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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 […]