All Research
Op-Ed
Thirty Years Later, Welfare Reform Is Still a Model That Works
…and earnings among low-income single mothers, matched by less poverty and dependence on welfare checks. The law also sharply reduced welfare payments to groups that should never have been on…
Commentary
Lessons from the 1996 Welfare Reform Law Approaching Its 30th Anniversary
…Welfare Reform Angela Rachidi, Matt Weidinger, and Scott Winship, A Safety Net for the Future: Overcoming the Root Causes of Poverty, October 2022 Matt Weidinger, Missing the Big Picture on…
Op-Ed
Trump Takes Dramatic Step Toward Curbing Rampant Fraud in State Unemployment Programs
The Trump administration is threatening to use “every available enforcement tool” to compel states to better protect unemployment benefits against fraud and abuse, which is elevated following an especially severe…
Op-Ed
Americans Still Believe in Work. The AI Crowd Hasn’t Gotten the Memo
…benefit dependence. If so, that would match the results of historic reforms applied to formerly work-free welfare checks a generation ago. As expanded work requirements are implemented everywhere, they have…
Op-Ed
Safety Before Kinship
…a court-ordered program, for example, may demonstrate nothing more than a desire to stay out of jail. It’s not that these factors don’t matter when it comes to, say, whether…
Blog
Capping Student Loan Interest Would Cost Billions, Help Well-off Borrowers
…cost estimate for this plan, but some back-of-the-envelope math suggests the bill could be in the tens of billions. The COVID-19 payment pause set all student loan interest rates at…
Op-Ed
Are Big Families the Solution to Declining Fertility?
“Big families are like waterbed stores,” comedian and father of five Jim Gaffigan jokes. “They used to be everywhere, and now they’re just weird.” But he might have to update his…
Op-Ed
Albany Acts to Rescue Kids from Deadly Abuse—10 Years Too Late
…or companion animals” and “sexual abuse or other sexual offenses against the child or the other party.” “That history may be a strong indicator of future behavior in these matters,”…
Op-Ed
States Are Wrestling with How to Deal with Substance-Exposed Infants. New Mexico Offers a Warning
…argued: “The idea that prenatal substance use is child abuse or neglect is rooted in the concept of maternal-fetal conflict, which frames ‘people with the capacity for pregnancy as threatening,…
Op-Ed
Why Mamdani’s Foster Care Cuts Make Sense
…assert that services can prevent foster care. They insist that poverty drives neglect, so what at-risk families really need is more material resources. Neglect is easily solved, on this view,…
Op-ed
New York Families Are Doing Better Than You’ve Heard
…that city’s middle class is “disappearing.” Relative class standing matters in some contexts. If the cars that the richest Americans drive or the houses they buy are sufficiently luxurious that…
Commentary
Pandemic Unemployment Fraud Data Continue to Amaze—and Not in a Good Way
On May 18, or more than 1,700 days after an alphabet soup of temporary federal unemployment benefit programs expired in 2021, the US Department of Labor (DOL) issued a 34-page…