...e identified as a key national concern: the growing epidemic of poverty in America. Poverty has always been a complicated, challenging issue, but changing social and political attitudes towards poverty in the wake of the 1996 welfare reform compromise, coupled with the disruptions posed by the Great Recession, have converged to shut out talk of poverty from the national discourse. Figures released by the US Census Bureau in late 2012 have shown t...
Lisa Adams was not a welfare queen. When she walked into the office of Jewish Vocational Services (JVS), a San Francisco-based non-profit that offers welfare-to-work training, she was just a black mother of three trying to get her life in order. Adams, who is currently employed as a receptionist at a San Francisco law firm, is one of welfare reform’s success stories—a former recipient who went through the welfare-to-work system and, less t...
...omen face, the discussion surrounding immigration remains relatively ungendered. Women are, to be fair, implicitly addressed in the “anchor babies” discussion, but in a negative light that recalls the sensational reporting on welfare fraud that began during the early 1960s. This concept of a welfare queen was introduced then to refer to a mother who collected welfare payments through fraud or manipulation. The catchphrase ran: “welfare queens dri...
...mpeachment trials notwithstanding, Clinton enjoyed enormous successes as President. The economy boomed. He presided over a federal government with a projected budget surplus for the first time since 1969. He signed a landmark welfare reform bill. Newt Gingrich was embarrassingly deposed as Speaker of the House just four years after taking office, reflecting the reversal of his party’s fortunes. President Clinton left the White House with high app...
...s organize themselves to control and limit the chaos of their lives, even in the absence of government. From their descriptions, it is clear that shockingly complex systems of barter and favor emerge, as do even more shocking welfare systems, to meet needs the state cannot. Individuals often come to Kibera alone, as Ngira and Isaboke explain, transplanted from more rural or communally close regions. As individuals encounter the difficulties and l...
...vernments to physicians seeing Medicaid patients. Increased restrictions on funding for reproductive services would inevitably result in a rise of unwanted pregnancies, and subsequently, compel the government to spend more on welfare programs in the long run. About 65 percent of patients who use the services available at Planned Parenthood clinics are considered to be of a low-income background. Welfare spending currently makes up 29 percent of f...
The First Nations of British Columbia stand at a crossroads, confronted with a Faustian bargain. Should they sacrifice their identity and principles in return for land and monetary settlements? Should they accept current recompense for past injustice while relinquishing the legal distinctions that have offered some (albeit meager) resources for their survival? Too often perceived as welfare-consuming dependents on a payroll subsidized by Canadia...
...However, both of these topics skim over a fairly fundamental aspect of the new law: What, in fact, would it do? And is it a normative “good” overall? If we assume that the underlying goal of the law is to “promote the general welfare,” specifically by making healthcare more readily available, then it becomes somewhat simpler to analyze. Clauses eliminating lifetime and annual coverage limits, extending dependents’ insurance to 26 years of age, an...
...irestorm that the Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz thinks may have just been the result of how much the media enjoy being angry. The fact of the matter is that Ann’s husband, one Willard “Mitt” Romney attacked stay-at-home moms on welfare and said that “even if you have a child two years of age, you have to go to work,” adding that he “wants individuals to have the dignity of work.” This was in January, and in that time, Mitt may have changed his opin...
...the dichotomy between liberty and security, and between freedom and equality, in the mid-twentieth century. His biographer, James MacGregor Burns, puts Roosevelt’s belief this way: “Individual political liberty and collective welfare were not only compatible, but they were mutually fortifying.” The unsolved domestic quandary of universal healthcare shows that Americans have not yet realized that individual political liberty and collective welfare...
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