Download or read book Lifting Up the Poor written by Mary Jo Bane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003-10-10 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People who participate in debates about the causes and cures of poverty often speak from religious conviction. But those convictions are rarely made explicit or debated on their own terms. Rarely is the influence of personal religious commitment on policy decisions examined. Two of the nation's foremost scholars and policy advocates break the mold in this lively volume, the first to be published in the new Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and Public Life. The authors bring their faith traditions, policy experience, academic expertise, and political commitments together in this moving, pointed, and informed discussion of poverty, one of our most vexing public issues. Mary Jo Bane writes of her experiences running social service agencies, work that has been informed by "Catholic social teaching, and a Catholic sensibility that is shaped every day by prayer and worship." Policy analysis, she writes, is often "indeterminate" and "inconclusive." It requires grappling with "competing values that must be balanced." It demands judgment calls, and Bane's Catholic sensibility informs the calls she makes. Drawing from various Christian traditions, Lawrence Mead's essay discusses the role of nurturing Christian virtues and personal responsibility as a means of transforming a "defeatist culture" and combating poverty. Quoting Shelley, Mead describes theologians as the "unacknowledged legislators of mankind" and argues that even nonbelievers can look to the Christian tradition as "the crucible that formed the moral values of modern politics." Bane emphasizes the social justice claims of her tradition, and Mead challenges the view of many who see economic poverty as a biblical priority that deserves "preference ahead of other social concerns." But both assert that an engagement with religious traditions is indispensable to an honest and searching debate about poverty, policy choices, and the public purposes of religion.
Download or read book The Poverty of Welfare written by Michael Tanner and published by Cato Institute. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1996 Welfare Reform Act was the most significant changes in social welfare policy in nearly 30 years. The Poverty of Welfare examines the impact of that reform, looking at the context of welfare's history, and concludes that while welfare reform was a step in the right direction, we have a long way to go to fix the deeply troubled system.
Download or read book The Poverty of Welfare Reform written by Joel F. Handler and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once again, America is getting tough on welfare. Democrats and Republicans at both the national and state levels seem to have agreed that paying public funds to the poor--particularly to single mothers and their children--perpetuates dependency and undermines self-sufficiency and the work ethic. In this book Joel Handler, a national expert on welfare, points out the fallacies in the current proposals for welfare reform, arguing that they merely recycle old remedies that have not worked. He analyzes the prejudice that has historically existed against "the undeserving poor" and shows that the stereotype of the inner-city woman of color who has children in order to stay on welfare is untrue. Most welfare mothers are in the labor market, says Handler; however, the work that is available to them is most often low-wage, part-time employment with no benefits. Efforts to move large numbers of welfare recipients to full-time employment are not likely to be successful, especially since most of the welfare programs for single mothers are at the state and local levels, and these governments are reluctant to spend the extra money needed to institute work or other reform programs. Handler suggests that national reform efforts should focus less on welfare and blaming the victim and more on increasing labor markets and reducing poverty through legislation that promotes, for example, the Earned Income Tax Credit and universal health care benefits. Welfare reform, by itself, does nothing to improve the job market, and unless there are more jobs paying more income, we will have done nothing to lessen poverty or reduce welfare.
Download or read book Poverty and Welfare in Ireland 1838 1948 written by Virginia Crossman and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a ground-breaking history of poverty and welfare in modern Ireland, in the era of the Irish poor law. As the first study to address poor relief and health care together, the book fills an important gap, providing a much-needed introduction and assessment of the evolution of social welfare in 19th- and early 20th-century Ireland. The collection also addresses a number of related issues, including private philanthropy, the attitudes of landowners towards poor relief, and the crisis of the poor law during the Great Famine of 1845-1850. Together, these interlinking contributions both survey current research and suggest new areas for investigation, providing further stimulus to the growing field of Irish welfare history.
