Bush Criticizes Senate Welfare Bill (washingtonpost.com): President Bush insisted Monday that welfare recipients put in a 40-hour work week and said a Senate bill requiring less is riddled with "so many exceptions, so many loopholes" that it would reverse six years of welfare progress. Bush leveled his assault on the Democrat-written legislation while on a $1.2 million fund-raising hop to South Carolina for the state's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Sanford. He faulted legislation passed last month by Democrats, who control the Senate Finance Committee, because it does not include the stiffer work requirements he seeks, would not produce as much money as he wants for programs promoting marriage, and would increase funds to help working welfare parents pay for child care.
    "They're saying we got to spend a bunch more money in order to make us feel better and to make things work better. We don't need that," Bush said.

So, let me just get this straight: he wants people on welfare to be required to work a 40-hour workweek, but we should make absolutely no provisions to deal with the fact that most people on welfare have children that need to be dealt with.

He does not consider education to be "helping people become independent and it's certainly not my view of understanding the importance of work and helping people achieve the dignity necessary so they can live a free life, free from government control." He begrudges education to people trying to get themselves off welfare. This from a man who wanted to call himself the education president.

What sort of job does he envision welfare recipients having? Low end service jobs for unskilled labor are all very well and good, but they don't lead anywhere. In an economy that's staggering around the way this one is, that will likely lead to frequent bouts of unemployment. It's a job, sure, but it's no way to build a good life. Don't we want people to be able to get off welfare, stay off welfare, and make a better life for themselves and their children?

(And don't get me started on his revolting "promoting marriage" proposition. Welfare rules don't allow the women to be married and receive full benefits for their children. Additionally, if most of the men were worth being married to, they probably would be married to them. A fair number of these women are escaping from abusive situations, but we should just shove those families back together! Yes we should! After all, once that man kills that woman and maybe her children, then we won't have to care for them on welfare anymore, will we? Of course, the guy will be going to prison, which is a sort of welfare captivity, but with a little luck, he'll be in Texas, where they get rid of them as needs killin' just as fast as they can!)

Welfare reform has already had such wonderfully pro-family effects, such as acquainting children with their grandparents and foster care:

...new research underscores a smaller, unwelcome trend: a rising share of children, particularly black children in cities, are turning up in no-parent households, left with relatives, friends or foster families without either their mother or their father. Researchers say they cannot pinpoint the forces driving parents and children apart. But among them, they said, may be the stresses of the new welfare world ? loss of benefits, low-wage jobs at irregular hours and pressure from a new partner needed to pay the rent. [...]
     "What we're seeing is the complex relationship between this thing we call welfare reform and the impact on families," said Wade F. Horn, the Bush administration official who oversees the welfare program. "In some cases we see positive effects on family structures, and in other cases we see more children living in no-parent families." Mr. Horn said new welfare demands might expose an unfit parent whose children are better off in foster care. On the other hand, he added, a West Virginia mother told to seek work in Ohio may feel obliged to leave a child behind to finish school. "What it tells us," he said, "is that we need to do an even better job on understanding the complexities of these programs on real people."

Yes, but the problem is, the administration doesn't want to understand. Understanding would mean that it would have to face the fact that welfare reform implemented without proper analysis beforehand means that we may well have been doing things wrong. Understanding would mean foregoing the quick policy soundbite and saying, "Look, we need to pay attention to what we're doing. It does no good to promote marriages that don't work and work rules that force people to stay away from their children, especially when we're trying to be a compassionately conservative, pro-family administration. Destroying families is really the last thing we want to do. And if we continue to promulgate policies that target poor and black families in particular, we will be condemning ourselves to having a permanent minority underclass, and that's not what we want to do."

Who thinks we'll hear that from this administration anytime soon? Anyone? ... no, I didn't think so.

Compassionate conservatism, my ASS.