When Welfare Disappears: The Case for Economic Human Rights

by Neubeck; Kenneth J.

• ISBN13: 9780415947794
• ISBN10: 0415947790
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-24
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

While welfare rolls have dramatically dropped across the United States during the last decade, the high poverty for mothers and their children has not. In fact many of new welfare reform initiatives pose increasingly negative effects on poor children and youth. As these startling statistics mount, federal and state governments continue to cut back on the very services and funds on which impoverished families rely. This groundbreaking new book offers a history of welfare, an accurate portrayal of welfare recipients and an understanding of the relationship between race and welfare. Through detailed research and compelling interviews, award-winning author Ken Neubeck offers a unique comparison of other industrialized nation's welfare policies compared to ours, and presents a new argument for curtailing the end of welfare as we know it: the case for making economic human rights. What civil rights was to the 1960s, human rights have become the movement of the 1990s and today. Just as many doctorshave campaigned to have health considered a human right, Neubeck provocatively suggests that people should be entitled to economic human rights.When Welfare Disappearsexamines the important ways in which our government has refused to recognize these rights of its most impoverished and vulnerable citizens.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Chapter 1 Introduction: Combating Poverty, Respecting Economic Human Rights	1	(16)
Chapter 2 U.S. Welfare Policy: From Supporting Motherhood to a War against the Poor	17	(26)
Chapter 3 Building Character through Adversity: General Outcomes of Welfare Reform	43	(24)
Chapter 4 Varieties of Little-Noticed Suffering: Deconstructing Welfare-Reliant Families	67	(46)
Chapter 5 Combating Family Poverty: How Other Affluent Nations Are More Successful and Why This Is So	113	(38)
Chapter 6 Establishing Respect for Economic Human Rights in the United States	151	(26)
Notes	177	(18)
Index	195