A friend says: “Whenever a progressive invokes the word “broken”, run and duck under a desk like a kid in a nuclear war test drill in the 1950s. Cause this time, it’s coming.”
Fred Siegel writes: Mayor Bill de Blasio has tried to be cautious when it comes to policing. He worries that a crime spike will produce an angry citywide reaction that would threaten his political career. But when it comes to welfare reform, the other great advance of the Giuliani/Bloomberg years, de Blasio shows no such caution. He has turned the city’s massive Human Resources Administration over to former Legal Aid Society attorney Steven Banks, a leading “welfare rights” advocate, whose principal contribution over the years has been to tie up the city in litigation.
De Blasio can be more aggressively liberal on welfare because most New Yorkers are barely aware of the policies that reduced the welfare rolls from 1.1 million, when Giuliani took over from de Blasio mentor David Dinkins, to the current 350,000. Giuliani’s reforms, devoted to getting people back to work, were so successful that 75 percent of those placed into jobs remained off welfare a year later. From 1994 to 2009, work rates for New York’s single mothers rose from 43 percent to 63 percent (during a period when workforce participation nationwide declined). Even after the 2008 recession, child poverty in New York City in 2011 was almost 10 percentage points lower than in 1993, the year before welfare reform began.
Now de Blasio proposes to replace these proven successes with policies that have already failed in the past. Reviving the hoary notion that entry-level work represents “dead-end jobs,” de Blasio suggests that people on welfare are owed more than an opportunity to work. Job training and “seat time” in a classroom will displace the current system of “rapid placement” into a job. The newly created Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development proposes a vast new program of job training and enhanced “education,” on the theory that a new version of the old failure will reduce inequality in New York. De Blasio’s plan, notes former Giuliani welfare commissioner Jason Turner, “acknowledges that welfare skills training does not work—but then goes on to recommend a ‘new and improved’ version.”
