"The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning."

A drop in the bucket. Given Judy Clarke’s fee in the Susan Smith case, $100K probably isn’t much more than what you’ll wind up paying Dzhokhar’s lawyers to help him avoid the death penalty. And if they succeed, you’ll be paying for his upkeep for years and years and years after that. So poisonous are [...]

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Phoning it in.

Steel yourselves, because this egregious revelation may very well shock you: A well-meaning but perhaps overly ambitious federal assistance program that offers a taxpayer-subsidized benefit and does not have rigorous eligibility requirements, was fraudulently taken advantage of by millions of people. (I’ll pause here a moment to let you recover.) The Wall Street Journal reports [...]

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Bottom line.

Revealingly, he’s the country’s finance minister. A quick bit of googling reveals that people think he was talking about letting elderly patients who don’t want to linger in the hospital choose assisted suicide. Could be, but the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is over 200 percent and, thanks to its appalling birthrate, more than 40 percent of [...]

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Womp.

It’s been a particular hallmark of Obama’s presidenc,y and current Democratic trends in general, not merely to oppose the reform of the already and completely predictably spiraling welfare state, but to actively grow and expand it. To paraphrase Churchill on the British Empire, Barack Obama did not become president of the United States to preside [...]

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Excluding Social Security and Medicare.

How much spending does the US do on means-tested welfare programs?  According to Senator Jeff Sessions and the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, it’s more than one would imagine.  In FY2011 alone, federal and state spending on means-tested federal entitlement programs rose above $1 trillion — and that doesn’t include non-means-tested programs like Social Security and [...]

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Outcomes.

Debate continues over whether Barack Obama’s command to waive the work requirement of the 1996 welfare reform is legal, and if it offers states a way out of effectively enforcing the Able-bodied Adults Without Dependents rule that required those recipients to start working at some job in order to receive benefits.  A new report from [...]

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Triple standards?

The last 48 hours of media commentary has evinced an interesting, and entirely unsurprising, double standard, or perhaps triple standard.  When undercover videos of ACORN and NPR by James O’Keefe or of Planned Parenthood by Lila Rose get published, the media immediately insinuates that they contain deceptive editing and demand that the full videos get [...]

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Looking for growth in all the wrong places.

Because one good thirty-second ad spot always deserves another, the Obama camp is out with their own welfare-related ad today attempting to refute Mitt Romney’s ad of the same nature that debuted earlier this week. Set to air in all of the usual suspects — Colorado, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia — the [...]

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It's time to fix America's broken system

There are more than 70 separate welfare programs operated by the federal government today. The cumulative cost is nearly $1 trillion per year and rapidly expanding on President Obama’s watch. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about just one. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was the centerpiece of President Bill [...]

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Projection.

On MSNBC last night, Ed Schultz and E.J. Dionne argued that the Romney campaign’s argument against President Obama’s welfare adjustments plays into “old racial politics about poverty” and relies upon a level of blatant deception hitherto unknown in presidential campaigns. And, before you ask, why yes — this is coming just after Team Obama basically [...]

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Why the flip-flop, Mr. President?

During his run for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama praised the work requirements that were the centerpiece of welfare reform — the very requirements his administration just gutted last week. During a discussion with pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, Obama declared: “[O]ne of the things that I am absolutely convinced of is that [...]

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Republican bill would stop HHS waivers

A coalition of Republicans in the House and Senate vowed to preserve the work requirements at the heart of welfare reform after the Obama administration announced last week it would illegally gut the 1996 law. Lawmakers could vote in the coming days on a plan that prohibits the administration from implementing its unilateral action. The [...]

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"You're comparing the President to Mussolini."

I’m actually a bit surprised by ABC News’ headline on this fun but provocative interview with Rick Santorum. They feature Santorum’s observation that Mitt Romney can’t afford to pick a pro-choice running mate, a rather obvious point, considering the need to fire up the base in this election — and the dearth of pro-choice Republicans. [...]

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'He is hurting the very people he claims to help.'

The landmark welfare reform law President Bill Clinton signed in 1996 helped move nearly 3 million families off the government dole — the result of federal work requirements that promoted greater self-reliance. Yesterday the Obama administration gutted those federal work rules, ignoring the will of Congress by issuing a policy directive that allows the Department [...]

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Julia 2.0.

“Back in his Wisconsin district today to hold a series of listening sessions, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan commented on President Obama’s latest campaign mascot, a hypothetical woman whom the campaign calls ‘Julia.’ Ryan called the imaginary character ‘creepy,’ and called the idea of creating a fictional woman dependent on the government ‘demeaning.’ “‘It [...]

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Julia.

“I feel GREAT about our Julia web tool & LOVE the Repub freak-out” *** “Mr. Obama’s advisers are clearly hoping that the idea of Julia will capture the public’s imagination the way the Harry and Louise ads did two decades ago. The story of the fictional couple worrying about their health care helped crystallize opposition [...]

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"The ninth circle of business hell."

I seem to recall, not too long ago, California Governor Jerry Brown saying that his state’s policies were about “California leading the country,” which, in turn, could serve as a model for “America potentially leading the world.” Yet again, Gov. Brown has provided an all-too-apt example of how these United States could indeed lead the [...]

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Reclaiming the narrative.

Pretty much from the minute Newt Gingrich branded President Barack Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history,” I’ve wondered why liberals didn’t immediately tout that statement as a compliment. Government spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has doubled just since 2008 and more than 10 million people have been added to the food [...]

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Great.

President Barack Obama has proved his adeptness at exploiting the vote pump: Dependence on government has increased by 23 percent under his administration, according to the Heritage Foundation 2012 Index of Dependence on Government. More people than ever before — 67.3 million Americans — depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid [...]

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"It's free. Swipe yo' EBT."

A new report posted today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows a record 45.8 million Americans received assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in August — 1.1. percent more than in July and 8.1 percent more than in August 2010. That new record is not surprising: The number of Americans receiving food stamps has [...]

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Happy Father's Day!

What is it about fatherly wisdom that instantly presses the reset button on a rushed life, illuminating what actually matters? This past week, my dad’s work brought him to nearby Baltimore and I had the pleasure of joining him for dinner in the city — a once-common, but now-rare occurrence, given that we live so [...]

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