| The mid-1990s saw two legislative reforms that together marked a transformation in social policy toward poor families in the United States. In 1996, the Social Security Act's federal guarantee of assistance to needy families through Aid to Families with Dependent Children was eliminated. Three years earlier, the largest expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit consolidated the program's position as the first major entitlement program available to working poor families. Both were means-tested social welfare programs designed to help poor families. What explains the demise of one program and the parallel rise of the other?;This dissertation seeks to explain these two developments and the link between them. It roots them historically in a set of political, institutional and economic changes that transformed poverty politics beginning in the mid-1970s. Specifically, the dissertation locates the sources of change in four factors: (1) the ambiguous mandate and structure of divided institutional authority built into AFDC at its inception; (2) the gradual transformation in the purposes of the AFDC program, from a program designed to provide income support that would release single mothers from wage-earning obligations, into one designed to move mothers into the workforce; (3) a larger shift toward reinforcing and rewarding work in U.S. public assistance programs in the 1970s, reflected not only in the redirection of AFDC, but also in the creation of the EITC; and (4) the restructuring of the low-wage labor market that began just as the turn to work took place in public assistance. These factors led to a series of political struggles in the 1980s and 1990s that culminated in the decline of AFDC and the parallel rise of EITC, and fundamentally re-cast the social contract for poor families. |