Download or read book Why Americans Hate Welfare written by Martin Gilens and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackling one of the most volatile issues in contemporary politics, Martin Gilens's work punctures myths and misconceptions about welfare policy, public opinion, and the role of the media in both. Why Americans Hate Welfare shows that the public's views on welfare are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the "deserving" poor. "With one out of five children currently living in poverty and more than 100,000 families with children now homeless, Gilens's book is must reading if you want to understand how the mainstream media have helped justify, and even produce, this state of affairs." —Susan Douglas, The Progressive "Gilens's well-written and logically developed argument deserves to be taken seriously." —Choice "A provocative analysis of American attitudes towards 'welfare.'. . . [Gilens] shows how racial stereotypes, not white self-interest or anti-statism, lie at the root of opposition to welfare programs." -Library Journal
Download or read book The End of Welfare written by Michael Tanner and published by Cato Institute. This book was released on 1996 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues for the abolishment of the current system.
Download or read book Welfare Work and Poverty written by Qin Gao and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction -- Background, inception, and development -- Thresholds, financing, and beneficiaries -- Targeting performance -- Anti-poverty effectiveness -- From welfare to work -- Family expenditures and human capital investment -- Social participation and subjective well-being -- What next? : policy solutions and research directions -- References -- Acknowledgements
Download or read book Words of Welfare written by Sanford Schram and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been suggested that policy analysis has come to serve the needs of the state at the expense of the citizens. This book offers a critique of how welfare policy is analyzed and set in the USA, illustrating that how we study issues affects what ultimately gets done about them.
Download or read book Visions of Poverty written by Robert Asen and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images of poverty shape the debate surrounding it. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation repealing the principal federal program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the president's signature this originally non-controversial program became the only title of the 1935 Social Security Act to be repealed. The legislation culminated a retrenchment era in welfare policy beginning in the early 1980s. To understand completely the welfare policy debates of the last half of the 20th Century, the various images of poor people that were present must be considered. Visions of Poverty explores these images and the policy debates of the retrenchment era, recounting the ways in which images of the poor appeared in these debates, relaying shifts in images that took place over time, and revealing how images functioned in policy debates to advantage some positions and disadvantage others. Looking to the future, Visions of Poverty demonstrates that any future policy agenda must first come to terms with the vivid, disabling images of the poor that continue to circulate. In debating future reforms, participants-whose ranks should include potential recipients-ought to imagine poor people anew. This ground breaking study in policymaking and cultural imagination will be of particular interest to scholars in rhetorical studies, political science, history, and public policy.
Download or read book Learned Helplessness Welfare and the Poverty Cycle written by Kristina Lyn Heitkamp and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1996 and 2017, the number of families on welfare declined to less than a quarter of its former rate of coverage, yet nearly twice as many households live in extreme poverty and nearly 25 percent of American children live in poverty. What can be done to help these children and families escape poverty? Are government programs like welfare the best solution, or are there other ways to pull families out of poverty? This volume looks at the issue of poverty, the various theories about why it proliferates, and a number of proposed strategies to fight it.
Download or read book Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty written by Kathleen Ann Pickering and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was enacted, policy makers, agency administrators, community activists, and academics from a broad range of disciplines have debated and researched the implications of welfare reform in the United States. Most of the attention, however, has focused on urban rather than rural America. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty examines welfare participants who live in chronically poor rural areas of the United States where there are few job opportunities and poor systems of education, transportation, and child care. Kathleen Pickering and her colleagues look at welfare reform as it has been experienced in four rural and impoverished regions of the United States: American Indian reservations in South Dakota, the Rio Grande region, Appalachian Kentucky, and the Mississippi Delta. Throughout these areas the rhetoric of reform created expectations of new opportunities to find decent work and receive education and training. In fact, these expectations have largely gone unfulfilled as welfare reform has failed to penetrate poor areas where low-income families remain isolated from the economic and social mainstream of American society. Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty sheds welcome light on the opportunities and challenges that welfare reform has imposed on low-income families situated in disadvantaged areas. Combining both qualitative and quantitative research, it will be an excellent guide for scholars and practitioners alike seeking to address the problem of poverty in rural America.
