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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: We found this is from Breitbart TV. It’s a 1998 C-SPAN forum at the Brookings Institution, a state of the cities forum. Barack Obama tells us plainly that he disagrees with the 1996 warfare reform bill signed by Bill Clinton and wants to do away with it, which he has done in the stimulus bill. To set it up, a question from an unidentified liberal wearing wire rims.

WOMAN: Just the other day when the House budget resolution was prepared to cut billions of dollars from the welfare block grant before the states even figure out really how to spend it, what are the coalitions that you see might possibly be put in place that could reverse some of that?

RUSH: Okay, so the question is how do we reverse welfare reform? And here’s Obama’s answer.

OBAMA: I was not a huge supporter of the federal plan that was signed in 1996. I do think that there is a potential political opportunity that arose out of welfare reform, and that is to desegregate the welfare population —

RUSH: Listen.

OBAMA: — meaning the undeserving poor, black folks in cities, from the working poor, deserving, white, rural, as well as suburban.

RUSH: Stop the tape, stop the tape, stop the tape. I hear racism here. What Obama says, I do think there’s an opportunity now that we’ve got welfare reform, because welfare reform required work, and the way that it did it, the states used to get an increasing amount of money per welfare recipient that they signed up. Welfare reform simply capped the amount of money they got. There was not an automatic increase. They had to make due with what they got, they had to pare the roles, they get to get more people off welfare so that fewer people were on it. That required work, and it has worked tremendously. So Obama didn’t like that because he wants as many dependent people as possible. And he says he sees an opportunity here to desegregate the welfare population, meaning the undeserving poor, black votes in cities from the working poor, deserving, white, rural, as well as suburban. So he thinks that welfare reform was punishing blacks. He thinks the welfare reform bill of 1996 was a punishment of blacks, and it helped the working poor ’cause they already had jobs. So he saw racism in it, and now let’s pick up his answer at that point.

OBAMA: Now you’ve got just a bunch of folks who are struggling at the bottom of the economic ladder. And that means that, at least from my perspective, the political strategy and political coalitions put together — and this relates to the issues of housing that we just talked about in mixed income communities — I think about where are the areas where you are not just helping welfare people, you know, folks on welfare, but how are you helping folks who are not currently making enough money in the economy to support a family, pay a mortgage, and send their kids to school?

RUSH: So basically he says here in this answer that he was committed to undoing it. He saw an opportunity here to undo it the minute it was enacted, and the way it was enacted, and it has now happened. Now, I bring this up, and I mention this to you precisely because this audio is from 1998, 11 years ago. This is how long Obama has been calculating various elements of his desires to shift the common structure of everything that goes on in this country, and welfare reform’s one, of course national health care, socialized medicine is going to be another one of these things, but it’s starting to come to pass. The new welfare reform gets rid of the caps. Well, the killing of welfare reform, the stimulus bill gets rid of caps. The stimulus package says, ‘You know, it’s not a good thing that we reduced welfare roles, it’s not a good thing that people went back to work, that’s not a good thing.’ So the states are now going to get even more money per welfare recipient they sign up. It’s the same way it used to be under AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, you remember those days where the single mother got increased welfare for every child she had out of wedlock with no husband around and it led to cultural decay like you can’t believe. It’s one of the reasons welfare reform was designed to change it. And it worked. Obama wants to go back to it.

Now, you might say, why? Why does he want to go back to that? Remember, all this is about is the Democrat Party, and this is about Obama’s presidency. The more dependent helpless people they have, the less opposition they’re going to have. Remember, Obama is not about a level playing field. He’s about clearing the decks. He’s about clearing the playing field. He doesn’t want there to be any opposition, and if he can create as many dependent people as possible — this is axiomatic, on government, create as many dependent people on government as possible, guess who they’re going to vote for? You saw evidence of it at Fort Myers town hall. ‘Mr. Obama, get me a car, get me a car, get me a kitchen, get me a new house, get me a better job, I’m working at McDonald’s four and a half years, what are you going to do to help me?’ That’s exactly what he wants. He loved those answers. Don’t think for a moment he was embarrassed.

