Issues: Welfare

Sanders Questions: Women Are Watching Edition

Today, the White House doubled down on attacking three of the nineteen women who have accused President Trump of sexual misconduct as liars on a “publicity tour.” Fittingly, Trump also released a robocall in support of  child sexual predator Roy Moore on the eve of Election Day in Alabama. This administration continues to sink to new lows of disrespecting women and each and every person who enables President Trump to remain in the Oval Office should be ashamed.

American Bridge Rapid Response Director Emily Aden calls on White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to answer the following questions:

1. How can President Trump stump for a bill that will take money away from the bottom 95% of Americans by 2027?

2. Did President Trump keep Michael Flynn on as National Security Adviser for 18 days after being warned about Flynn by the Justice Department because he was the one who directed Flynn […]

Read more after the jump.

Trump Administration tax “analysis” is built on a giant lie

Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, joined by many other nonpartisan and even Republican experts, has estimated that the Trump-Republican tax plan could not pay for itself, and that it would significantly increase the U.S. budget deficit.

Now, after suspicious delays and repeated promises from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Department has released a one-page “analysis” that concludes this deficit-busting tax proposal might pay for itself if not yet written plans for “regulatory reform, infrastructure development, and welfare reform” were also later implemented.

“This is a joke​.​  ​I​t’s like saying, ‘I could fly if I could grow wings,​’​” said American Bridge Vice President Shripal Shah. “The fact that the Trump Administration had to doctor a study with fake calculations about major plans that don’t even exist yet is a glaring admission of guilt. They know their tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will […]

Read more after the jump.

American Action Network: “Tax And Spend”

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American Action Network goes after congressional candidate Val Demings (D-FL) over her support for the Recovery Act and for ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, saying she supports wasting Floridians’ money. But the stimulus, which passed without any involvement from first-time candidate Demings, helped save the economy from an even worse recession, and ending the Bush tax cuts for top-tier earners would impact few real small businesses.

Read more after the jump.

American Action Network: “Again”

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The American Action Network wants you to know that Rick Nolan stands “for raising taxes and killing jobs” – 700,000 jobs, to be precise. But that number comes from a study that explicitly did not analyze the actual White House proposal for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The on-screen claim that Nolan would tax 894,000 small businesses is similarly bogus, as that definition of “small business” includes multi-billion-dollar corporations and both candidates for president. The ad is correct about Nolan’s 1975 votes on gas taxes, but they somehow fail to mention the same bill included tax credits to offset the increase in pump prices.

Read more after the jump.

Meet The Man Behind The Claim That Obama ‘Gutted’ Welfare Reform

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Following a July 2012 Health and Human Services memo offering states a chance to apply for waivers that would allow them more flexibility in complying with welfare’s work requirements, conservatives began claiming that President Obama had ‘gutted’ the 1996 welfare reform law and waived all work requirements associated with receiving assistance. This is false. Currently, activities that fulfill work requirements are narrowly defined by changes made during the law’s 2005 reauthorization, and the waivers would let states try out new approaches to moving welfare beneficiaries towards stable employment while maintaining the principle that recipients must be progressing towards work. Yet the allegation remains popular among conservatives, thanks largely to the efforts of the Heritage Foundation’s in-house welfare expert, Robert Rector.

In the past two months, Rector has published at least 16 items on the subject of welfare reform, including the July 12 blog post cited in Mitt Romney’s now-infamous television ad that provoked a storm of fact checks. Given his role in promoting the attack on the administration, Rector’s record deserves a closer look.

Rector was involved in crafting the 1996 welfare reform law and has spent more than two decades arguing that Americans who live in poverty are not truly “poor” because they own “modern amenities,” such as vehicles and household electronics. To bolster his position, Rector has cited statistics showing that impoverished Americans are “more likely to be overweight” than better-off Americans and outright denied that poverty is “harmful” to children. The clear intent of these claims is to undermine the logic behind the safety net. In fact, Rector has stated explicitly that welfare is based on the “idiot premise” that more resources will cause poor Americans to “behave more like middle-class people.”

Read more after the jump.

Meet The Man Behind The Claim That Obama ‘Gutted’ Welfare Reform

Following a July 2012 Health and Human Services memo offering states a chance to apply for waivers that would allow them more flexibility in complying with welfare’s work requirements, conservatives began claiming that President Obama had ‘gutted’ the 1996 welfare reform law and waived all work requirements associated with receiving assistance. This is false. Currently, activities that fulfill work requirements are narrowly defined by changes made during the law’s 2005 reauthorization, and the waivers would let states try out new approaches to moving welfare beneficiaries towards stable employment while maintaining the principle that recipients must be progressing towards work.

Yet the allegation remains popular among conservatives, thanks largely to the efforts of the Heritage Foundation’s in-house welfare expert, Robert Rector. In the past two months, Rector has published at least 16 items on the subject of welfare reform, including the July 12 blog post cited in Mitt Romney’s now-infamous television ad that provoked a storm of fact checks. Given his role in promoting the attack on the administration, Rector’s record deserves a closer look.

