quote, moving welfare recipients into work was one of the basic principles of the bipartisan welfare reform legislation that president clinton signed into law. everyone loved the idea of welfare reform. everyone bragged about it. everyone has tried to take credit for it. even a little known state senator from illinois and his running mate. he passed a low to move people from welfare to work, slashed the roles by 80%. more people have moved from welfare to the dignity of work and he got it done. okay. so work equals dignity. that s a bipartisan position. it s been a bipartisan position for a long time. fine. that is not exculpatory. in fact, it only further proves what s actually important about this national debate which sometimes feels like a lot of silly semantics. everybody understands, every speaker of the english that the word work has different meanings in different contexts and when applied to women and the things they do, their labor inside the house and out, it has a w
if you look up welfare there s no entry but he does write about welfare in his book. on page 251. i ve got it marked with my special rachel maddow book park. welfare without work erodes the spirit and the sense of self-worth of the resip yents and conditions the children of nonworking parents to an indoe lent and unproductive life. hard working parents raise hard working kids. we should recognize that the opposite is also true, end quote. parent that doesn t work outside the home that receives assistance from the government that person suffers from an erosion of the spirit and lack of self-worth. so called nonworking parents don t raise hard working kids. this was mitt romney s argument two years ago. it s not a new idea and it isn t new to the republican party either. last year the house of representatives passed legislation to build on the successes of the 1996 welfare
and success that come from hard work. the law passed the house require 40 hours of work each week. the first stage of welfare reform brought unprecedented success. millions of americans now knows the rewards of work. welfare mothers have found their long lost self-e seem. we want to stop the dependency the government has created with all these entitlement program. we want to give people the opportunity and dignity to work. in welfare reform we reached the conclusion that giving people money for nothing is a bad idea. the romney campaign was forced to respond. their response was instructive. it was a dodge in which they tried to say he was talking about the bipartisan welfare reform of the 1990s and everyone agreed with that. quote, moving welfare recipients into work was one of the basic principles of the bipartisan welfare reform legislation that
last year the house of representatives passed legislation to build on the successes of the 1996 welfare reform law. they did so because they want more americans to know the pride and success that come from hard work. the law passed the house, that passed the house requiring 40 hours of work each week. the first stage of welfare reform brought unprecedented success. millions of americans now knows the rewards of work. welfare mothers have found their long-lost self-esteem. he want to stop the dependency that government has created with all of these entitlement programs. we want to give people the opportunity, the dignity to work. in welfare reform we reached the conclusion that giving people money for doing nothing is a bad idea. doing nothing. meaning raising your children. just so that s clear. betsy stevenson, i wanted you to talk a little bit about there s been this amazing research
but something is wrong particularly against the backdrop of this war on women. ghandi once said that poverty is the worst form of violence. for all the violence women endure, poverty is the worst form. and for us to be having this conversation without specifically focusing in on extreme poverty and the mothers falling into poverty, something is missing in this debate and poverty s got to be raised higher on the american agenda. this is exactly what was predicted when the republicans wrote a welfare reform law, which was actually a repeal of welfare. it was the first and only repeal of a provision of the social security act, which bill clinton signed into law. this was precisely the prediction. because that program was the way you could get it was being a mother with children. now, those were basically the only recipients of that welfare money. and they are now they are time limited to a couple of years where they used to be able to stay on it for the period of time they needed it.