Press Play with Madeleine Brand
20 years since welfare reform, are the poor better off?
President Bill Clinton signed “welfare-to-work” reform 20 years ago, radically overhauling the nation’s welfare system. Did the law spur people to get jobs or are poor people in worse shape now, a generation later?
By Madeleine Brand • • 53m ListenWhen President Bill Clinton spoke in the White House Rose Garden on August 22, 1996, he claimed, “today we are taking an historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be. A second chance. Not a way of life.” Then he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, a radical overhaul of the nation’s welfare law. What happened next?
