BOSTON — Mitt Romney, who is trying to gain an edge in the presidential contest with the disputed charge that President Barack Obama is giving welfare recipients a free ride, can point to his own record of pushing for tighter welfare rules during four years as governor of Massachusetts...
Romney fought to require single parents with children as young as a year old to work to get welfare benefits if they could obtain state-subsidized child care. He also opposed efforts to allow time spent in job training or education programs to count toward the state’s 20-hour weekly work requirement for welfare recipients, and pushed for a five-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits.
At the time, Massachusetts was one of only five states without a lifetime limit, instead allowing welfare recipients to claim benefits two years out of every five-year period. Despite his tougher stand, Romney also tried to shield welfare benefits from budget cuts as the state struggled with sinking revenues.
"There are a number of areas where I feel significant cuts would be too difficult on such short notice. I did not cut welfare payments," Romney said in a televised address in 2003 explaining his state budget proposal after just four weeks on the job. "In fact, the majority of state programs for the poor and elderly were not touched."..
While the Republican presidential nominee has been criticized for shifting his position on everything from abortion to embryonic stem cell research to health care, his stand on welfare has remained relatively constant...Romney has told voters again and again he’d restore the work requirement to the federal program...
Romney vetoed a proposal sent to him by the Legislature during his first year to allow welfare recipients to use time spent in training and education classes to satisfy the state work requirement. It later overturned Romney’s veto...
By 2005, Romney sought to increase the pressure even more by proposing rules that would mandate welfare recipients with children as young as a year old to
start working 20 hours a week to earn their state benefits.
In his state of the state address that year, Romney outlined his efforts to bring what he called "real welfare reform to Massachusetts," saying part of his
goal was to help get those on welfare back into the workforce as quickly as possible.
"People from both political parties have long recognized that
welfare without work creates negative incentives that lead to permanent poverty," Romney said. "It robs people of self-esteem."...
The House and Senate passed a bill they said would require more welfare recipients to work, but critics, including Romney, said the plan didn’t go far enough, jeopardizing millions in federal welfare dollars.
The Legislature’s bill would have required about 16,000 of the state’s 45,600 welfare recipients to work. Romney proposed a series of amendments he said would put more than 25,500 recipients to work.
Among those was his push to require women with children between 1 and 2 years old to work if they could obtain state-subsidized child care.
Romney also wanted to require disabled welfare recipients to meet the stricter federal definition of disability rather than a more lenient state definition...."People who receive payments from government are going to be required to work, not as a punitive measure, but as a gift. Work is enhancing. Work is elevating," Romney said in Iowa. "I want more people working if they’re going to receive government assistance."
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_...eid=1061157208
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Originally Posted by timcsaw
Agreed... my point being that everyone has a different understanding of what "character" is (usually based on how they see their own "character"). If you were to ask Anthony Weiner, John Edwards and Rod Blagojevich if they think that THEY have "good character", and can be a good judge of the "character" of others, they'd probably answer "yes".
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