But what I want to focus on here are the economic effects of welfare reform. Plunging our society’s weakest and most vulnerable into economic desperation triggered a domino effect of misery right down the line, with the slightly better-off now feeling the competition of the utterly hopeless. The effect was to make all of us a little more precarious. On its own, welfare reform was a meanspirited thing to do—“one of the most regressive social programs promulgated by a democratic government in the twentieth century,” in the words of the sociologist Loïc Wacquant, who has studied the subject in
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