Setting Priorities for Welfare Reform

From The Daily Signal:

Although the welfare reform of the 1990s was popular and initially successful, it was actually quite limited. Of 80 welfare programs, only the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was reformed, and even in TANF, the vigor of reform has nearly disappeared. Welfare reform should be rejuvenated and expanded by making the following changes.

1. Set the proper goals for welfare. The goal of welfare should not be to reduce poverty through an ever-larger welfare state. Rather, the goals should be to increase self-sufficiency (having an income above poverty level without relying on government welfare aid); enhance productive participation in society; and improve personal well-being and upward mobility.
2. Clearly enumerate the total cost of the means-tested welfare in the Congressional Budget Resolution and set annual spending caps on total welfare spending.
3. Measure poverty, income, living standards, and inequality correctly.
4. Require able-bodied non-elderly adults receiving welfare benefits to work, prepare for work, or at least look for a job under supervision as a condition for receiving aid.
5. Promote healthy marriage in low-income communities.
6. Reject the ineffective pseudo-federalism of welfare block grants and begin to implement real federalism by transferring fiscal responsibility for low-income housing from the federal government to the states.
7. Reform the earned income tax credit. Fraud can be greatly reduced by requiring income verification before payments are made and limiting eligibility to custodial parents and legal guardians.
8. Reduce welfare fraud.Work requirements such as those recommended in this paper substantially reduce welfare fraud because requiring a recipient to be in the welfare office periodically interferes with holding a hidden or unreported job. Recipients cannot be two places at once. Faced with a work requirement, many recipients with hidden jobs simply leave the rolls.
9. Reform social service and training programs by funding them on a pay-for-outcome basis.
10. Create greater employment opportunities for hard-to-employ individuals in low-income neighborhoods.

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Makes perfect sense to me.