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Mail
Magazine 24…
Obama
Administration Already Tossed the Food Stamp Work Requirement
by
Kiki Bradley
The
Obama Administration sure is getting defensive about
its recent action to waive all
work requirements in the Temporary
Assistance
for Needy Families (TANF) cash welfare program. But this isn’t the
first time
or the first program in which Obama Administration policy has
undermined work
requirements.
The
welfare reform of 1996 requires that after three months on food stamps,
recipients be engaged in some kind of work activity for at least 20
hours a
week. Tucked away in the mammoth 2009 so-called “stimulus” spending
bill was
the suspension of this requirement for able-bodied adults with no
children. The
suspension expired on September 30, 2010. His next two budgets then
requested that the suspension be extended each year. However, he did
not wait
for Congress to act on these requests; instead his Department of
Agriculture
issued waivers to 44 states and
the District of Columbia freeing them from
implementing the food stamp work requirement.
What
has been the result?
The
number of able-bodied adults without children on food stamps has
doubled, increasing from
1.7 million people in 2009 to 3.9 million
in 2010 and costing taxpayers an extra $400 million per year.
It’s
not surprising, then, that the work requirements in the TANF program
are now on
the chopping block. As my colleague Robert
Rector points out, liberals have a long
history of
opposing work requirements in welfare.
The
sad outcome of the Obama Administration’s action is that millions of
families
on welfare will no longer be engaged in job preparation activities to
help them
enter the workforce and become self-sufficient. Instead, the days that
welfare
reform was supposed to put behind us—of cutting welfare checks to poor
families
and forgetting about them—are back. The future for these needy families
just
got bleaker.
Source:
blog.heritage.org
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the rest of the article at Mail Magazine 24
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