“On the Holmes Front, with Frank Holmes”
President Donald Trump keeps rolling back former President Barack Obama’s “achievements” – and he just drove another nail through Obama’s failed, big government legacy this week.
On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order requiring all able-bodied welfare recipients to work or lose their benefits. And insider sources say even bigger changes are just around the corner.
Welfare recipients already had to work a certain number of hours a week in order to get a check. Former President Bill Clinton signed the legislation, which praised for its “firm but fair work requirements.”
But like so many other areas of his administration, Obama just ignored the law.
Obama “suspended” the work requirements during the Great Recession and banned states from making welfare cases get off the couch and work, too.
With the government handing out free money, no-strings-attached, the number of people living on the government’s dime hit an all-time high.
A record-breaking 48 million Americans had to turn to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) just to survive the Obama economy. One-third of all the people on food stamps signed up during his first term in office.
Obamacare also expanded Medicaid to the point that it sucked up more than half-a-trillion dollars ($574.2 billion) in 2016, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
In all, the federal government spend a whopping $700 million on programs to aid low-income people last year – and the pricetag gets bigger every year.
Obama said he struck the work requirements, because there just weren’t enough jobs for the growing army of people receiving federal handouts.
But his real agenda was to get as many people dependent on the government as possible – because welfare recipients vote early, vote often, and vote Democrat.
Trump has a much different approach to government handouts. He said welfare should be “A Safety Net, Not a Hammock.”
“There’s nothing ‘compassionate’ about allowing welfare dependency to be passed from generation to generation,” Trump wrote in his 2011 book Time to Get Tough.
Trump summed up his welfare policy like this – “Bottom line: You do drugs, no welfare check. End of story.”
That sounds like a pretty good policy to us.
Trump hammered Obama for his soft-on-fraud welfare policies:
Obama our Welfare & Food Stamp President, is praising himself for expanding welfare http://t.co/cAOUnJT0 He doesn't believe in work.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2012
Our country needs to reestablish the work ethic. In NY, welfare pays better than jobs http://t.co/RL0fd2SJJm Zero incentive.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2013
Thanks to 8 years of big-spending liberalism, “our country suffers from nearly record-high welfare enrollments,” said Andrew Bremberg, Trump’s domestic policy advisor.
Now President Trump is cleaning this mess up, too.
He charted a totally different direction in a document released this week called “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility” You can read Trump’s whole executive order here.
Federal agencies have 90 days to draw up plans requiring able-bodied welfare recipients between the ages of 19 and 50 to work for their benefits – and block immigrants who aren’t eligible for the programs in the first place.
His order applies to the Departments of the Treasury, HUD, HHS, Agriculture, Labor, Transportation, Commerce, and Education – rooting out shiftless welfare recipients across the entire federal government.
Watchdogs say the reform could save Uncle Sam a fortune by cutting off people who are gaming the system.
“According to the Census Bureau, 52 percent of able-bodied adults on Medicaid do not work at all,” the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) reported. “Just 16 percent work full-time all year.”
Even the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a pro-welfare lobbying group, admits that at least 6% percent of Section 8 housing recipients are “work-able” but not working.
President Trump has America on a roll again. Unemployment is a decades-long low, the stock market is at a record high, and he shaved 7 million people off the SNAP program last year.
Administration aides say that Trump’s next move is to kick drug-abusers off the welfare rolls, too.
He knows what we all know from watching our neighborhoods: Welfare policies don’t actually help people long-term. “People can’t rise out of poverty if they are only receiving SNAP and Medicaid,” said Robert Doar, who ran New York City’s public assistance program. “These programs were meant to supplement earnings, not replace them.”
They’re just enough to keep people from starving, keep them voting, and make them demand bigger giveaways from a socialist government.
Welfare is supposed to be a temporary program for people down on their luck. It’s not meant to be a way of life. If hard-working Americans have to work to provide a welfare check, unemployed people should have to work to cash it.
Trump is making America great again, one common-sense policy after another.
— Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”