 (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) By Max Ehrenfreund Shavonna Rentie's father raised her on what he earned working at McDonald's, along with welfare and food stamps. When she was 15, President Clinton signed a law that changed all of that, replacing welfare with a complex new system that fostered vocational training. The new law encouraged Rentie's father to go to school and become a mechanic. Seeing him get the job he wanted "pushed me to go for what I really want to be," Rentie said. It was exactly as the writers of the law had planned: Welfare reform would help parents receiving welfare set a better example for their children. The children, in turn, would grow up with broader ambitions, free from the generational cycle of poverty and dependence on government — at least, that's what policymakers intended. Today, Rentie is looking for a job. She and her four children receive food stamps and housing assistance. Like her father, she participated in the new welfare system that Clinton's changes established, but her experience "wasn't as positive," she said. While offering some recipients valuable help to train and find jobs, Clinton's changes also imposed strict new rules. Rentie — who was in school while receiving welfare — was required to volunteer several hours each week, file stacks of paperwork and regularly make her way 15 miles from her home in Tulsa to the welfare office for meetings with caseworkers. "It seems a little more of a hassle than it is a help," Rentie said. The program is not really a hand up or a handout, she added: "It's like another hand pressing you down." Rentie quit the rolls. The checks weren't worth the trouble, and the program wasn't making it easier for her get ahead in a labor market that has become increasingly unforgiving for workers in her situation. 
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