During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama told "Joe the Plumber" that he wanted to "spread the wealth around." A leading conservative think tank says President Obama fulfilled that promise with his fiscal year 2010 budget by greatly expanding the welfare state.
The Heritage Foundation estimates that President Obama's budget includes a 30-percent increase in programs for the poor, including Medicaid, food stamps, S-CHIP, daycare, and energy assistance. Kiki Bradley, a research fellow at Heritage who analyzed the president's budget, says the increased welfare spending "traps people in a lifetime of poverty."
Katherine (Kiki) Bradley (Heritage Foundation)"A lot of people ask, 'Well, what's the problem with that? We're having some economic downturn,'" says Bradley. "Well, out of all these programs for the poor -- and we looked at 70 in particular; that's 70 different programs across 15 different agencies -- ...we found that out of all those 70 programs only one was instituted with reforms to put people into jobs and self-sufficiency. That was the TANF program -- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families."
Bradley -- who before joining The Heritage Foundation was the associate director of the TANF Bureau at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- says unfortunately, all the other 69 programs for the poor "keep them poor" and "do nothing to help them become self-sufficient."
Topic: Obama's 2010 budget includes 'poverty traps' (Read 592 times)