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social welfare



  • Why the French are Striking

    by Moshik Temkin

    Brits and Americans commonly refer to French protests as a form of national sport, which obscures the serious retrenchment of the welfare state that President Macron is seeking to oppose, and trivializes opposition to the changes. 



  • Who Will Now Bear Costs of Crisis Pregnancies?

    by Daniel K. Williams

    "Perhaps neither Roe nor Dobbs represents a fully Christian way to distribute the human costs associated with crisis pregnancies.  And therein lies a dilemma for Christians who want to preserve human life and are unhappy with the results of Roe as well as the likely results of Dobbs."



  • Reducing Child Poverty Is a No-Brainer even Without Brain Science

    by Mical Raz

    Reducing child poverty is a good in itself; justifying policies to reduce poverty in terms of improvements in measures of cognition or IQ scores makes such programs vulnerable to backlash and risks validating racist and eugenicist arguments about race and intelligence.



  • Paid Family Leave was Invented in the US, But We Still Don't Have It

    The International Congress of Working Women met in Washington in 1919 and developed the blueprint for a paid parental leave after another international workers' organization punted on the idea. The proposal has undergirded paid leave programs throughout the industrialized world – except the United States.



  • Work Requirements Would Undo A Signature Biden Accomplishment

    by Molly Michelmore

    An expanded Child Tax Credit would potentially reduce child poverty by 40%. Placing work requirements on the credit would harm children for the sake of the historic pattern of policing the line between the deserving and undeserving poor. 



  • Will Biden Reverse 50 Years of Failure on Child Care Policy?

    by Anna K. Danziger Halperin

    Achieving better childcare policy requires recognizing women may be both mothers and workers, and moving past ideological views that women's economic independence is against the interest of families. 



  • How Cruelty Became the Point of Our Labor and Welfare Policies

    by Gail Savage

    The persistence of Malthusian thinking in social welfare debates is leading to policies that create needless suffering and a corrosion of the common bonds of humanity that sustain a society.



  • The U.S. Government Should Promote the General Welfare

    by Lawrence Wittner

    The preamble of the Constitution states that the federal government was established "to promote the general welfare." The Democratic Party, for its own good and that of the nation, must aggressively seize that mantle now. 



  • ‘There’s No Natural Dignity in Work’

    by Ezra Klein

    Is it time to revisit the basic premise of American welfare policies that encouraging or requiring paid labor is the best way to deal with poverty? 



  • Richard Nixon Bears Responsibility for the Pandemic’s Child-Care Crisis

    by Anna K. Danziger Halperin

    Today’s child-care crisis may have been fueled by the outbreak, but it is not new. It has been simmering below the surface for decades and can be traced back to President Richard M. Nixon’s 1971 veto of federally funded universal child care.



  • The Lessons of the Great Depression

    by Lizabeth Cohen

    The larger lesson the New Deal offers is that recovery is a complex and painful process that requires the participation of many, not directives from a few. And that, ultimately, we’re all in this together.



  • Donald Trump Is Redefining the Role of "Big Government" in America

    by Amitai Etzioni

    Donald Trump's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has not renewed "big government." Trump has channeled public funds to private enterprises and left state and local governments responsible for providing services without the resources or power to do the job effectively.



  • Work Requirements are Catastrophic in a Pandemic

    by Elisa Minoff

    Instead, we should be implementing policies that support people’s work in the wage labor force and make it possible for working families to make ends meet.