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Welfare reform at ten

August 17, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward

In August 1996, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the historic legislation that dramatically reformed one of America’s failed welfare programs, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. AFDC was replaced by a new plan, designed largely by Heritage’s Robert Rector, that had three primary goals:

  1. Reduce welfare dependence and increase employment;
  2. Reduce child poverty; and
  3. Reduce illegitimacy and strengthen marriage.

Ten years later, Robert Rector explained last month to members of the House Ways and Means Committee, “welfare reform has been effective in meeting each of its goals.” Liberal critics of the reform predicted at the time that the changes would bring only misery. But despite these gloom-and-doom predictions about restoring individual responsibility, Rector said in his testimony, the reform has been an astounding success.

  • Child poverty has fallen. Some 1.6 million fewer children live in poverty today than in 1995.
  • Decreases in poverty have been greatest among black children. The poverty rate among black children has fallen at an unprecedented rate from 41.5 percent in 1995 to 32.9 percent in 2004.
  • Unprecedented declines in poverty also occurred among children of single mothers. After the enactment of welfare reform, the poverty rate for children of single mothers fell from 50.3 percent in 1995 to 41.9 percent in 2004—three times the decrease between 1971 and 1995.
  • Welfare caseloads were cut in half, from 4.3 million families to 1.89 million today.
  • Employment of single mothers has surged. The employment rate of the most disadvantaged single mothers increased from 50 percent to 100 percent.
  • The explosive growth of out-of-wedlock childbearing has come to a near standstill. Although the rate has continued to inch up slowly, the increase is far slower than in the pre-reform period.

Dependence on government has also decreased. America has in the past decade witnessed a 57-percent decline in the number of people on welfare rolls, which today stand at their lowest level since 1969. But the 1996 welfare reform affected only one out of nearly 70 programs, and more needs to be done to end the federal subsidies that contribute to a cycle of poverty and family breakup. Heritage continues to press for these essential reforms.

To celebrate this important anniversary, The Heritage Foundation is hosting a conference on Thursday afternoon.

Federal judge: don’t monitor terrorists

A federal judge has ordered the National Security Agency to suspend its Terrorist Surveillance Program, which monitors terrorist communications initiated overseas. The judge ruled the program unconstitutional, saying that it violates the rights to free speech and privacy.

Heritage legal expert Todd Gaziano said in February, though, that “during war, it is the President’s obligation to intercept every [enemy] communication that he can reasonably make use of” to defeat the al Qaeda terrorists. Normal warrant requirements still apply to domestic criminal investigations, he added.

Reports indicate that American monitoring of terrorist communications helped British police last week as they foiled a plot to destroy ten airliners. Time magazine, for instance, reports that “U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts of the group's communications.”

Don’t appease radical Islam

There’s disturbing news from Britain. A recent letter from prominent British Muslims to Prime Minister Tony Blair “is a thinly veiled threat: Britain should expect more terror attacks unless it changes its worldview,” Heritage’s Nile Gardiner reports. “The letter does not condemn the terrorists involved, attempting instead to establish moral equivalence between the Anglo-American-led war on terror and the actions of brutal terrorists.”

Gardiner, director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, said the letter “is the modern-day equivalent of the anti-British propaganda spewed by fascists in the 1930s and 1940s.” He added that it raises questions about possible “collaboration between some Muslims organizations and radical Islamists.”

Appeasement of this sort increases the chances that terrorists will again strike on British soil, Gardiner continues. He calls on Britain’s political parties to condemn the letter, and says British Muslims must unequivocally reject Islamic extremism and terrorism.

Signing statements—the right call for the President

Liberals have recently criticized President Bush for his alleged misuse of “signing statements,” a proclamation of how the executive intends to carry out the law. They claim that the President must enforce a law, even an unconstitutional law. The American Bar Association even argued that the President must enforce any law he signs “unless and until they are held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court or a subordinate tribunal.”

“The ABA has it exactly wrong,” Heritage legal scholars Ed Meese and Todd Gaziano write in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal (available to subscribers only). “In fact, the president has an obligation not to enforce unconstitutional parts of statutes (and not to interpret them in ways that would render them unconstitutional) under the Constitution, which requires the chief executive to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’”

“When the courts have not yet ruled on a particular issue, the president must make the initial call on the constitutionality of proposed legislation,” continue Meese, a former Attorney General and Heritage’s Reagan Fellow, and Gaziano. “If he determines that a provision is unconstitutional, he has no duty to enforce it.”

In other news

  • A new report from the Conressional Budget Office suggests, to no one’s surprise, that the federal government will go deeper into the black in future years. Congress should rein in its spending problem by slashing spending on wasteful and duplicative programs and implementing real reforms on out-of-control entitlement spending.
  • Heritage hosted a discussion yesterday about holding companies liable for the actions of individuals, a practice the panel held to be largely wrongheaded and counterproductive.
  • A new humor website, TerroristTipSheet.com, gives terrorists key insights into America’s efforts to thwart their deadly plots. And what’s the source of this information? The New York Times.
  • In an interview with Germany’s Spiegel, former President Jimmy Carter said Israel was not justified in its retaliation against the Hezbollah terrorists who kidnapped Israeli soldiers and deliberately targeted civilians with missiles.

Coming up at Heritage

To attend these or any other Heritage Foundation events, RSVP at Heritage’s events website. Or you can watch these events live online at Heritage.org. All times are Eastern.

  • On Wednesday, September 20 at noon, Heritage hosts a special screening of Things of the Spirit, a film on the personal and political life of President Calvin Coolidge, who was more than the “capitalist tool” he’s remembered as.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.