Organizations: Heritage Foundation

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.

Crossroads GPS: “Football”

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Crossroads GPS targets Sen. Sherrod Brown’s (D-OH) support for the Affordable Care Act, which it describes as the “$1 trillion health care law that cuts $700 billion from Medicare spending.” However, the ACA actually reduces the deficit, and the reductions in the future growth of Medicare spending do not cut seniors’ benefits.

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.

Contraceptive Coverage: No Bitter Pill For Most Americans

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The arguments in favor of the new Health and Human Services (HHS) rule requiring employers to provide health plans that cover contraceptives with no cost-sharing are overwhelming. Yet, as is often the case in matters concerning women’s health and reproductive rights, what ought to be an issue of effective and practical modern public health policy has been reframed by the right as a threat to religious liberty. Despite an exception to the HHS rule allowing religiously affiliated employers to avoid paying premiums that support contraceptives by shifting the responsibility onto insurers, conservatives remain outraged. But the outside groups and politicians who persist in protesting over the issue are at odds with the American public.

The Origins Of The Uproar Over Contraceptive Coverage

The Affordable Care Act Requires New Insurance Plans To Cover Preventive Services For Free. From The New York Times: “Starting this year, insurers will be required under the Affordable Care Act to completely cover such services as annual physicals, childhood vaccinations and dozens of screening tests for everything from high blood pressure to abdominal aortic aneurysms.” [The New York Times, 9/19/11]

Read more after the jump.

Crossroads GPS: “Hiding”

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Crossroads GPS criticizes North Dakota Senate candidate Heidi Heitkamp for supporting the Affordable Care Act, even though, according to the ad, the “Supreme Court ruled Obamacare is a massive increase on working families.” Of course, while the Supreme Court ruled that the law’s requirement that people obtain health insurance or pay a small penalty is constitutional under Congress’ taxing power, the decision did not say anything about how the provision would affect working families. In reality, the Affordable Care Act does not directly raise taxes on most working Americans, and it will actually provide tax relief for millions. The ad also misleads on the law’s Medicare savings – which do not ‘cut’ seniors’ benefits – while failing to mention that Heitkamp’s opponent voted to preserve nearly all of those spending reductions.

Read more after the jump.

U.S. Chamber Of Commerce: “Congressman Heinrich Says He’s Standing For New Mexico Families”

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An ad from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce attacks New Mexico Senate candidate Martin Heinrich for allegedly voting to raise energy costs “by nearly $1,000 per year” and opposing “American energy exploration.” It’s true that Heinrich voted in the House for the American Clean Energy and Security Act, but nonpartisan experts concluded that the bill would have a minimal cost to consumers. Meanwhile, Heinrich’s “energy exploration” vote was against speeding up the process to restart drilling permits just a year after the Deepwater Horizon spill, when safety reviews were still being conducted.

Read more after the jump.

Schlafly: Poor People Today “Don’t Know What Poverty Really Is”

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At the Heritage Foundation Blogger Briefing on July 24, Eagle Forum president Phyllis Schlafly said:

However, I grew up during the Great Depression. And I read the list that the Heritage Foundation made up of all the amenities and all the advantages that people living in poverty today enjoy. And I went over that list of 50 and I didn’t have a single one as I was growing up except for a stove and an oven. We didn’t even have a refrigerator because my father lost his job, and I think today’s people in poverty don’t know what poverty really is.

Fiscal Frauds: Conservatives Support Policies That Blew Up The Debt

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From the Heritage Foundation to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to purely political organizations like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth, nearly the entire infrastructure of the right criticizes President Obama for the current state of our national debt. It is instructive to look back on these groups’ positions on the two primary drivers of both recent and future deficits: President Bush’s tax cuts and the expansion of the war on terror to Iraq. AEI, Heritage, and the Hoover Institution may be debt hawks now, but their roles in pushing the costly and misguided invasion of Iraq began almost before the wreckage was cleared at Ground Zero in New York City. And while it’s unremarkable that conservative institutions would support reducing taxes, the promises made in debate over the Bush tax cuts by Heritage, Americans for Tax Reform, and the like fly in the face of their current griping about our indebtedness.

Conservative Institutions Blame President Obama’s “Spending Binge” For Rising Debt

HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Heritage Foundation Decries Obama’s “Vision” Of “Deeper Deficits.” From the Heritage Foundation’s response to President Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2013: “The Administration’s apparent vision is one of bigger government, more spending, higher taxes, and deeper deficits. At a time when runaway spending and swelling deficits must be reversed, President Obama increases both.” [Heritage.org, 2/28/12]

Read more after the jump.

The Conservative Crusade To Decrease Voting

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It’s no coincidence that conservative state legislatures launched an unprecedented wave of measures to make it harder to vote in the wake of the GOP’s sweeping state-level victories in 2010. With the dexterous hand of the American Legislative Exchange Council providing coordination, and the will to suppress the vote that’s animated the right for decades, the assault on ballot access isn’t really surprising either. But it is based on a deeply flawed premise: Claims of voter fraud are chronically exaggerated, and when organizations actually follow up on initial reports they almost always prove inaccurate or inflated. (President Bush’s DOJ, for all its zeal, turned up fewer than 100 convictions out of 300,000,000 votes cast.) However, for a movement that’s openly declared its hostility toward efforts to increase voter turnout in American elections, it doesn’t matter that there’s no fire behind all that smoke.

With Help From ALEC, GOP’s 2010 Wave Produced Voting Laws That Could Disenfranchise 5 Million Mostly Poor, Young, And Minority Voters

State-Level GOP Gains In 2010 Elections Led To Vast, Unprecedented Push To Restrict Voting Access. From the Brennan Center for Justice’s report on “Voting Law Changes In 2012”: “This year, at least thirty-four states introduced a record number of bills to require photo ID to vote. As Jenny Bowser, senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, observed, ‘It’s remarkable … I very rarely see one single issue come up in so many state legislatures in a single session.’ […] There are at least two major reasons for this change. The first is the stark shift in the partisan makeup of state legislatures after 2010. As noted, there is typically a sharp partisan divide over the issue of strict voter ID requirements, with Republicans generally pushing more restrictive measures and Democrats generally opposing them. This year, in every case but one, strict voter ID bills were introduced by Republican legislators. Newly elected legislators introduced about a quarter of these bills. As a result of Republican electoral success in state houses across the country in 2010, proponents of strict voter ID bills were able to garner much greater legislative support than in the past. In the 2010 elections, Republicans picked up at least 675 state legislative seats across the country. Republicans therefore controlled both legislative chambers in twenty-six states, up from fourteen earlier in 2010.” [Brennan Center for Justice, “Voting Law Changes In 2012,” 2011, internal citations removed, emphasis added]

Read more after the jump.