A01=Janet Currie
Accounting
Affordable housing
Asthma
Author_Janet Currie
Block grant
Breastfeeding
Budget crisis
Category=JKSB
Category=KC
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Child care
Christina Paxson
Criticism
David Card
Economics
Employment
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Family income
Fraud
Funding
Generosity
Guideline
Head Start (program)
Health care reform
Health insurance
Homelessness
Household
Housing authority
Housing voucher
Income
Insurance
Internal Revenue Service
Jonathan Gruber (economist)
Kindergarten
Legislation
Low-Income Housing Tax Credit
Marriage penalty
Medicaid
Nutrition
Orley Ashenfelter
Participation (decision making)
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Payment
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act
Physician
Policy
Poverty
Poverty in the United States
Poverty reduction
Preschool
Public housing
RAND Health Insurance Experiment
Recession
Requirement
Safety net
School district
School meal
Section 8 (housing)
Sibling
Single parent
Social safety net
State Children's Health Insurance Program
Subsidy
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Supply (economics)
Tax
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
Unemployment
Voucher
Welfare
Welfare queen
Welfare reform
Welfare trap
WIC
Product details
- ISBN 9780691138527
- Weight: 299g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2008
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In one of the most provocative books ever published on America's social welfare system, economist Janet Currie argues that the modern social safety net is under attack. Unlike most books about antipoverty programs, Currie trains her focus not on cash welfare, which accounts for a small and shrinking share of federal expenditures on poor families with children, but on the staples of today's American welfare system: Medicaid, Food Stamps, Head Start, WIC, and public housing. These programs, Currie maintains, form an effective, if largely invisible and haphazard safety net, and yet they are the very programs most vulnerable to political attack and misunderstanding. This book highlights both the importance and the fragility of this safety net, arguing that, while not perfect, it is essential to fighting poverty. Currie demonstrates how America's safety net is threatened by growing budget deficits and by an erroneous public belief that antipoverty programs for children do not work and are riddled with fraud. By unearthing new empirical data, Currie makes the case that social programs for families with children are actually remarkably effective.
She takes her argument one step further by offering specific reforms--detailed in each chapter--for improving these programs even more. The book concludes with an overview of an integrated safety net that would fight poverty more effectively and prevent children from slipping through holes in the net. (For example, Currie recommends the implementation of a benefit "debit card" that would provide benefits with less administrative burden on the recipient.) A complement to books such as Barbara Ehrenreich's bestselling Nickel and Dimed, which document the personal struggles of the working poor, The Invisible Safety Net provides a big-picture look at the kind of programs and solutions that would help ease those struggles. Comprehensive and authoritative, it will prompt a major reexamination of the current thinking on improving the lives of needy Americans.
Janet M. Currie is chair of the economics department at Columbia University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the advisory board of the National Children's Study.
