Our Neighbors On The Streets: A Social Justice Perspective

This Week in Poverty: Welfare Reform—From Bad to Worse Greg Kaufmann   on March 9, 2012 - 8:54 AM ET A stunning  report  released by the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center reveals that the number of US households living on less than $2 per person per day—a standard used by the World Bank to measure poverty in developing nations—rose by 130 percent between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million. The number of children living in these extreme conditions also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million. The reason? In short: welfare reform, 1996—still touted by both parties as a smashing success. The report concludes that the growth in extreme poverty “has been concentrated among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare reform.” The law created the  Temporary Assistance for Needy Families  (TANF) block grant, replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which had guaranteed cash assistan...