Alex Pareene on Salon points out that the $40,000,000,000 in cuts to SNAP that the House GOP passed is just the logical continuation of the GOP view of the “welfare reform” of 1996. The events of that time have been examined and here’s part of what has been found.
The Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published a report in 2006 on the failure of welfare reform as politics, and not as policy. (As policy it was a huge success if you consider the goal to be “getting people off welfare” and a mixed bag if your aim is “provide adequate levels of support for needy people.”) These were the Clinton administration arguments for supporting a very conservative reformation of welfare:
Influenced by the arguments David Ellwood advanced in Poor Support, Clinton and his aides originally hoped to bargain for stronger social supports as a condition of imposing stronger work requirements and time limits on welfare receipt. After the Republicans captured Congress (and the reform agenda) in 1994, however, a more sequential political strategy emerged: restrictive behavioral rules passed now would make it easier to gain public support for social benefit expansions in the future. Dick Morris, Bruce Reed, and other centrist Clinton advisors argued that “the welfare restrictions — time limits and work requirements — would do more than revamp one discredited program. [They] would help create a political climate more favorable to the needy. Once taxpayers started viewing the poor as workers, not welfare cheats, a more generous era would ensue. Harmful stereotypes would fade. New benefits would flow. Members of minorities, being disproportionately poor, would disproportionately benefit. President Clinton signed welfare reform into federal law in August 1996.
The paper seeks to answer two questions: Whether welfare reform improved public perception of, and support for, government assistance to the poor (it didn’t); and whether embracing reform led more people to support Democrats. (“We find no evidence that the Democratic Party benefited from welfare reform,” the authors say.) Nothing Morris and Reed predicted came to pass. Democrats gave conservatives a public policy victory and in return they won nothing besides perhaps a short-lived “truce” on the use of explicitly racial “welfare” attacks against Democrats in national campaigns. That truce lasted approximately as long as it took for Democrats to regain the White House. And now Republicans can point to this reform — a bipartisan reform pushed by a Democratic president! — as precedence for their proposal to slash spending on poor people even more.
Pareene ascribes the push to push millions of people off of food stamps and cut the benefits for many of those who remain on the program to simple cruelty. I think he’s right but it’s not cruelty aimed at at the people who are on food stamps. It’s cruelty aimed at the people the GOP and their supporters think are on food stamps, like Jason Greenslate in this piece from NPR. In their view he is not only undeserving of food stamps because of his empty headed misuse of them, but a good example of the people receiving food stamps and yes, most modern conservatives do hate them. Just go to conservative web sites discussing this issue or read the comments on pretty much any web site addressing it that conservatives make. It makes it easy to justify letting them go hungry when you are convinced that it will be their fault when they do. In this worldview, people are poor by choice and those who receive food stamps or any other government benefits choose to not work and be eligible for those programs. In the real world, as the NPR piece points out, the vast majority who receive SNAP are either children, disabled, elderly or work.
The ongoing effort to slash programs for the poor is changing the political argument when it comes to supporters of programs versus their opponents. Pareene ends his piece with this.
If you want to know why left-leaning Democrats oppose “modest” “reforms” to Social Security and Medicare, look at food stamps and welfare. If you want to know why even a change as “progressive” sounding as “means testing” — lowering benefits only for richer retirees — is opposed by liberals, look at food stamps and welfare. Co-opting the conservative line on anti-poverty programs did nothing to halt conservative attacks on anti-poverty programs. Programs aimed strictly at the poorest Americans are always and forever under assault from a Republican Party that still has not dared to cut spending on programs — like Medicare and crop insurance — that also benefit the rich. The “Grand Bargain” is always going to accelerate the destruction of the safety net.
I think he’s right. In spite of their constant claims that they have no interest in eliminating the social safety net, the endgame of conservative strategy to cut it and cut it again will be the death of a thousand cuts. I don’t believe they will ever say “Enough.” when it comes to cuts so long as they can use the image of the welfare queen or its equivalent to their poltical advantage.