Welfare Reform: Ten Years Later

From the wonderful City Journal, Kay S. Hymowitz provides a lucid and thoughtful assessment of welfare reform in the US ten years after it was introduced by the Clinton/Gingrich tag-team. People willing to dismiss Hymowitz as a conservative apologist will be suprised by the turn she takes toward the end of the column:

Though researchers haven’t found that reform has had any adverse effect on children, they haven’t found much positive impact, either. Jason DeParle’s book and others that look at the lives of poor families after reform give a pretty good idea why. Just because a woman has to be at a job at 8 each morning doesn’t mean that her child’s father has become a paragon. For that matter, just because she’s following the dictates of an alarm clock doesn’t mean that she is envisioning a better life for her children.