Politics

Mitt Romney has spent the week characterizing President Obama’s decision to grant waivers to states seeking innovative solutions for meeting the work requirements in welfare reform as gutting the program. In reality, the administration would require participating states “to increase the number of people transitioning from welfare to work by 20 percent” and require states to “demonstrate clear progress” in the first year of the waiver. Interestingly, Romney’s newly-minted Vice Presidential running-mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), adopted a different approach as a congressman during the Bush administration. In 2002, Ryan folded a provision into a House-backed version of President Bush’s welfare reauthorization bill that provided his home state “a significant break in meeting new federal work rules,” lowering the work requirement from 70 percent to just 45 percent. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (4/3/2002): Those measures — patterned after a Bush administration plan — require states to ...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More New Enterprise Associates, the global venture capital firm with headquarters in Silicon Valley, confirmed today that it has raised $2.6 billion for NEA 14, its fourteenth venture capital fund. TechCrunch reported it was raising the fund back in May. NEA is known for raising large funds, but this one takes the cake: It’s easily NEA’s largest ever, and it may well be the largest in venture capital history. The only one that comes close is the $2.56 billion fund that Oak Investment Partners raised for its twelfth fund back in 2006 — but that was arguably not quite a ventu...