I found a new blog through Little Green Footballs, called New Sisyphus (which is a phrase that shouldn't be read too quickly). The inaugural post is LONG! But totally worth it.

Regarding the 1996 Welfare Reforms:

"The current debate over welfare reform involves conflicting visions of society and the impact of welfare on human behavior. Real reform will not be achieved until specific core assumptions which form the foundation of the modern welfare state have been overturned and discarded. From its onset, the liberal welfare state has been founded on faulty logic. This flawed logic, embedded in nearly all liberal thinking about welfare, runs something like this:

PREMISE #1: Children in families with higher income seem to do better in life.

PREMISE #2: Welfare can easily raise family income.

Conclusion: Therefore, welfare is good for kids.

* * *

It is useful to examine each of these cardinal liberal tenets individually. The first is that raising incomes is crucial to the well-being and success of children. The common liberal corollary to this premise is that poverty "causes" such problems as crime, school failure, low cognitive ability, illegitimacy, low work ethic and skills, and drug use. Hence, reducing poverty through greater welfare spending will reduce most social problems. History refutes this belief. In 1950, nearly a third of the U.S. population was poor (twice the current rate). In the 1920s, roughly half of the population was poor by today's standard. If the theory that "poverty" causes social problems were true, we should have had far more social problems in those earlier periods then we do today. But crime and most other social problems have increased rather than fallen since these earlier periods."

A highly intelligent blogger working for the State Department.