Scott R. Sullivan

July 20th, 2008 by Scott

In one of Obama’s recent ads, he says:

He passed a law to move people from welfare to work, slashed the rolls by eighty percent. Passed tax cuts for workers; health care for kids.

The truth of the matter is, he was mandated to sign that law by a bill written by the 1994 Republican Congress and signed into law by President Clinton:

First, the law in question wasn’t dreamed up out of thin air by its sponsors. It was the follow-up to the welfare reform act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, that President Clinton signed on Aug. 26, 1996. That law gave states the ability to design their own welfare programs as long as they met certain federal requirements, including limits on how long recipients could get benefits.

Welfare reform was successful in moving people off public assistance. There was about a 78 percent drop in the number of families receiving public assistance in Illinois between 1998 and 2006. It was the federal law, hammered out by Clinton and the Republican Congress, that set the wheels in motion and forced states to act. Nationwide, the number of families on welfare declined quite a bit as well, going from 3,146,870 in ‘98 to 1,805,900 in ‘06, a decrease of almost 43 percent.(Source)

So why are we interested in putting Obama in the White House, when it was the 1994 Republican Congress and their Contract With America that initiated this action?

It was the Republican Congress that helped get people off welfare and become responsible, productive citizens. Let’s remember that.