Purgatory of the Working Poor
Since making the leap from welfare to work two years ago, Tami Buddi has put a lot of miles on her aging family sedan. To collect child-support payments from her former boyfriend, she drove to the county courthouse in a nearby suburb of Minneapolis. To keep appointments with her job counselor, she drove to a…
Welfare Reform, Phase Two
In 1996, welfare reform was rarely far from the headlines. across the country, states were overhauling their cash assistance programs for poor families. That summer, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a deeply controversial revamping of the federal-state system. The new law ended public assistance as a federal entitlement, in favor of a complex system…
The Big Squeeze
For most Americans, the last four years have represented a low point in our economic history. But for the big-business interests financing the Bush campaign, these have been high times. In previous eras, and even under previous Republican administrations, corporate America was one of a number of players in the public-policy arena. But under the…
A Payday Bonus
Russell Long was hardly the darling of liberal tax reformers when he chaired the Senate Finance Committee in the 1970s. In fact, we usually saw him as a toady for corporate special interests. But as the genial Louisiana Democrat liked to say, even a blind hog finds an acorn once in awhile. The Earned Income…
Prospects
It would have been a catastrophe for democracy itself if liberal leadership during the past century had been unequal to the challenges of national defense. But under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States and its allies prevailed in both world wars. FDR and Harry Truman, advised by such “wise men” as George…
Women and Children Last
One reason for the relative success of welfare reform in the 1990s was expanded child-care subsidies to women making the shift from welfare to work. Since then, experts have been mining the data, seeking to understand the wide-ranging effects on children when their mothers work outside the home. What programs helped school-aged children? How did…
The Politics of One America
To the extent that there’s a social contract in America, it centers on work. If polls are to be believed, most Americans think that all full-time workers should be paid enough to keep themselves and their families out of poverty, that all Americans should have an opportunity to make the most of their talents and…
Can Better Skills Meet Better Jobs?
Our ongoing national debate about poverty, work, and opportunity is in many respects an argument about supply versus demand. Is working poverty ultimately a problem of the skills workers supply or the number and quality of jobs employers create? The supply-side camp, dominant for many years, argues that the solution to poverty amid prosperity is…
Rules of Engagement
Arguing About War By Michael Walzer • Yale University Press • 225 pages • $25.00 The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror By Michael Ignatieff • Princeton University Press • 160 pages • $22.95 It is not easy to weave together the various shorthand critiques of the Bush…
The Brains Thing
Remember the 2000 election? With the country enjoying a seemingly endless spell of peace and prosperity, and no apparent daunting challenges facing the next chief executive, the media were finally granted the chance to construct a narrative entirely around personalities. Al Gore, based on a handful of small exaggerations and his association with the occasionally…
Non-Native Son
The stakes could not have been higher for John Kerry as he appeared before the NAACP’s 95th annual convention in Philadelphia on July 15. In the few months prior, his campaign had been the subject of sharp criticisms from prominent black leaders throughout the country. In May, Donna Brazile chided Kerry for not including enough…
How Much Is Enough?
Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, posed the question of how to define an adequate standard of living. “By necessaries,” he wrote, “I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for support of life, but what ever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest…
Business: Ally or Obstacle?
By now, the stirring images are familiar to television viewers: teary-eyed father recounting beloved child’s battle with life-threatening illness … child enjoying miraculous recovery thanks to world-class health care at Mayo Clinic … grateful dad’s glowing tribute to beneficent employer for picking up tab, supporting family values, and investing in hard-pressed workers like him. The…
One to Watch
CORNING, N.Y. — Samara Barend, a 26-year-old congressional candidate in New York state, is barreling along in a Buick Rendezvous on a recent Friday when “an even bigger SUV,” as her campaign spokesman-cum-driver, Don Weigel, put it, nearly sideswipes her car. Barend looks shaken, but it’s not the first time she’s had a mishap on…
A More Perfect Union?
The Iraq war has quietly but fundamentally changed the course of the European Union. If in recent years Britain, France, and Germany — the EU’s three most important states — had created a delicate and unprecedented harmony over Europe’s future, Britain’s decision to join the war destroyed it. This dissension is playing out all over…
Rights Stuff
The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution — and Why We Need It More Than Ever By Cass R. Sunstein • Basic Books • 294 pages • $25.00 Most of the world’s constitutions include three kinds of rights: civil, political, and social. The U.S. Constitution, however, makes no mention of “social rights,” and the…
Bridging the Two Americas
In the past four years, the income of the median family has fallen while the gap between executive pay and that of ordinary workers has continued to widen. Some of this trend is the result of deliberate Bush administration policies: tax cuts tilted toward the top, the defunding of social subsidies, the deregulation of corporate…
Film: Costume Psychodramas
Is she or isn’t she? That is the question stalking Meryl Streep’s portrayal of a power-mad senator in The Manchurian Candidate. Is the actress pulling a Hillary or what? In June, Matt Drudge fanned the rumors prior to the film’s release, linking to a blogger who claimed that Paramount Pictures had found Streep’s “brilliantly scary…
Cheap Trick
Back in 1996, Terry Johnson, the human-resources director for Ada County, Idaho, was excited about his new health-care coverage. He had just helped the county become the first in the United States to offer employees a medical savings account (MSA) as an alternative to traditional indemnity health insurance, and he was eager to try it.…
Cell Block
Two years ago, Evan Snyder, a developmental and child neurologist, was working at the Harvard Medical School, transplanting neural stem cells into the damaged brains and spinal cords of mice and other animals and watching them reconstitute tissue or recover function. “I had just moved to better lab space,” Snyder recalled in June at the…