Rector was involved in crafting the 1996 welfare reform law and has spent more than two decades arguing that Americans who live in poverty are not truly “poor” because they own “modern amenities,” such as vehicles and household electronics. To bolster his position, Rector has cited statistics showing that impoverished Americans are “more likely to be overweight” than better-off Americans and outright denied that poverty is “harmful” to children. The clear intent of these claims is to undermine the logic behind the safety net. In fact, Rector has stated explicitly that welfare is based on the “idiot premise” that more resources will cause poor Americans to “behave more like middle-class people.”

Read more after the jump.

Heritage’s Rector: Liberals Want To ‘Replace Marriage With A Welfare State Family’

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From a September 4, 2012, Bloggers Briefing with the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector:

RECTOR: Okay now as I’ve said, having a child without being married is actually a stronger predictor of childhood poverty than dropping out of high school. Again, not recommending dropping out of high school, but this is a huge deal. And in every state in the United States I can guarantee you that in this at-risk population not once is any young boy or girl ever told, look, if you don’t want your children to be poor, it’s critically important to be married before you have children. Not once. Dead silence. Okay, so we pretty much guarantee this result because we never even offer them the information. If this is where you want to go with the house in the suburbs, these are the choices that you need to make in order to get there. You need to understand that a child that’s born outside marriage is 80 percent more likely to be poor than if you make other choices. And give them that information to empower them to begin to make other choices. Not that that would be a panacea, but as long as we have a gag rule about talking even why people are poor, we would have no chance whatsoever of ever altering this behavior, which is fine with the left because the left does not like marriage in the first place and the left basically has had a plan all along to remove marriage and replace it with a welfare state family, because none of these single-parent families can possibly be self-sufficient. They always require massive amounts of subsidies through the welfare system, not only for food, cash, and housing, for medical care, but also even if the mom is working you have to subsidize her daycare. So you end up basically with moms married to the welfare state, and if you’re a statist, that’s a good deal, okay. Not that you ever exactly set it out to plan that, but when things started falling apart the left has basically said that we’re not going to do anything to correct this situation.

Read more after the jump.

Rick Santorum: Some Obama Policies Are “Antithetical To The American Experience”

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On the August 17, 2012 edition of Family Research Council president Tony Perkins’ Washington Watch Weekly radio show, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) falsely claimed that President Obama had ‘waived’ work requirements for welfare recipients:

PERKINS: Well let’s take a – I want to get your take on the current state of affairs in this election as the Republicans go into their convention, I know you’re going to be one of the convention speakers, maybe you want to give us a little thought—a little highlight on what you might be talking about, a little preview. But where does the election currently stand today, you think?

SANTORUM: Well, you know, as you know, Tony, it always comes down to about a dozen states, and, you know, it’s how those candidates do in, you know, Pennsylvania, Ohio, you know, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Florida, Colorado, you know the states. And right now I’d say, you know, we’re looking at those polls, we’re probably a little bit behind. And that’s disconcerting to me given, you know, how outrageous this administration has been in its assault on the American values, everything from the values we just talked about to the values of free enterprise and the value of limited government and, you know, one of the things I’ll talk about at the convention is what the president’s doing with welfare and waiving a requirement that everybody in welfare is required to work. Those are the kinds of things that are, you know, antithetical to the American experience. It’s not who we are as a country, and one of the – you know, what I hope comes out of this convention is that we see very clearly crystallize in the eyes of the American public the clear and stark differences between Barack Obama’s America, and the America that, well, frankly, we built in generations past that created the greatest country in the history of the world.

Newt Gingrich Claims You’re Better Off Being Uninsured Than On Medicaid

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From Newt Gingrich’s August 9, 2012, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal:

NEWT GINGRICH: The key difference is no corporation, including federal employees, is big enough to control medicine in America. You have a very wide range of choices. And if you look at the Federal Employee Health Benefit Act, it’s actually a good model for thinking about how to have a large number of choices. What worries those of us who have looked at various national health systems is putting power in the hands of bureaucrats so that they start making decisions. For example, should—There’s a recent argument about whether or not you should have a particular test for men that relates to prostate cancer. One of the leading experts on prostate cancer in America said this government bureaucratic decision made by a committee that had no cancer expert on it, had no prostate expert on it, this decision sounded good in theory but in fact would lead to the premature death of 10 to 15 percent of the men who get prostate cancer. So I want to stick with you having the right, and your doctor having the right, to practice appropriate medicine for you, and then I want to find ways to maximize the number of people who have health insurance. But if you look at Medicaid, which has been a government-run program, there aren’t many people who will voluntarily get on Medicaid and there have been studies that indicate that the uninsured have better health outcomes than the people on Medicaid because Medicaid tends to be so badly run.