Trump Overhauls Medicaid, Food Stamps and Public Housing in Landmark Executive Order
This is change conservatives can really believe in.
While much of the mainstream media was occupied with analyzing Monday’s FBI raid on President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, the president himself was making a different kind of history earlier this week by overhauling the country’s welfare programs to make able-bodied recipients work or risk losing their benefits.
In an executive order signed Tuesday, Trump imposed a 90-day deadline for all federal agencies that administer aid programs to review their work requirements and come up with ways to make them stronger.
As Investor’s Business Daily noted, the federal government has plenty of examples of states that have cut their welfare rolls and put recipients back to work by imposing work requirements.
Alabama, Arkansas and Kentucky are among the states that have decided that making work a requirement for public aid is good for the public coffers as well as the recipient.
Trump’s executive order is titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility” and that pretty sell sums up the rationale. It states in part (emphasis added):
“The federal government should do everything within its authority to empower individuals by providing opportunities for work, including by investing in federal programs that are effective at moving people into the workforce and out of poverty. It must examine federal policies and programs to ensure that they are consistent with principles that are central to the American spirit — work, free enterprise, and safeguarding human and economic resources. For those policies or programs that are not succeeding in those respects, it is our duty to either improve or eliminate them.”
Basically, welfare that simply prolongs dependency by families across generations is bad for the families involved, it’s bad for the American spirit, and it’s bad for a system of government that depends on the informed choices of the governed.
In a nutshell, individuals who work for their own living are individuals who can be functioning parts of a democracy. Of course, poor people on welfare have the right to vote. But they might be a little more careful how public dollars are spent if they were actually contributing to them.
While the executive order went largely unreported by the mainstream media — FBI raids on the president’s lawyer are so much sexier than substantive policy changes — the measure is a sign of just how adept the still-young Trump administration is becoming at handling the twin responsibilities of foreign policy challenges and domestic policy reforms.
While facing a crisis in Syria that ultimately culminated (for the moment) in Friday’s missile strikes in conjunction with Britain and France, Trump still had time to issue an executive order overhauling key elements of the welfare state.
On social media, many liberals — as they always do — cried about the unfairness of making public assistance recipients work for their benefits. But for many conservatives, the action was yet another step in the direction of dumping the Barack Obama legacy of swelling the country’s food-stamp rolls.
Some posts were sarcastic:
https://twitter.com/TyEducatingLibs/status/984078797573013505
And many were grateful:
This is great news and about time! I see the abuse of this system every day. Grown healthy men standing around a burn barrel all day as they wait for the postal employee to deliver their check & then harass him/her for choosing to actually work, like working is a terrible thing!
— Mermaids 🌹🌿 Glitter (@ArmyProudParent) April 11, 2018
Of course, liberals are screaming, because the power of liberal government in a democracy grows with every citizen who is dependent on the government.
That’s why liberals love public employees — they’re dependent on the government, too — and welfare recipients.
Since Trump took office, he has made it clear he doesn’t feel obligated to grow the federal bureaucracy, and with this latest executive order, he’s taking a concrete step to reduce the number of Americans who depend on the government for their daily bread.
Cutting federal payrolls. Cutting the welfare rolls.
After eight years of Obama swelling both, that’s definitely change a conservative can believe in.
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