Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination

Images shape the debate surrounding poverty. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation repealing the principal federal program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the president's signature this originally uncontroversial program became the only title of the 1935 Social Security Act to be repealed. The legislation completed a retrenchment era in welfare policy that began in the early 1980s.

Robert A...