Author: Jeff GROGGER Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674037960 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.
Author: Michael E. Fix Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation ISBN: 1610446224 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America's collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants' ability to integrate into American society. Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform's ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants' propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants' use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants' benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants' use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare. Even though few states took the federal government's invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law's most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare. Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute
Author: National Research Council Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309171342 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 267
Book Description
Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.
Author: Sanford F. Schram Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472025511 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 391
Book Description
It's hard to imagine discussing welfare policy without discussing race, yet all too often this uncomfortable factor is avoided or simply ignored. Sometimes the relationship between welfare and race is treated as so self-evident as to need no further attention; equally often, race in the context of welfare is glossed over, lest it raise hard questions about racism in American society as a whole. Either way, ducking the issue misrepresents the facts and misleads the public and policy-makers alike. Many scholars have addressed specific aspects of this subject, but until now there has been no single integrated overview. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform is designed to fill this need and provide a forum for a range of voices and perspectives that reaffirm the key role race has played--and continues to play--in our approach to poverty. The essays collected here offer a systematic, step-by-step approach to the issue. Part 1 traces the evolution of welfare from the 1930s to the sweeping Clinton-era reforms, providing a historical context within which to consider today's attitudes and strategies. Part 2 looks at media representation and public perception, observing, for instance, that although blacks accounted for only about one-third of America's poor from 1967 to 1992, they featured in nearly two-thirds of news stories on poverty, a bias inevitably reflected in public attitudes. Part 3 discusses public discourse, asking questions like "Whose voices get heard and why?" and "What does 'race' mean to different constituencies?" For although "old-fashioned" racism has been replaced by euphemism, many of the same underlying prejudices still drive welfare debates--and indeed are all the more pernicious for being unspoken. Part 4 examines policy choices and implementation, showing how even the best-intentioned reform often simply displaces institutional inequities to the individual level--bias exercised case by case but no less discriminatory in effect. Part 5 explores the effects of welfare reform and the implications of transferring policy-making to the states, where local politics and increasing use of referendum balloting introduce new, often unpredictable concerns. Finally, Frances Fox Piven's concluding commentary, "Why Welfare Is Racist," offers a provocative response to the views expressed in the pages that have gone before--intended not as a "last word" but rather as the opening argument in an ongoing, necessary, and newly envisioned national debate. Sanford Schram is Visiting Professor of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Joe Soss teaches in the Department of Government at the Graduate school of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. Richard Fording is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky.
Author: Sharon Hays Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780195176018 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
This text explores the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives. It also focuses on what welfare reform reveals about work and family life, and its impact on us all.
Author: Ron Haskins Publisher: ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 472
Book Description
As a key staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee, Haskins was one of the architects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Here, he portrays the political battles that produced the most dramatic overhaul of the welfare system, since its creation as part of the New Deal.
Author: Kathleen Ann Pickering Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 9780271028774 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
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.
Author: R. Kent Weaver Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 9780815798354 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 502
Book Description
Bill Clinton's first presidential term was a period of extraordinary change in policy toward low-income families. In 1993 Congress enacted a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. In 1996 Congress passed and the president signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This legislation abolished the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with a block grant program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It contained stiff new work requirements and limits on the length of time people could receive welfare benefits.Dramatic change in AFDC was also occurring piecemeal in the states during these years. States used waivers granted by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to experiment with a variety of welfare strategies, including denial of additional benefits for children born or conceived while a mother received AFDC, work requirements, and time limits on receipt of cash benefits. The pace of change at the state level accelerated after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation gave states increased leeway to design their programs. Ending Welfare as We Know It analyzes how these changes in the AFDC program came about. In fourteen chapters, R. Kent Weaver addresses three sets of questions about the politics of welfare reform: the dismal history of comprehensive AFDC reform initiatives; the dramatic changes in the welfare reform agenda over the past thirty years; and the reasons why comprehensive welfare reform at the national level succeeded in 1996 after failing in 1995, in 1993–94, and on many previous occasions. Welfare reform raises issues of race, class, and sex that are as difficult and divisive as any in American politics. While broad social and political trends helped to create a historic opening for welfare reform in the late 1990s, dramatic legislation was not inevitable. The interaction of contextual factors with short
Author: Rebecca M. Blank Publisher: Brookings Inst Press ISBN: 9780815710103 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 514
Book Description
The sweeping welfare reform legislation of 1996 will soon be up before Congress for reauthorization. The need for reauthorization presents an opportunity to assess what welfare reform has accomplished and what remains to be done. The New World of Welfare is an attempt to frame the policy debate for reauthorization, and to inform the policy discussion among the states and at the federal level.
Author: Jeff GROGGER
Author: Michael E. Fix
Author: National Research Council
Author: Sanford F. Schram
Author: 
Author: Sharon Hays
Author: Ron Haskins
Author: Kathleen Ann Pickering
Author: R. Kent Weaver
Author: Rebecca M. Blank