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Republicans have spent years decades talking up welfare and entitlement reform. But for the past two decades thats all they have delivered: talk.

This year Virginias General Assembly considered a half-dozen measures that would have curtailed various social-welfare benefits. Only two minor ones have survived the gauntlet. One would audit a family that loses multiple benefit cards. The other would cross-check welfare beneficiary lists against lists of lottery winners.

If the changes were any less significant you would need an electron microscope to see them.

Note that the GOP controls both houses of the legislature. So while Republicans sponsored the measures, Republicans also killed them.

The picture looks much the same at the national level. Congressional leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan have long agitated for changes to Medicare and other programs. The need to change social-welfare programs so they do not become a hammock, as some put it, is an article of faith among Beltway Republicans.

So is deficit reduction. Many Republicans want to trim benefits not for cultural reasons but for fiscal ones. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are growing to such a degree that all other federal spending (except interest payments on the debt) soon will be squeezed to nothing, unless the federal deficit balloons again.

Which it almost certainly will. Donald Trump has proposed big tax cuts. He wants to spend as much as $1 trillion on a new infrastructure program. He also aims to rebuild the military. But he has shown little interest in entitlement reform. He has promised to protect Social Security and does not want to meddle with Medicare or cut Medicaid. There is no universe in which this does not amount to a prescription for ruinous levels of debt. Something needs to give.

That something ought to be entitlements, which have spiraled out of control and which are placing the greatest strain on the federal treasury. But without the president behind them, congressional Republicans wont get far on reform even if they have the stomach to give it a shot. Given recent events in Virginia, that too is open for debate.

Read more from the original source:
Editorial: On welfare reform, Republicans are all talk - Richmond.com