Today's edition of "Who could have foreseen...?"

Mark Schmitt is annoyed.

It only took twelve years, but the New York Times has discovered the fundamental problem with the 1996 welfare reform: It doesn’t work in a deep recession!

[...]

Twelve years later, the block grant structure is showing its age and its inflexibility. Populations have grown, the recession is particularly rough for women, and states don’t have any flexibility. You don’t build a social safety net for boom times, you build it for rough times.

That's a point that few people wanted to talk about that at the time. Poverty, they thought, was not about the economy, it was a matter of culture and incentives. Defending the “entitlement,” meaning just the economically responsive financing system, was seen as a stale defense of the old system. (The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised the issue, as did my boss at the time, Bill Bradley.) Reading the Times article, I couldn't help being a little annoyed, because among those who were obsessed with work requirements, time limits, and the "culture of welfare," while paying little attention to the long-term economic risk posed by changing a flexible safety net program into a block grant, was the leading reporter on welfare at the time, Jason DeParle of the New York Times. DeParle is also the author of today’s article.