Ending Welfare as We Know It

Ending Welfare as We Know It PDF 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-term political and policy calculations by President Clinton and congressional Republicans—along with the cascade of repositioning by other policymakers—turned "ending welfare as we know it" from political possibility into policy reality.

Ending Welfare as We Know It

Ending Welfare as We Know It PDF Author: R. Kent Weaver
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815798354
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Get Book

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-term political and policy calculations by President Clinton and congressional Republicans—along with the cascade of repositioning by other policymakers—turned "ending welfare as we know it" from political possibility into policy reality.

The End of Welfare

The End of Welfare PDF 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.

The End of Welfare?

The End of Welfare? PDF Author: Max Sawicky
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9780765604552
Category : Block grants
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.

American Dream

American Dream PDF Author: Jason DeParle
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143034377
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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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.

Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition

Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition PDF 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.

Take the Rich Off Welfare

Take the Rich Off Welfare PDF Author: Mark Zepezauer
Publisher: South End Press
ISBN: 9780896087064
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
When the first version of this book came out in 1996, on the heels of "Welfare Reform," it was received with great popular acclaim. As Jim Hightower put it, "At last, the real welfare scandal [is] revealed in one handy little -volume." But the scandal was still in the making. The total amount of taxpayers' money going to subsidize corporations and rich individuals has grown from about $448 billion to over $800 billion--and the amount of that tax money that comes from those flush companies and individuals continues to shrink. In this greatly expanded and updated version of Take the Rich off Welfare, Mark Zepezauer still details who's on the government dole and how much they're getting. This time around, though, he has slowed down his rapid firing of the latest names and numbers in order to reveal how it all works. Using accessible language and revealing graphics, he takes the time to explain how programs once intended to profit the public have been warped to benefit only the corporate bottom line; how administrations manipulate the tax code to slide their extortion from the bottom half past congressional oversight; and how the politicians from both parties employ budget doubletalk and paper trickery to make it look as if the economy isn't being sucked further into a sinkhole in order to line the pockets of the few. A prolific writer of humorous but cutting analyses of government policy and its fallout, Zepezauer provides us with the tools we need to expose the political chicanery of current and past administrations, and make it much more difficult for politicians to play Three Card Monte with our money and our future. To the rallying cry of fiscal conservatives who claim that government must shrink, Zepezauer offers an easy answer. Shrink you. Mark Zepezauer has worked as a journalist, editor and publisher since 1985. His articles, columns and reviews have appeared in the Village Voice, In These Times and the Arizona Daily Star. Zepezauer also wrote two Real Story books (now published by South End Press): The CIA's Greatest Hits (1994) and the first version of Take the Rich Off Welfare (1996), which have sold over 25,000 and 22,000 copies respec

Welfare's End

Welfare's End PDF 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.

$2.00 a Day

$2.00 a Day PDF Author: Kathryn Edin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544303180
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
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)

The War on Welfare

The War on Welfare PDF Author: Marisa Chappell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Why did the War on Poverty give way to the war on welfare? Many in the United States saw the welfare reforms of 1996 as the inevitable result of twelve years of conservative retrenchment in American social policy, but there is evidence that the seeds of this change were sown long before the Reagan Revolution—and not necessarily by the Right. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America traces what Bill Clinton famously called "the end of welfare as we know it" to the grassroots of the War on Poverty thirty years earlier. Marshaling a broad variety of sources, historian Marisa Chappell provides a fresh look at the national debate about poverty, welfare, and economic rights from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. In Chappell's telling, we experience the debate over welfare from multiple perspectives, including those of conservatives of several types, liberal antipoverty experts, national liberal organizations, labor, government officials, feminists of various persuasions, and poor women themselves. During the Johnson and Nixon administrations, deindustrialization, stagnating wages, and widening economic inequality pushed growing numbers of wives and mothers into the workforce. Yet labor unions, antipoverty activists, and moderate liberal groups fought to extend the fading promise of the family wage to poor African Americans families through massive federal investment in full employment and income support for male breadwinners. In doing so, however, these organizations condemned programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for supposedly discouraging marriage and breaking up families. Ironically their arguments paved the way for increasingly successful right-wing attacks on both "welfare" and the War on Poverty itself.

The End of Welfare as We Know It?

The End of Welfare as We Know It? PDF Author: Philipp Sandermann
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
ISBN: 3847403389
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
During the last 30 years, the governments of many Western countries have repeatedly called for an end to welfare. While the virtue of this goal and the means of achieving it continue to be debated in politics, much of contemporary social science research assumes that, in fact, the end of the welfare state has already occurred. The authors of this volume hope to contribute to a clearer understanding of how, where and to what extent welfare state settings really have changed since the 1980s. Their work examines questions of change and continuity while exploring various welfare practices in the Western world.