menu_open Columnists
We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

Larry Summers is having a convenient short-term memory lapse on welfare reform 

2 1
11.07.2025

Larry Summers has some nerve. The economist is ripping Republican’s “cruel” efforts to rein in out-of-control Medicaid spending.

Yet he himself participated in one of the biggest welfare reforms of our lifetime.

In 1996, with Summers serving in his Treasury Department, President Bill Clinton signed into law measures that ended welfare as an “entitlement,” pushed people to go to work, made relief temporary and limited federal funding for state programs.

Sound familiar? That’s what’s the Medicaid changes contained in the just-passed reconciliation bill look like. Then, as now, liberals predicted millions would die or descend into poverty from cutting back welfare. But here's what actually happened: People found jobs, became self-sufficient and prospered. And that’s what will happen again.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Summers, Harvard’s former president, told fellow Clinton administration alum George Stephanopoulos, “The Yale Budget Lab estimates that [the tax bill] will kill, over 10 years, 100,000 people.”

Summers is not alone. Democrats like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have spent weeks spewing similar

© The Hill