Anthony Lukas’s last book is a powerful tale of what used to be “class warfare” in America — and a lesson about why so many people have had a hard time telling that story.
Poverty & Wealth
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Orwell’s Poor and Ours
Orwell depicted the poor unsentimentally, but with compassion and economic realism. Today’s conservative critics, who blame poverty on an absence of values, do neither.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Welfare Reform as I Knew It: When Bad Things Happen to Good Policies
“I’ll look forward to reading your book on why it failed this time,” Senator Moynihan told me on my first visit as cochair of the Clinton working group on welfare reform. Herewith, the first installment.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Was Welfare Reform Worthwhile?
T here is no question that David Ellwood, the Clinton administration’s chief welfare intellectual, has been on a rough ride. But the political lessons he draws are less than useful (see “Welfare Reform As I Knew It,” May-June 1996). To discuss lessons, we need some agreement about what happened. Ellwood thinks more has been accomplished […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Welfare as We Might Know It
Why I resigned in protest over President Clinton’s signing of welfare reform–and what can still be done to repair it.
Posted inEconomic Policy
The Hidden Paradox of Welfare Reform
If former welfare beneficiaries can get jobs, they’ll be better off, right? Not necessarily. Because their costs will be higher, particularly for child care and health care, they may earn more yet do worse.
Posted inEconomic Policy
How She Got a Job
Everyone who participates in this innovative welfare-to-work program finds steady employment. Too bad it’s precisely the kind of effort that the new federal welfare law discourages.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Special Report: The Crime Debate
I n places as diverse as Anchorage and El Paso, Nassau County and New Orleans, get-tough prosecutors are promising to ban plea bargaining. Too many criminals get off easy, they insist; take away plea bargains, and more will get the punishments they deserve. But these officials may want to consider what happened in the Bronx […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Behind the Numbers: Class Dismissed?
The Democrats have hinged their political strategy upon the empirically shaky notion that most Americans consider themselves middle class. The consequences are not just rhetorical.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Do Poor Women Have a Right to Bear Children?
The current movement to reform welfare implies an uncomfortable thought: Perhaps poor women don’t have the right to bear children. Are we really prepared to say that?