Clinton’s proposal for a two-year limit on AFDC payments would be the most far-reaching welfare reform since 1935. But if the goal is to make welfare mothers self-sufficient, it won’t be cheap.
Poverty & Wealth
Posted inEconomic Policy
From “Projects” to Communities: How to Redeem Public Housing
Saving public housing will require more than bootstrap lectures and selling off units to tenants. To transform housing projects into safe communities requires a new balance of rights and responsibilities—and real resources.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Bringing Fathers Back In: The Child Support Assurance Strategy
Holding absent fathers financially accountable, while providing a minimum assured benefit for child support, could reduce child poverty significantly and help millions of single mothers move out of dependency.
Posted inEconomic Policy
The Myth of a Savings Shortage
A precipitous decline in saving during the 1980s? A closer look shows it isn’t so.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Social Support for Self-Reliance: The Politics of Making Work Pay
Millions of the working poor earn less than the minimum needed for self-sufficiency. Enabling these families to achieve security is good policy—and smart politics.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Flexibility Trap: The Proliferation of Marginal Jobs
Temporary and part-time jobs may be penny-wise for employers, but pound-foolish for the economy.
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Can Democracy Save Chicago’s Schools?
With much fanfare, Chicago has moved to decentralize control of what some have called the worst public school system in America. But reform has been financially and politically crippled from the start.
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Gangs in the Post-Industrial Ghetto
Though hardly a new phenomenon, gangs of poor youth are once again in the news and movies. There is one new factor: the vanishing prospect of industrial jobs that lead out of poverty.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Suite Greed
But for the fact that Democrats are now drinking from the same campaign-finance trough as Republicans, the scandal of executive salaries would be a major issue in the 1992 campaign. The scandal has been growing for years, of course, even before the Reagan-Bush greed decade. In 1960, the chief executive of one of America’s 100 […]
Posted inBooks
From Crisis to Working Majority
Reports of the death of the Democrats are greatly exaggerated. Three new books, despite their author’s pessimism, suggest how to reconstruct the party’s middle-class foundations.