Lots of people are talking about Chris Matthews teeing off on Reince Priebus today, accusing the GOP of “playing the race card” against the President. Mitt Romney’s birther joke, their blatantly false ad accusing the President of removing the work requirement from welfare and the framing of the debate over Medicare, that “you paid into it” and now your benefits are being “stolen” for those other people to get Obamacare, seem calculated to play into this.

This welfare dustup in the Presidential election, as I said earlier in the week, generates a lot of heat as an argument while being irrelevant to the actual issue. Newt Gingrich, the architect of welfare reform in the 1990s who has been employed by the Romney campaign as a spokesman, admitted last night that there’s no proof that the waivers provided by the Department of Health and Human Services would lead to direct cash payments to beneficiaries, which it wouldn’t.

Mitt Romney has a new ad attacking President Obama for undermining “welfare reform” by removing the work requirements. That’s false. First, the “waiver” process leaves to states how best to achieve the same goals, and second, GOP governors, including MA Gov. Mitt Romney in 2005, asked for the waiver process. But more important, the claim ignores the fact the original “welfare reform” structure failed, unable to meet needs during an economic recession.

Hundreds of thousands of food stamp recipients will lose at least $90 a month in benefits, after an amendment to the farm bill failed badly in the Senate.

On Pete Peterson Fiscal Summit, let’s marvel for a second at just how much influence Peterson has, that he can get pretty much everyone in Washington to kiss the hem of his garment. Former President Bill Clinton, House Speaker John Boehner, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and what seems like half of Congress were on hand at this thing. And the reason for this is simple: dollars and cents.

It’s almost poetic that this year’s Equal Pay Day—the one day of the year when Americans are supposed to reflect on the value (and undervaluing) of women’s work—coincided with the media firestorm surrounding the American stay-at-home-mom. The “controversy” over Ann Romney’s decision to stay home rather than work a “regular” job should highlight some of the continuing struggles of women to be valued and respected for their work, in and out of the home.

Pete Stark has introduced his bill called the Women’s Option to Raise Kids (WORK) Act, which would allow low-income mothers with children up to 3 years old to classify their child-rearing responsibilities as work, just the way Ann Romney did. Will Mrs. Romney support it?

Mitt says “all moms are working moms.” Pete Stark wants to hold him to it.

Now that we’ve exposed the flaws from cutting welfare so it cannot provide adequate benefits during an historically bad recession, we can gather a new appreciation for the main mandatory spending program on the poor that has served to keep them afloat in these troubled times.

The US enacted the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform in the midst of the largest postwar expansion in four decades. It was not put to the test for many years, and really not until the Great Recession. And now we’re seeing that it doesn’t work for most of those who need it.