Key Social Safety Net Laws by Alex Acks

Author:Alex Acks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

6

The End of Welfare as We Know It

President Bill Clinton was elected at the tail end of a recession—one that had put 33 percent more families on AFDC. Due partially to years of talk of welfare queens, 81 percent of people responding to a TIME/CNN poll wanted reform of the welfare system, and even more believed that the welfare system of the time stopped poor people from looking for work. Between his election and his reelection, Clinton vetoed two strict welfare reform bills authored by the Republican-controlled Congress; when they presented him with one in 1996 that was significantly less harsh, he signed it on August 22. He coasted to reelection having then fulfilled a campaign promise he made in 1991: He would “end welfare as we have come to know it.”1

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996

“Personal responsibility” related to welfare was a phrase introduced by Ronald Reagan, in parallel with his tales of welfare queens. He used the idea of responsibility to mean a mechanism of accountability: The idea was that if someone was poor because they had made bad decisions, they did not deserve help from the government.2 This is another incarnation of the deserving versus the undeserving poor. The idea of personal responsibility caught hold among both Republican and Democratic politicians, so much so that it found its way into the title of the 1996 welfare reform bill: the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).

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