Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net, by Martha R. Burt and Demetra Smith Nightingale. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press, 2010, 273 pp., $29.50, paperback. Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better, by Carolyn J. Heinrich and John Karl Scholz,

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 666-668
Author(s):  
Kristin S. Seefeldt
2021 ◽  
pp. 99-105
Author(s):  
Mark Robert Rank ◽  
Lawrence M. Eppard ◽  
Heather E. Bullock

Chapter 13 examines the size of the social safety net in the United States. Compared with European and other OECD countries, the United States has a fairly small safety net. The amount spent is approximately 2 percent of our GDP. In particular, programs aimed at protecting children from poverty are minimal. These programs have also been reduced over time, especially since the 1996 welfare reform changes. Challenging the myth of the bloated welfare state requires tackling multiple intersecting misperceptions, including erroneous portrayals of U.S. welfare expenditures as exorbitant and low-income programs as driving up the national debt. It will also require shattering myths that legitimize keeping welfare benefits low.


Author(s):  
Alex Rajczi

This chapter argues that this book’s examination of the American health care debate has revealed larger lessons. Latent in our discussion is a whole new approach to debates about the social minimum—one that can prove useful during inquiries into any part of the social safety net, not just health care, and that can be applied to debates in any country, not just the U.S. Specifically, the discussion in the previous chapters has hinted at a way of understanding a conservative point of view about distributive justice, one that is usually overlooked. This chapter describes it more thoroughly and explains why it is philosophically significant. The chapter then identifies the parts of the conservative view that progressives might challenge, thereby building up a picture of the progressive view itself. The chapter closes by explaining why it is valuable to frame debates over the social safety net in this new way.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-656
Author(s):  
Kant Patel
Keyword(s):  

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