🚨🇺🇸The Senate just killed the SAVE Act, 48-50.
Voter ID and proof of citizenship, supported by over 80% of Americans, dead.
Four Republicans voted no: Tillis, Murkowski, McConnell, Collins.
The uniparty showed its face today...
Under capitalism, socialists are free to build socialism.
Under socialism, capitalists aren’t free to build anything.
Nothing stops a group of socialists pooling their money, forming a company, and splitting every wage and every pound of profit perfectly equally.... Or to donate all profit to the government.
It’s legal. It’s easy. Owning the means of production is as simple as setting up a company.
Marx wrote his manifesto before the invention of limited liability companies. Back then “seize the factory” meant seizing it from the handful of families who could afford one.
That argument expired the day anyone could start a company with limited liability, raise investment and hire who they want.
Socialists are free to lead by example and demonstrate their system works. They can out-recruit, out-motivate, out-build and out innovate based on their ideas if they like. It would prove the philosophy works. Capitalism will happily host their experiment.
The fact that nobody does this tells you a lot.
Life advice: The guy in a "fuck you" hat would almost certainly pull you out of a burning car if needed. Anybody wearing a shirt mentioning "love" or "kindness," meanwhile, might feign concern while watching you burn to death.
@CommunityNotes Laws and regulations are immortal.
Humans die, laws and regulations don’t.
There has to be a garbage collection process for laws and regulations, otherwise human civilization will come to a grinding halt. Eventually no progress will be made as everything will be illegal.
Here’s the clean timeline and what actually happened:
1996–2012: The Reform Was Mostly in Place
• The 1996 Welfare Reform (PRWORA) passed with bipartisan support and was signed by Bill Clinton.
• It replaced the old open-ended AFDC with TANF, added real work requirements, time limits, and block grants to states.
• The results were strong (as we covered): caseloads dropped dramatically, single-mother employment rose sharply, child poverty fell, and the growth in unwed births finally slowed.
For roughly 16 years (1996–2012), the core anti-dependency features of the 1996 law remained in effect. States had flexibility, but the federal work requirements and time limits were still on the books and were being enforced to varying degrees.
2012: The Obama Administration Gutted It
This is the key turning point you’re asking about.
In July 2012, Obama’s HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued an administrative memo that effectively waived the core work requirements of the 1996 law.
• The memo claimed the federal government could grant states waivers from the 50% work participation rate if they promised “better employment outcomes.”
• This was widely viewed (and later confirmed by the Government Accountability Office) as illegal — the 1996 law did not give HHS authority to waive the work requirements.
• Even though few states formally applied for the waivers (they knew it was politically toxic), the signal was clear: Washington was no longer going to enforce the heart of the 1996 reform.
From that point forward, work requirements were hollowed out in practice across much of the country. The 1996 reform was still technically on the books, but its teeth were pulled.
2021–2025 (Biden Era): They Doubled Down
The Biden administration went even further:
• They expanded eligibility and loosened rules in SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, and housing programs.
• They proposed new TANF regulations in 2023 that would have made work requirements even weaker (later withdrawn after pushback).
• Overall federal welfare spending ballooned toward $1.2 trillion per year.
• They did not pass new laws that explicitly said “pay single moms more.” But by:
• Gutting enforcement of work requirements
• Expanding benefits
• Leaving the old marriage penalties in place
…they effectively made the system more permissive toward single motherhood again.
The marriage penalties never went away. In many cases, getting married still meant losing thousands of dollars in benefits because the father’s income gets counted against the mother’s eligibility.
The 2012 waiver + Biden-era expansions just made the overall system more generous while keeping those anti-marriage cliffs intact.
Bottom Line
• 1996–2012: Real reform was in place and working. Single motherhood growth slowed. Dependency dropped.
• 2012 onward: The Obama administration used administrative power to gut the work requirements. The Biden administration continued and expanded the permissive approach.
• They didn’t need to repeal the 1996 law. They just stopped enforcing it and made the rest of the welfare system more generous — which had the effect of re-incentivizing single motherhood and dependency.
This is exactly the pattern we’ve been tracing: the long-march coalition cannot tolerate reforms that actually reduce dependency and strengthen families. When real progress happens (like after 1996), they use bureaucratic power to reverse it.
The 1996 reform proved the system can be fixed. The fact that it was deliberately undermined shows how deep the capture runs.
@R1dack1415 Now bring in a technology layer: the Pill destroying the courtship process and stable family formation.
Then the financial one: print money over decades so housing is unaffordable.
The demographic decline will degrade rural areas first.
Here we are. Good luck everyone.
@SRCHicks This thing all things devours;
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down.
- There and Back Again, Tolkien
If we can't be taxed on unrealized gains, why the fuck are we being taxed on the new increased valuation of our home without selling it?
THAT'S UNREALIZED GAINS!
@TheMichaelEvery@izakaminska My intuition is UK will go to the EU, like two failing corporations thinking one bigger entity will save them.
It's a rare person who admits they've been wrong.
Now do Canada!
@PlanBpassport Big government flywheel: print money to drive up capital gains, pound the table about inequality and morality, then tax the gains.
Ensuring the birth rate collapse continues.
Would you believe 57 Republicans and 211 Democrats recently voted in favor of this Orwellian automobile kill-switch? Here’s the roll call for the vote I forced to defund the mandate: https://t.co/dnPxPHFYie