In 1996, Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law.

Here’s Hillary Clinton talking about her role in the bill’s passage seven years later, in her memoir Living History:

The President eventually signed this third bill into law. Even with its flaws, it was a critical first step to reforming our nation’s welfare system. I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage.

Here’s the Washington Post talking yesterday about the bill’s impact on the poor:

Hundreds of thousands of Southern families are living on less than $2 in cash a day as a result of legislation President Bill Clinton signed in 1996, according to new research by Johns Hopkins University’s Kathryn Edin and University of Michigan’s Luke Shaefer. . . .

As a result, a certain kind of grave poverty has reappeared in the United States. Sanders said that the number of people living in extreme poverty has doubled under President Clinton’s reforms. If anything, that was an understatement. Edin and Shaefer’s research shows that the number of people living on $2 a day or less in cash has increased more than twofold, to 1.6 million households. . . .

For those Americans unable to work and who were ineligible for government assistance as a result, the effects were devastating. That has been clear in the South, which has the greatest poverty rate of any U.S. region.

Edin reported that about 4 in 10 households surviving on less than $2 in cash a day live in the South. The prevalence of extreme poverty there is partly a result of how state policymakers used the authority they gained under President Clinton’s reform.

Clinton replaced traditional welfare with a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In order to comply with the law, states either had to place a certain number of beneficiaries in training, job-placement or community service programs, or they had to stop issuing payments to those recipients. For many states, it was easier and cheaper to reduce the rolls.