HHS abandons strict work requirements to qualify for benefits
PHOENIX – As today marks the 16th anniversary of landmark welfare reform legislation passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Democrat President Bill Clinton in 1996, it’s a good time to remind voters that in this election our country faces a stark contrast between Mitt Romney and those who support the current program requiring welfare recipients to work or get job training, and President’s Obama’s new push to dismantle welfare-to-work and drop the program’s strict work requirements.
At the center of the 1996 welfare reform was the creation of work participation requirements mandating that states show at least half of its welfare recipients were either working or receiving work-related training. If a state fell below that threshold, it could lose its federal funding. The result of the requirement was that millions of welfare recipients went back to work and welfare cases dropped dramatically.
But last month the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a memo that changed the policy and offered waivers of the work participation requirements to states that might propose different ways of measuring the success of welfare assistance. In fact, work requirements were written into the bipartisan 1996 agreement as a non-negotiable prerequisite for states to receive federal funding.
With this memo, the Obama Administration announced it has the power to ignore those requirements. Mitt Romney, however, has pledged to rescind the memo and make clear that work requirements are not optional.
"Welfare reform stands as a major bipartisan accomplishment, but President Obama still insists on having his liberal way and trying to grow a culture of dependency on his government hand-outs,” said Arizona Republican Party spokesman Tim Sifert. "And it’s part of the Obama-Carmona plan either to unilaterally ignore the law, or to simply eliminate any opposition.”
Also today the Republican National Committee released a video"Never Happenened” shedding light on what America would be like if Barack Obama had his way with welfare -- fewer paychecks and more welfare checks.
www.azgop.org/article/significant-1996-bipartisan-...ation
#welfare #obamafail #osgottago #azgop
http://chumly.com/n/1608a27
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