The Taxonomist: Alaska’s Infinite Regress
Recognizing that an informed public generally likes progressive taxes, Republicans prefer to lie about the impact of their tax ideas. Take, for example, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who recently claimed that the federal estate tax on the largest 2 percent of estates isn’t paid by rich “fat cats,” it’s paid by “schoolteachers…airline pilots…and mechanics.” Or…
Welfare Reform’s Hidden Ally
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) lifts more children out of poverty than any other social program in America — indeed, more than all other means-tested benefit programs combined. That’s because it provides a substantial tax credit for low-income working parents, which is also refundable. That is, it is paid in full to them whether…
When Low Wages Don’t Add Up
Elena, a single mother living in San Diego, is well aware of the pressure to get off welfare and take whatever employment is available. “Get a job, get a job, then get a better job” was the message she got from her welfare caseworker. “I didn’t buy that,” she says. What was the point of…
Caring for Children as a Career
High-quality child care is the biggest missing element in welfare-to-work efforts. Despite additional funding under welfare reform, the care available to most low-income women and their children is usually custodial and unreliable. Many former welfare recipients themselves work providing child care — at low wages in unstable employment. So upgrading child care would actually serve…
Getting Welfare Right
Recently I was invited to be the token liberal at a major national conference of conservative foundations. The invitation was to debate Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard editor, TV pundit, and conservative grand strategist, as the after-dinner entertainment. Presumably, conservative donors wished to view the face of the enemy, close up. The better I did,…
No Huddled Masses Need Apply
The walk to the H street welfare office from Washington, D.C.’s Union Station takes a good 20 minutes, longer if you’ve got small children in tow. You see manicured gardens give way to empty lots, bottles in brown paper bags, and a grocery store that’s fenced-in to prevent cart theft. When you get to the…
Money Also Matters
If welfare reform is ultimately to be considered a success, the new system should do a better job than the old one at enabling low-income children to grow up to become healthy, productive adults. Protecting children from destitution was, after all, the original mission of the welfare system when it was included in the Social…
Welfare Reform Depends on Good Child Care
When the 1996 welfare-reform bill was passed, one of its many controversial provisions was the imposition of work requirements on single mothers applying for welfare assistance, even if they had very young children. In part, these requirements simply reflected the overall thrust of the legislation, which aimed to make work the fulcrum of the U.S.…
High Stakes, Hard Choices
Over the last decade, two important social policies originating on the right have been recast as centrist and adopted nationwide. One is welfare reform, which has pushed (some would say shoved) poor and low-skill parents headlong into the labor market. The other is the turn against “social promotion” and toward high-stakes testing in public schools.…
Liberal Lessons from Welfare Reform
When Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996, the liberal community was almost unanimous in urging President Clinton to veto it. Even people like myself, who had supported Clinton’s earlier efforts to “end welfare as we know it,” thought that PRWORA went too far. Fortunately for the poor, the…
Forgotten Men
Although the last decade has brought unprecedented prosperity to many Americans, the picture has been decidedly mixed for young black men. Their crime rates have dropped, and their school enrollments have increased, but things are not going so well for young black workers. During the strongest economic expansion since World War II, while the overall…
Bush’s Blunder
In the last three months, the welfare-reform debate has been transformed in ways few people envisioned even recently. The change hasn’t been for the better. Early this year, many people believed that reauthorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 provided an opportunity to help low-income working families and the hardest-to-employ,…
A Film Divided
Hollywood made some healthy contributions to the “rogue cop” genre in the 1990s. One was Internal Affairs, in which Richard Gere, as a cop gone bad, was corrupt, porkily sexual, running rackets, and siring children like a Greek god. Gere’s character had no conscience; his ethical sense was entirely displaced onto the person of the…
What Does Minnesota Know?
In an aging St. Paul neighborhood known as Frogtown, at a storefront social-services agency called Lifetrack Resources, Tina Thompson and Angela Fink are meeting one afternoon to discuss the impoverished clients they are trying to move into the world of work. There is Zainab, an Ethiopian refugee who arrived in the United States with poor…
Moral Parent, Moral Child
These days there is once again a great deal of hand-wringing about the sorry moral state of America’s children. All the usual suspects have been rounded up: parents who lack values, schools that neglect “character” education, and — conservative pundits’ favorite culprit — family breakdown. As William Bennett puts it in The Broken Hearth: Reversing…
Why Not a New War on Poverty?
The debate in Washington over welfare policy has taken an unfortunate turn: Republicans and many Democrats seem to be in a battle over who can be tougher on poor people rather than who can be tougher on poverty. It’s too bad, because in the early days of the Bush administration there seemed to be a…
Market Extremists Amok
Market extremism doesn’t wear hoods, white sheets, or armbands. Skinheads in its ranks are few. Suicide bombers in its cause are even fewer. But the essence of extremism, as opposed to other specific “isms,” is to extend — harshly, rigidly, and dangerously — a commitment and ideology that in softer and milder forms can be…
The Going Rate on Shrinks
It was last summer in Berlin when I first encountered pharmaceutical funhouses. I was one of 4,000 attendees at the 7th World Congress of Biological Psychiatry. Until about a decade ago, pharmaceutical companies passed out pens or notepads with their companies’ logos at such events, and most speakers presented data and opinions based upon their…
The Future Is Later
In his recent book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, Francis Fukuyama writes, “Cloning is the opening wedge for a series of new technologies that will ultimately lead to designer babies…If we get used to cloning in the near term, it will be much harder to oppose germ-line engineering for enhancement purposes in…
This Is Your Party on Drugs
About three years ago, pollster Celinda Lake sat down with then-Representative Debbie Stabenow — a Michigan Democrat preparing to run for the Senate — to put together a campaign proposal for prescription drugs. Stabenow had already made headlines busing senior citizens across the border to buy affordable prescription drugs in Canada; she wanted to make…
Ashcroft’s Lies
Conservatives are supposed to stand for personal accountability. But at the FBI, under the ultraconservative stewardship of a Republican president and attorney general, no bad deed goes unrewarded. Recent revelations that agents in Washington ignored clues of terrorist activities before September 11, and afterward covered up their incompetence, diminished what was left of the bureau’s…
How Not to Overthrow Saddam
For the past few months, senior Bush administration and military officials have been debating whether and when to launch a military invasion of Iraq. Had they attended, and actually listened to, a late May conference at American University in Washington, however, they would have received a powerful reality check. It brought together the men (no…
Dollars Don’t Do It
The FBI has had a rough couple of months with the public, in the press, and on the Hill. Senators are even entertaining the notion of splitting the bureau in half. But if Director Robert Mueller is seriously concerned about the FBI’s future, it’s only because he’s new to the job. Congress may be in…
Comment: Philanthropy and Movements
Recently I was invited to be the token liberal at a major national conference of conservative foundations. The invitation was to debate Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard editor, TV pundit, and conservative grand strategist, as the after-dinner entertainment. Presumably, conservative donors wished to view the face of the enemy, close up. The better I did,…
The Darkest Horse
It’s hard to imagine a place seeming farther from the White House than State Street in Montpelier, Vermont. A bucolic hamlet nestled alongside the Winooski River, Montpelier, a town of 8,000, must be the only state capital without a McDonald’s. On a brisk May morning, the sun glints blindingly off the gold-domed capitol building. Shops…
