In a surprise to no one, Jeb Bush’s welfare “reform” plan would do nothing to help the poorest Americans according to a new analysis in The Washington Post. Rather, Bush’s plan and the others from Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, John Kasich, and others, would inflict serious pain on America’s poor.
According to Catherine Rampell, Bush’s “block grants” proposal would “completely destroy established anti-poverty programs such as food stamps, cash welfare payments, rent subsidies and public housing.”
Here’s more from Rampell on the upshot of the whole block grants thing:
[B]lock-granting is just a way federal politicians can strip poor people of much-needed services without actually taking the blame for the resulting suffering.
Jeb’s “reform” plan isn’t new: Block-granting SNAP has been a part of the various iterations of Paul Ryan’s budgets. And the sentiment behind the proposal isn’t new to Bush, either: He ran his unsuccessful 1994 gubernatorial bid on the platform of “seeking to ‘dismantle the welfare state’ and encouraging poor people to work more.”
It isn’t just Jeb — the entire GOP’s in on it.
Leading up to tonight’s State of the Union, Speaker Paul Ryan’s been talking up a “game-changing” GOP anti-poverty agenda and transformative welfare reform, but here’s the thing: For Republicans, “welfare reform” isn’t about improving outcomes — it’s code for: “Dear America’s Poor, life’s about to get a lot harder.”
Read more here
Published: Jan 12, 2016