Special Report

The most obvious value of human rights to the post-Holocaust world has been to set a limit on government power and shine a light on its abuses. The limit comes from the revolutionary idea, conceived in the immediate aftermath of World War II, that all governments are constrained in their actions by the inherent dignity […]

From the last, best hope of earth to Abu Ghraib: What has happened to the vision of America as the land of justice? In countless ways, at home and in the world, this country has abandoned its commitment to the protection of human rights. The change is all the more stark because Americans played such […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]