| Summary: | America's Great Recession has provoked a twenty-first century awareness of her costly social welfare commitments, failure to protect Americans in times of broad-based economic disaster, and longstanding inability to reduce poverty. Arguing that historic social rehabilitation efforts to confront longstanding American poverty have failed, and by concentrating on the cash support obligations America has undertaken, this book refocuses the poverty debate on an overburdened social welfare system deprived of a sufficient political and economic foundation to support its commitments. American capitalism has refashioned itself to meet today's global economic challenges, often at the expense of economically disadvantaged citizens, while the social welfare system remains chained to principles that fail to narrate American poverty. Economic need is no longer a story of personal failure; poverty has become a macroeconomic construct, and work no longer provides the poor with the path to economic independence. Only by refashioning America's social insurances, her commitments to welfare assistance, and her inadequate efforts to support low wage employment will America join the ranks of companion advanced nations in bringing poverty under control.
|
|---|