Naked Emperor News did a little research into the claim that the stimulus bill was nothing more than a Trojan horse for the reversal of welfare reform, and appears to have found some truth to the allegation. According to Robert Rector at Heritage, shown speaking in this clip, Porkulus restores the profit motive to states in expanding their welfare rolls, which eliminated the key mechanism of reform established by Congress in the mid-1990s:

NEN accuses Obama of racism in this clip by apparently framing the problem of fighting welfare reform as an America that doesn’t want to help black people. I’m not sure that’s what Obama’s saying here; I think what he’s saying is that activists have to expand the notion of welfare past the old limits and include working-class people in order to gain political strength. Obama did just that during the campaign with his “tax cuts for 95% of the people”, which turned out to be refundables for people with little or no tax liability to begin with.

If Rector is correct and welfare reform accounted for the steep decline in poverty among black children, it will be interesting to see the effect of Obama’s policies on that population in the next few years.