Author: R. Kent Weaver
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815798354
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 502
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Book Description
Bill Clinton's first presidential term was a period of extraordinary change in policy toward low-income families. In 1993 Congress enacted a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. In 1996 Congress passed and the president signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This legislation abolished the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with a block grant program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It contained stiff new work requirements and limits on the length of time people could receive welfare benefits.Dramatic change in AFDC was also occurring piecemeal in the states during these years. States used waivers granted by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to experiment with a variety of welfare strategies, including denial of additional benefits for children born or conceived while a mother received AFDC, work requirements, and time limits on receipt of cash benefits. The pace of change at the state level accelerated after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation gave states increased leeway to design their programs. Ending Welfare as We Know It analyzes how these changes in the AFDC program came about. In fourteen chapters, R. Kent Weaver addresses three sets of questions about the politics of welfare reform: the dismal history of comprehensive AFDC reform initiatives; the dramatic changes in the welfare reform agenda over the past thirty years; and the reasons why comprehensive welfare reform at the national level succeeded in 1996 after failing in 1995, in 1993–94, and on many previous occasions. Welfare reform raises issues of race, class, and sex that are as difficult and divisive as any in American politics. While broad social and political trends helped to create a historic opening for welfare reform in the late 1990s, dramatic legislation was not inevitable. The interaction of contextual factors with short
Author: Max Sawicky
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9780765604552
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Exploring the consequences of federal devolution on state budgets, this work deals with three major areas of concern: the effect of moving large numbers of welfare recipients into labour markets; the planned federal reforms in the health care field; and trends in federal aid.
Author: Jennifer Mittelstadt
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876437
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
In 1996, Democratic president Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress "ended welfare as we know it" and trumpeted "workfare" as a dramatic break from the past. But, in fact, workfare was not new. Jennifer Mittelstadt locates the roots of the 1996 welfare reform many decades in the past, arguing that women, work, and welfare were intertwined concerns of the liberal welfare state beginning just after World War II. Mittelstadt examines the dramatic reform of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) from the 1940s through the 1960s, demonstrating that in this often misunderstood period, national policy makers did not overlook issues of poverty, race, and women's role in society. Liberals' public debates and disagreements over welfare, however, caused unintended consequences, she argues, including a shift toward conservatism. Rather than leaving ADC as an income support program for needy mothers, reformers recast it as a social services program aimed at "rehabilitating" women from "dependence" on welfare to "independence," largely by encouraging them to work. Mittelstadt reconstructs the ideology, implementation, and consequences of rehabilitation, probing beneath its surface to reveal gendered and racialized assumptions about the welfare poor and broader societal concerns about poverty, race, family structure, and women's employment.
Author: Jason DeParle
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440649170
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
In this definitive work, two-time Pulitzer finalist Jason DeParle, author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce a masterpiece of literary journalism. At the heart of the story are three cousins whose different lives follow similar trajectories. Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces their family history back six generations to slavery and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic. With a vivid sense of humanity, DeParle demonstrates that although we live in a country where anyone can make it, generation after generation some families don’t. To read American Dream is to understand why.
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309171342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.
Author: Michael Tanner
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 9781882577378
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Argues for the abolishment of the current system.
Author: Michael E. Fix
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610446224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America's collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants' ability to integrate into American society. Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform's ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants' propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants' use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants' benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants' use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare. Even though few states took the federal government's invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law's most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare. Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute
Author: Irwin Garfinkel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019957930X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Including education has profound consequences, undergirding the case for the productivity of welfare state programs and the explanation for why all rich nations have large welfare states, and identifying US welfare state leadership. From 1968 through 2006, the United States swung right politically and lost its lead in education and opportunity, failed to adopt universal health insurance and experienced the most rapid explosion of health care costs and economic inequality in the rich world. The American welfare state faces large challenges. Restoring its historical lead in education is the most important but requires investing large sums in education, beginning with universal pre-school and in complementary programs that aid children's development.
Author: Gwendolyn Mink
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728873
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
With her analysis of the thirty-year campaign to reform and ultimately to end welfare, Gwendolyn Mink levels a searing indictment of anti-welfare politicians'assault on poor mothers. She charges that the basic elements of the new welfare policy subordinate poor single mothers in a separate system of law. Mink points to the racial, class, and gender biases of both liberals and conservatives to explain the odd but sturdy consensus behind welfare reforms that force the poor single mother to relinquish basic rights and compel her to find economic security in work outside the home. Mink explores how and why we should cure the unique inequality of poor single mothers by reorienting the emphasis of welfare policy away from regulating mothers to rewarding the work they do. Every mother is a working mother, the bumper sticker proclaims, but the work mothers do pays no wages. Mink argues that women's equality depends on economic support for caregivers'work. Welfare's End challenges the ways in which policymakers define the problem they seek to cure. While legislators assume that something is wrong with poor single mothers, Mink insists that something is wrong with a system that invades their rights and negates their work. Showing how welfare reform harms women, Mink invites the design of policies to promote gender justice.
Author: Kathryn Edin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544303180
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
The story of a kind of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't even think exists--from a leading national poverty expert who "defies convention" (New York Times)
