's work requirements.

Lots of new people on welfare. Lower work obligations. The best of both worlds for welfare-unreforming Dems.

The major difference between the House and Senate versions of this deeply troubling provision, apparently, is that the Senate allocates only $3 billion to induce states to expand their caseloads, while the House bill might spend more than twice as much.

P.S.: On bloggingheads my colleague Bob Wright routinely ridiculed me as paranoid for worrying that if Democrats got back in power they would unravel welfare reform. Even I thought I was paranoid. If only for political purposes, I figured, Dems would have to wait a few months or years before sabotaging Bill Clinton's major domestic achievement. It took them two weeks. ... 

**--By "Money Liberals" I mean liberals who define the equality they seek entirely in economistic terms. Confronted with the indignity of poverty, Money Liberals seek to end it by the simple expedient of sending cash to the poor. Money Liberalism, in this definition, ignores non-material distinctions, like those between those who work and those who don't, that (in an alternative, more Clintonian view) are fundamentally bound up in our ideas of dignity and civic respect (i.e. social equality). Specifically, an able-bodied person who fails to work and relies instead on the dole can't have full respect in our society, and shouldn't. The attempt to confer equal respect by spreading around cash--as opposed to guaranteeing work, and making work pay--is doomed. (More here, esp. the exciting footnote 2 on page 192). 3:05 P.M.

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Boehner Squawks

Monday, February 9, 2009

GOP House leader John Boehner has issued an "alert" saying the stiumulus bill "undermines the 1996 welfare reforms by promoting bigger welfare rolls and expecting less work and less training on the part of government welfare recipients." Boehner cites not only the bill's fiscal reward for state caseload expansion, but also some "complicated" funny business involving "‘caseload reduction credits." (I will try to figure that out.**) ...  [Tks. to R.N.]

**--Michael Tanner offers a semi-explanation. ("It also shifts the base for states caseload reduction bonuses in a way that will discourage states from holding down the growth in welfare ...") 1:41  P.M.

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kf Goes In the Tank

I saw my friend and Slate contributor Tom Geoghegan speak in L.A. at a fundraiser for his Congressional run.** He wasn't as good as I expected. He was much better. The joy of Geoghegan is that he usually has a big interesting new theory, often a (dare I say it) contrarian one.  He can be earnest, but that's soon subverted by a fleeting isn't-this-all-absurd smile. What I didn't expect is that he'd be tightly focused--paring his pitch down to three points. You can hear them here. At least two of them aren't things you'll find in the official Ambitious Dem Playbook.. ... Plus he's able to disagree with his audience in an agreeable way, a non-trivial gift ...  Plus he only mentioned "card check" once. ... P.S.: Katha Pollitt got it right, I think, when she said that Geoghegan could be the next Paul Wellstone--meaning a left-liberal who's liked and respected by those to his right (i.e.,everyone). ... Reminder: Geoghegan is pro-union but he's well aware of the deficiencies of "interest group liberalism." ...
**-- I gave $250. ... 1:59 A.M.
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That welfare-expanding provision remains in the Senate stimulus compromise, alas, the language of which has now been released.  (You can read it here.) I can't help but think that if even a few Republicans squawked the potentially damaging publicity might force the Dems to drop it or at least rewrite it (to fund hard hit states, for example, whether or not they expand their welfare caseloads). ... Update: The New York Times gives the game away by explicitly calling for "rolling back work requirements" in an editorial endorsing the stimulus welfare provision. These are people who never liked welfare reform's work requirements in the first place. ... 1:16 A.M.

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Hello? GOPs? Your favorite wedge issue is coming back.

Shouldn't Republicans be making more of a fuss about the provision in the stimulus bill--both House and Senate versions, apparently--that spends $2-3 billion to the states for "temporary welfare payments"? I initially thought Charles Hurt of the N.Y. Post was being alarmist when he suggested the provision would "drastically undo two decades of welfare reforms." The essence of the 1996 reform was ending the individual legal entitlement to AFDC (cash aid to single mothers, basically) and replacing it with state-run programs that, in theory, require recipients to enter the work force. The stimulus bill doesn't rip up that basic deal, as I understand it. But it is part of a larger liberal campaign** to use the recession to weaken work requirements and let millions of non-working single mothers back on the welfare rolls. Specifically, it would apparently reward states that expand their welfare caseloads--even if the increase is only the product of loosened work requirements rather than a worsening local economy.

Nothing wrong with helping states avoid anti-stimulating cuts in a recession. Nothing wrong with targeting money to the poorest, who are most likely to spend it quickly. But why use the aid specifically to encourage expansion of welfare? This isn't "welfare" as only conservative Republicans would define it--i.e. any means-tested assistance. This is welfare as everyone would define it--cash assistance to able-bodied single mothers (or fathers) who may or may not be working, as in the old, despised AFDC program. Better to use the money (and more) to create public jobs*** for these would-be recipients if private sector jobs have dried up, even if that upsets municipal employee unions (which don't want welfare recipients doing jobs their members might do).  Don't revive the old AFDC principle that if you have a child, you can count on the government to take care of you with cash aid even if you don't work.

At the very least the extra aid to the states shouldn't be triggered by caseload expansion. (You could, for example, give states aid in proportion to their local unemployment rate.)

You would think this would be a potential killer issue for the GOPs--"See, the Democrats already want to undo welfare reform"--and Obama, being sensitive to the charge, might quickly back down. It's easiest to whack the camel when only its nose is in the tent, no?

More tk, as I find out more. ...

**--See, for example, Peter Edelman's comments here.

***--These could either be "workfare" jobs (required once you are receiving welfare) or last-resort WPA-style jobs (which pay people for their work without ever signing them up for welfare). ...

Update: Thanks to Rob Neppell, here is the relevant provision in the House bill, and in the pre-compromise Senate bill. The Nelson/Collins compromise language does not seem to be available yet. ... Note that the extra federal money seems clearly tied to increased welfare caseloads, not increased unemployment or poverty or other measure of need:.

A State meets the requirement of this clause for a quarter if the average monthly assistance caseload of the State for the quarter exceeds the average monthly assistance caseload of the State for the corresponding quarter in the emergency fund base year of the State.

If a state somehow succeeds at placing would-be recipients in jobs, it's out of luck under this provision. To get the extra federal money, it has to get more people on welfare (though presumably it could count "workfare" participants if it happens to have a workfare program). ....2:52 P.M.

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