This is the clincher, though, folks. This is what gets me. The states are not out of money. You could look at any state budget this afternoon, and in an hour you can find billions of dollars of crap to cut out of there, redundancies, and this is what gets me. We’re all being gulled into thinking we’re not paying enough, the states are out of money, the poor are suffering, it’s horrible, it’s inhumane out there, we’re paying enough to do what should have been to maintain life in a safe and healthy way but the libs have added in all this garbage, and that’s what we can’t afford. The states are not out of money. Plenty they could cut. Just like we have to cut when they raise our taxes, but they never do.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I mentioned, ladies and gentlemen, mere moments ago — and you gave you the audio sound bite from Obama back in 1998, about how he didn’t like welfare reform and he saw an opportunity to get rid of it and has finally succeeded in the stimulus package. And about welfare reform, you know, none of the liberal programs ever work, and we have talked about this. I’ve often said, ‘It’s not whether or not their programs work. It’s their good intentions.’ We never judge their results. There is never any accountability for the left or for Democrats on whether their programs work. The only Democrat to ever really pay a price for goofing things up was Jimmy Carter, but even he has been resuscitated and is now one of the Grand Pooh-Bahs of the Democrat Party.

People say, ‘It’s just their good intentions run amok.’ Well, Bill Clinton is a Democrat, and he signed welfare reform into service, and it worked. It worked beyond all expectations. So many lives were improved, so many people were taken off the welfare rolls — and now Obama has gotten rid of it, along with the far-left extremists in the Congress. So, would it be fair to assume that Barack Obama has bad intentions? I wish to repeat the question (and then I, ladies and gentlemen, am going to answer it). Welfare reform worked. Do we accept the premise of getting people off welfare and having them become self-sufficient is a good thing? We all do. It’s a wonderful thing. Their opportunity, their competence, security; all of that goes way, way up.

Barack Obama didn’t like it. It didn’t serve the interests of the Democrat Party. A lot of Democrats didn’t like it. Jesse Jackson didn’t like it. A bunch of people back then were pressuring Clinton to get rid of it or redo it, ’cause he was forced to. To get reelected in 1996, he was forced to sign welfare reform after vetoing it a bunch of previous times. So if we accept the premise that getting people off welfare and becoming self-sufficient is a good thing and with the stimulus bill Barack Obama has now done away with that, why, then we can assume Obama has bad intentions — and I think so. I don’t know how anybody could disagree with that. If it’s not good to force people onto welfare and to make them totally dependent on someone else or something else for virtually everything in their lives — that’s not good.

Those are bad intentions couched as ‘compassion.’ If you want to find out exactly how the stimulus bill gutted welfare reform, the Heritage Foundation has it. One of the most brilliant scholars that they have that I’m aware of is Robert Rector, and Rector has been working on this and all of these welfare socioeconomic programs, categorizing the poor properly and accurately. All the positive incentives instituted in 1996 by conservatives that motivated the states to reduce welfare roles are now gone, once this thing is signed in about 15 or 20 minutes. Now, the Heritage Foundation breaks at all down for you at AskHeritage.org. They’ve been around for 35 years.

One of their policy experts actually crafted much of the ’96 welfare reform legislation that’s been in place until now and that’s Robert Rector. Basically what it did was cap the amount of money states got. The only way they could show a surplus was get people off the welfare rolls. It worked. People actually went back to work. Now, the Heritage Foundation has the truth, they have all the details on this. They have the truth on what’s happening to welfare reform, and so many other really crucial issues that are both social and political facing us as a result of the passage of the stimulus bill. Just go to AskHeritage.org, and join them for the nominal fee of 25 bucks. You can spend more than that if you want to, but once you join AskHeritage.org, whatever you want to know is there. Their website is a veritable encyclopedia of answers.

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