On welfare reform, point by Max Sawicky, posting from Kevin Drum’s place:
The 1996 welfare reform looked good in the late ’90s, but that was when the whole labor market looked really, really good. Since 2000, not so much. Poverty rates, for instance, have consistently gone up since then. People have not been empowered to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Looking to Tyler for enlightenment on anti-poverty programs is like taking Driver’s Ed from Vin Diesel.
Counter-point from Megan McArdle at Bloomberg:
Was welfare reform a good idea?
In the past few years, I’ve started to hear a common complaint from leftish policy wonks about the welfare reforms of 1996. Maybe it was a good idea in the booming labor market of the 1990s, they say. But after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, things went south, and what looked like a good idea at the time has turned out to be a recipe for misery. Max Sawicky referenced that argument Friday at Mother Jones in a post on labor force participation.
Yet if you look at the poverty figures, I don’t think they tell that story.
My view is that there’s no substitute for robust economic growth. Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, libertarian, or socialist you should be unhappy with what’s going on now, what we’re doing now, and what our responses have been.
People have not been empowered to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I wonder what that particular “worthy’s” position on immigration is?