Bill Clinton gets personal

Well, it took Bill Clinton a long time to get to the heart of his speech. But what a mighty heart it proved to be. What a giant enterprise. He set himself singlehandedly to counter a billion dollars in attack ads, to break through the core Republican lies and obfuscations.  The big ones, the ones about high-stakes policy: Obama is gutting Medicare. Obama is gutting welfare reform.   Huge cuts to Medicaid won't devastate the poor, the nursing home population, the disabled.  Obama is exploding the debt.  Romney will cut taxes by $5 trillion and reduce the debt.

Listen to me, he said repeatedly in the epic debunk session. He said it secure in the authority conferred by eight years of successful budget combat. Unlike other speakers (who else could take/command the time?) he drilled down in (sometimes fudged) detail. Republicans quadrupled the debt in the 12 years before I took office and doubled it in the eight years after I left office. Listen to me. Obama's state waivers for welfare work requirements are to enable initiatives to increase job placements, not diminish them. This is personal for me -- to claim the opposite is just not true. Obamacare's Medicare cuts are to insurer and provider reimbursements, not coverage for seniors.  I want you to listen -- by erasing the ACA's Medicare cuts, the Republicans will bid fair to end Medicare by 2016.

The Waiver President

Hey, Republicans, I've got a new attack ad for you. Obama wants to gut educational standards. He said so, in a Las Vegas high school this week:

we’ve worked with Democrats and Republicans to fix No Child Left Behind.

So here in Nevada, a waiver has been granted because we want high standards but we don’t want teachers teaching to the test.  (Applause.)  We told governors and their states that if you’re willing to set higher, more honest standards for our kids, we’re going to give you more flexibility to meet them -- because what works best in New York might not work as well in Nevada, and vice versa.

Yah, fix it like his HHS secretary "fixed" welfare:

HHS is encouraging states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of TANF, particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment.  Therefore, HHS is issuing this information memorandum to notify states of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.

As The American Prospect goes, so goes the American prospect?

Answering The American Prospect's call to readers to help save the magazine from extinction, I donated some money and subscribed.  Honestly, I don't know if I'd ever even seen the print edition before my first issue arrived a couple of days ago. May it not be the last!  It's "The Poverty Issue," taking grim stock five decades after the U.S. declared war on poverty, and it's terrific.

Mark Levinson, writing about measurement of poverty, gives us to understand that by the most credible measures, there are currently between 69 and 100 million poor people in America. Roughly one third to one quarter of the nation is, if no longer ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished, still unable to meet a Basic Needs Budget with any consistency.  Peter Edelman, Bill Clinton's onetime Assistant HHS Secretary who resigned in protest when Clinton signed the Republican welfare reform law (which Edelman reminds us, knocked 10 million people off the welfare rolls), examines why the percentage of Americans in poverty stalled for 30 years after 1970 and backslid in the past decade -- mainly because "well-paying industrial jobs disappeared to other countries  and to automation"  and because we allowed unions' strength to erode rather than to migrate to the kinds of jobs that have filled the void.

Edelman offers various policy prescriptions to rebuild the middle class, and the article headline insists, "..We Can Solve This." While that would doubtless be true for a government with the desire and freedom to act, it's hard to imagine this generation of Americans mustering a fraction of the political will that would be required:

Cutting welfare in a recession: what doesn't go round doesn't come round

Today the Times reports on the effects of the 1996 welfare reform law in the Great Recession: the new rules enabled state governments to further cut their welfare rolls as unemployment and state budget shortfalls soared

In addition to the widespread misery caused by bumping resource-less people off the welfare rolls or reducing benefits, the welfare cuts enabled by the 1996 law must be one enabler of the overall reductions in government spending that distinguish this recession from previous ones. Paul Krugman has contrasted the  growth of state and local government spending in the wake of the Reagan recession by this point in Reagan's first term with the overall drop in such spending that has taken place during Obama's term, arguing that the difference more than accounts for the difference in the rate at which unemployment dropped in the two periods. (Unemployment in Reagan's first term dropped from a peak of 10.8% in December 1982 to 7.4% in October 1984. In Obama's term, unemployment peaked at 10.4% and has so far dropped to 8.2%. Krugman, using government purchases as a proxy for government spending, notes that purchases had risen 11.6% by this point in Reagan's term, while they've fallen 2.6% during Obama's.)