Josh Barro, Columnist

Romney's Thin Welfare-Reform Attack

August 8, 2012 at 8:14 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Mitt Romney is up with an ad attacking Barack Obama for gutting the work requirements in the 1996 welfare reform. Romney's ad says, "Under Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work, and you wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you a welfare check." This is false.

There was some reason to be nervous about the original request for waiver proposals from the Department of Health and Human Services. While HHS was not talking about abolishing the work requirements in welfare reform, it did open the door to reforms that could weaken them.