Politicians & Pundits: Robert Rector

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.