It flies below radar — seldom mentioned or discussed. Never, IIRC, on the front page here.

Welfare Reform — the ultimate New Democrat policy. But because Welfare policy is complicated, and only effect poor people little is said about it. And yet Welfare Reform is the policy that keeps targeting poor people.

So the Atlantic notes today:

Today, in large part because of welfare reform, the safety net—the set of government efforts to come to the aid of the country’s citizens when they are down on their luck, much of which has existed since the Great Depression—is thin and getting thinner. And this thinning goes beyond welfare, which gives needy families cash support: On April 1, between 500,000 and one million childless adults will lose access to food stamps (officially known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP). This is the belated consequence of a rule that was part of Clinton’s welfare reform, which stipulated that childless adults can only receive three months of food stamps if they aren’t employed at least 20 hours a week or in a training program.
I have written before about the war on the poor that is Welfare Reform. The effect has been to gut the safety net. It is an attack on the very poor.

The Atlantic notes:

Living in extreme poverty has very real consequences for families, Shaefer said. Reduced TANF access in states is associated with higher food insecurity, increased child homelessness, a jump in foster-care placement, and more juvenile detention, according to soon-to-be-published research by Shaefer and colleagues. Not having access to cash means people can’t pay the rent and then become homeless, and homelessness leads to stress, which can hurt people emotionally and physically. Families are often forced to sell their food stamps, their plasma, their bodies, to get access to cash to survive on, he said.

Welfare reform had big goals of moving people to self-sufficiency by training them to work. But it did little to create job opportunities or the types of programs that help people stay in jobs once they get them. Instead, they’re on their own.

This was a feature of Welfare Reform, not a bug, as the chart below shows.

The suffering goes largely unnoticed. Too many had a hand in Welfare Reform to admit the pain it has caused. Perhaps many others are ashamed.

It was wedge issue in the ‘96 election that Clinton used to show his New Democrat credentials.

It was not just a GOP policy. It was signed into law by Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton said she supported it in 2008.

It is, and remains, a shameful and indefensible targeting of the poor.