Democrats in Congress are still throwing tantrums about the extremely modest work requirements for some welfare recipients included in the House GOP debt-limit bill.
Yet the nation is headed for technical default by August, and the vast majority of Americans support such requirements.
It’s as absurd as it is fiscally dangerous.
Look: Per a new poll from Axios, some 63% of Americans think Medicaid and/or food stamps (the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) should come with work requirements.
Heck, 49% of Dems agree (along with 66% of independents and 80% of Republicans).
Even President Joe Biden has softened his public language, hinting he’s open to at least some requirements.
The only ones who find it remotely controversial seem to be Democrats in Congress.
They’ve been howling about this sensible and necessary call from their colleagues across the aisle as if it were a crime against humanity.
“It’s just cruel,” moaned Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).
No, it’s 20 hours a week for the able-bodied well below retirement age.
Republicans want to “take food out of the mouths of kids,” blubbered Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), even though the rules apply only to some adults.
Dems have zero excuse for opposing the requirements at all, let alone trying to tank negotiations on the debt limit over them.
Liberals talked the same doom in advance of the bipartisan 1996 welfare reforms — which wound up slashing poverty rates, including for black Americans.
Among single-parent families, poverty fell by two-thirds.
So the disastrous consequences Khanna & Co predict are total phantoms — as they should already know.
Meanwhile, Dems from Biden on down falsely claim other parts of the GOP bill would slash veterans’ health care and generally bring on Armageddon . . . by rolling total federal discretionary spending back to 2022 levels and limiting its growth thereafter.
The debt limit exists precisely to force a reckoning when Uncle Sam is spending far beyond his means.
Outlays are now roughly a quarter of yearly gross domestic product, well above the pre-2020 average.
Republicans don’t want default: That’s why they passed the only plan on the table for raising the limit.
House and Senate Democrats, like the White House, talk up the idea of a “clean” bill that just lets the spending continue — but they don’t have the votes to pass it, or (apparently) any other alternative.
The Dems simply scream at any cuts, even popular ones like the work-for-welfare rules.
Is their only plan to keep on spending and borrowing, or are they figuring that when the bills come due they’ll just claim the credit card was stolen?
This story originally appeared on NYPost
