Last week, when Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law a measure to require welfare applicants to submit to a drug test, his office included a precedent in the press release:
“Florida passed similar legislation back in 2010 decreasing their welfare applicant pool by 48 percent and saving their state $1.8 million.”
But the Huffington Post reports that the above statement is based on “bad research” conducted by a conservative think tank. Florida’s own evaluation of the law contradicted the finding:
“Florida’s caseload had been declining consistently since December 2010,” says a document from the state’s Department of Children and Families, which administers the assistance program (formally known nationwide as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).
“On applying the previous rate of decline to a projection of the July-September 2011 caseload and factoring in the drug testing denials, we found that the projected caseload would have been lower than the actual caseload. Therefore we saw no dampening effect on the caseload for the one quarter (July-September) covered for this report.”
Deal’s people have sent us this copy of the report by the Foundation for Government Accountability, which produced the number used by the Georgia governor.
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Today’s edition of the 2012 general election campaign for president features a race for the college-age crowd. From the New York Daily News:
Mitt Romney on Monday did something he rarely does — embraced one of President Obama’s initiatives.
Courting young voters, the likely GOP challenger supported Obama’s call for Congress to freeze rates on federal Stafford loans for college students.
“I think young voters in this country have to vote for me if they’re really thinking of what’s in the best interest of the country and what’s in their personal best interest,” Romney said….
With Congress debating how to pay for the freeze, Obama will be stumping for the rate’s extension during a tour of North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado this week.
Politico.com adds this thought to the president’s swing through North Carolina:
Obama’s Achilles Tarheel is the general lack of enthusiasm, especially among younger voters, that threatens to reverse his historic win in 2008, depriving him of a key part of his own map and imperiling his party’s tenuous foothold in the upper South.
Yet Romney’s own weakness, coupled with Obama’s major commitment of time and resources, will likely compensate, and strategists in both parties predict the state will remain a tossup deep into the fall.
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Presidential primary voters in five states go to the polls today — New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Delaware. Newt Gingrich has staked his red-inked campaign on Delaware. From NBC News:
“I think we need to take a deep look at what we are doing,” Gingrich [said] Monday. “We will be in North Carolina tomorrow night and we will look and see what the results are.”
And yet we heard the same phraseology from Newt before those primaries in Alabama and Mississippi.
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Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Monday stumped through Pennsylvania with U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., at his side – a try-out of sorts for the vice-presidential slot. The Philadelphia Inquirer managed to offer two caution lights in two sentences:
[T]he crowd of several hundred appreciated the senator’s star power. He drew louder applause than Romney at several points.
Romney, who has called President Obama too inexperienced, declined to answer a Fox News reporter’s question about whether Rubio, 40 and in his first Senate term, was qualified to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency.
- By Jim Galloway, Political Insider
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