fantapolitica
humorous look at Italian politics (bilingual)Wednesday, June 18, 2014
I think that Ed Kilgore's views on welfare reform have changed dramatically over the past two years. His latest post on the topic is entitled "The Despised and Abandoned" In this post grinding old axes meets I told you so. There is no point in reading it. It mainly consists of a link to and quotations from an article by Tom Edsall which decries the extent to which US anti poverty spending has been redirected to the less poor of the poor. Kilgore presents no criticisms of Edsall and I think it is clear he doesn't approve of the shift. He identifies the part he doesn't like with the 1996 welfare reform bill
As Edsall notes, eligibility for cash assistance was time-limited and work-conditioned—and significantly reduced—by the famous 1996 welfare reform legislation. At the same time, serial expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child and Dependent Tax Credit have provided a real bonus to the working poor, particularly those who are married.Only when cutting to paste did I notice the extremely unfortunate wording "At the same time, serial ..." Obviously serial expansions don't occur at any one time. Not obviously, but in fact, none of them occured in 1996. By "At the same time" Kilgore clearly means during the past three decades. Click the link if you doubt my claim. You really should, because this post celebrates the fact that Kilgore is no longer defending "welfare reform" by conflating the expansion of the EITC and the 1996 reform bill which did not expand the EITC. I have repeatedly criticized Kilgore for claiming that the 1993 expansion of the EITC was part of welfare reform. On the topic, I quoted Brad DeLong who was there when the expansion was proposed by the Clinton administration.
Brad DeLong Apr 11 to me OUCH! That is painful... IIRC the EITC expansion came about to offset the adverse distributional impact of the BTU tax... Brad DeLongMy original objection to Kilgore's original post focussed exactly on the question of whether EITC expansion occured "at the same time" as the 1996 welfare reform bill. I think Kilgore has conceded the point in fact while oddly using the exact wrong language. I have often wondered why Kilgore's April 10 2012 made me so angry that I am still angry about it. I have noted (mostly but not only to myself) that my inability to just let it go is suboptimal and unhealthy. I just re-read only the snippets in my original denunciation of the post and I am enraged all over again. (here is a google of my less than a google posts denouncing that one post of his) Re-reading my April 11 2012 post, I note typographical errors but find I absolutely still believe everything I wrote. In particular, it is clear that Kilgore forgot the timing of the EITC expansion. Snipping the snippets, I find that he declares his topic to be the 1996 bill "Clinton-era welfare reform legislation. ... some progressives seem to be going along with the characterization in order to grind some old axes about the 1996 act." So the topic is the 1996 act (also describing in 2012 its effects on people in 2012 is grinding old axes). Then "TANF costs and caseloads were intended to go down in no small part because the other safety net programs, along with the extremely important earned income tax credit (EITC) were intended to pick up the slack." The "extremely important earned income tax credit" was not at all affecte by "the 1996 act." I had forgotten that Kilgore explicitly stated that the debate was about the 1996 act. Any case he could possibly have been making depended entirely on the assertion that "welfare reform" does not refer to the 1996 act alone but to both the 1993 and the 1996 acts. Now it is absolutely true that any mention of Kilgore's April 10 2012 post IS grinding old axes. I think he has faced the facts and learned from the data in the past 2 years. Any mention of years old errors of fact and judgment is both rude and bad strategy (would be divisive if anyone paid attention). So after 2 years 2 months and 10 days I have to finally really truly and permanently let it go.
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