Sunday, January 07, 2018

Bill Clinton Betrayed the Poor

Currently, over 41 million Americans are living in poverty.

“In terms of public policy and poverty … the research shows us that we’d have about 90 million people in poverty if we didn’t have Social Security, the Earned Income Tax Credit, SNAP, which is food stamps, and so on,” Peter Edelman, a Georgetown Law professor and director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality explained.

Edelman resigned from the Clinton administration in 1996 in protest of Clinton’s drastic restructuring of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program by passing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.

“I can certainly say we should have done more,” Edelman tells Scheer of poverty policy. “It’s not only the low wage, it’s also the mass incarceration.”

“Here was Bill Clinton, and instead of talking about ending poverty in any serious way, he was talking about ending probably the most successful program for dealing with poverty,” Scheer says. “It [the AFDC] was just basically eliminated.”

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