And in fact, you needed to have all of these little strictures and these rules in order to build the mass public’s trust.

But this didn’t always totally make sense to me, because it’s not like people liked welfare better after 1996. Nobody is like: Oh, that’s a really great program today.

So I don’t think that adding administrative burdens to it improved it.

What happened in 1996?

Archival clip of Bill Clinton: Today we are ending welfare as we know it. But I hope today will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began.

In 1996, the program was required to have work requirements. It’s required to have sanctions for noncompliant users of the program.

There’s a time limit. You can only get it for five years, no matter how many kids you have. If you have one kid and then you have a kid 10 years later, you’re not going to get Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

It stops being an entitlement. So if you meet the criteria, you don’t necessarily get the benefit. It gets block-granted to the state, and they’ve never changed the block grant amount, even adjusting for inflation. It’s still $16.5 billion per year — so tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny.

Archival clip of Clinton: From now on, our nation’s answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare. It will be the dignity, the power and the ethic of work. Today, we are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be — a second chance, not a way of life.

For the people who are receiving the money, they have to do so much work to get this really paltry benefit. The benefit is so hard for them to get. And the application is not just difficult to do, but the application is humiliating, embarrassing — something that nobody actually wants to do, often because the benefit is so small.