In 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously predicted that the proposed welfare reform would result in children “sleeping on grates.” Most observers think history proved him wrong. But does the rise in the number of the $2-a-day poor represent the (until now unexamined) great failure of welfare reform? Perhaps Moynihan was not so far off after all. Perhaps his only mistake was in assuming that this failure at the very bottom of the economic distribution would be visible and obvious, when in fact, throughout history, American poverty has generally been hidden far from most Americans’
...more
