President Barack Obama is bringing “the discredited welfare state back to life, bigger than ever,”

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IBD: Obama Brings Back Welfare State

Monday, February 23, 2009 9:48 PM
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President Barack Obama is bringing “the discredited welfare state back to life, bigger than ever,” Investor's Business Daily said in an editorial to appear in Tuesday’s editions of the business newspaper.

Quoting former President Bill Clinton’s famous proclamation that the “era of big government is over," IBD said that the United States is now being led by a “president whose mission seems to be to prove that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were both wrong. Reaganesque across-the-board tax cuts on income and investment, as this thinking goes, have only gotten us into an unprecedented global financial crisis (begging the question of how they did so much good for so long before finally making the sky fall).”

Obama, the editorial said, is now going “full steam astern, back to the wasteful, corrupt — and corrupting — practices that Democrat Bill Clinton got re-elected helping to end.”

Quoting Heritage Foundation senior domestic policy analyst Robert Rector, who recently noted that “for the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseloads," the editorial paints a bleak picture of what Americans can expect over the next four years.

The new welfare system Obama is establishing will actually be worse than the old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program because it will reward the states more heavily to increase their caseloads, the piece states. “Uncle Sam would actually pay the states many billions of dollars to increase their welfare caseloads. Rector sees welfare spending increases nearing $800 billion over a decade, with more than $1.3 trillion added to the national debt by the stimulus.”

Despite this massive spending, Obama is promising to cut the budget deficit in half by the end of his first term — a promise that the editorial concludes is wildly optimistic. It doesn’t even take into account the problem of ever-expanding Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs.

“An economic rescue entailing ratcheting up income taxes and ballooning the government runs counter to Reagan's, Clinton's and even John F. Kennedy's governing philosophy,” the editorial concludes. “Does President Obama really think his 65-bucks-a-month tax cut will make up for it all?”




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