Download or read book The Failed Welfare Revolution written by Brian Steensland and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today the United States has one of the highest poverty rates among the world's rich industrial democracies. The Failed Welfare Revolution shows us that things might have turned out differently. During the 1960s and 1970s, policymakers in three presidential administrations tried to replace the nation's existing welfare system with a revolutionary program to guarantee Americans basic economic security. Surprisingly from today's vantage point, guaranteed income plans received broad bipartisan support in the 1960s. One proposal, President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, nearly passed into law in the 1970s, and President Carter advanced a similar bill a few years later. The failure of these proposals marked the federal government's last direct effort to alleviate poverty among the least advantaged and, ironically, sowed the seeds of conservative welfare reform strategies under President Reagan and beyond. This episode has largely vanished from America's collective memory. Here, Brian Steensland tells the whole story for the first time--from why such an unlikely policy idea first developed to the factors that sealed its fate. His account, based on extensive original research in presidential archives, draws on mainstream social science perspectives that emphasize the influence of powerful stakeholder groups and policymaking institutions. But Steensland also shows that some of the most potent obstacles to guaranteed income plans were cultural. Most centrally, by challenging Americans' longstanding distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the plans threatened the nation's cultural, political, and economic status quo.
Download or read book Assets and the Poor written by Michael Sherraden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work proposes a new approach to welfare: a social policy that goes beyond simple income maintenance to foster individual initiative and self-sufficiency. It argues for an asset-based policy that would create a system of saving incentives through individual development accounts (IDAs) for specific purposes, such as college education, homeownership, self-employment and retirement security. In this way, low-income Americans could gain the same opportunities that middle- and upper-income citizens have to plan ahead, set aside savings and invest in a more secure future.
Download or read book The Poverty of Welfare written by Michael Tanner and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citing the failure of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, a pubic policy research foundation dedicated to traditional American principles of limited government and individual liberty, argues that the American welfare system should be dis.
Download or read book And the Poor Get Welfare written by Warren R. Copeland and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This overview of the poverty problem begins by summarizing our current situation, with emphasis on its spiritual dimensions. It then places these issues within the American historical context. The core of the book is the presentation of alternative ways of looking at the problem and of trying to deal with it, with particular emphasis on the ethical principles that shape each alternative.
Download or read book The War on Welfare written by Marisa Chappell and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the War on Poverty give way to the war on welfare? Many in the United States saw the welfare reforms of 1996 as the inevitable result of twelve years of conservative retrenchment in American social policy, but there is evidence that the seeds of this change were sown long before the Reagan Revolution—and not necessarily by the Right. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America traces what Bill Clinton famously called "the end of welfare as we know it" to the grassroots of the War on Poverty thirty years earlier. Marshaling a broad variety of sources, historian Marisa Chappell provides a fresh look at the national debate about poverty, welfare, and economic rights from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. In Chappell's telling, we experience the debate over welfare from multiple perspectives, including those of conservatives of several types, liberal antipoverty experts, national liberal organizations, labor, government officials, feminists of various persuasions, and poor women themselves. During the Johnson and Nixon administrations, deindustrialization, stagnating wages, and widening economic inequality pushed growing numbers of wives and mothers into the workforce. Yet labor unions, antipoverty activists, and moderate liberal groups fought to extend the fading promise of the family wage to poor African Americans families through massive federal investment in full employment and income support for male breadwinners. In doing so, however, these organizations condemned programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for supposedly discouraging marriage and breaking up families. Ironically their arguments paved the way for increasingly successful right-wing attacks on both "welfare" and the War on Poverty itself.
Download or read book Cheating Welfare written by Kaaryn S Gustafson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last three decades, welfare policies have been informed by popular beliefs that welfare fraud is rampant. As a result, welfare policies have become more punitive and the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system have blurred—so much so that in some locales prosecution caseloads for welfare fraud exceed welfare caseloads. In reality, some recipients manipulate the welfare system for their own ends, others are gravely hurt by punitive policies, and still others fall somewhere in between. In Cheating Welfare, Kaaryn S. Gustafson endeavors to clear up these gray areas by providing insights into the history, social construction, and lived experience of welfare. She shows why cheating is all but inevitable—not because poor people are immoral, but because ordinary individuals navigating complex systems of rules are likely to become entangled despite their best efforts. Through an examination of the construction of the crime we know as welfare fraud, which she bases on in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in Northern California, Gustafson challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, welfare recipients, and crime control in the United States.
