Sandra Danziger, $2.00 a Day cited in NYT on political rifts over 1996 welfare reform

May 23, 2016

Sandra Danziger and $2.00 a Day are cited in The New York Times piece, “Political rifts over Bill Clinton’s welfare law resurface as aid shrinks.” The piece, which examines the mixed legacy of welfare reform on the occasion of its pending 20th anniversary, describes reform’s early “successes.”

“Welfare cases fell sharply, employment of single mothers increased and harsh critics of the program acknowledged that the first years were not nearly so bad as they predicted,” writes Robert Pear for The New York Times.

But Sandra Danziger, interviewed for the piece, hints at welfare reform’s increasingly recognized and alarming shortcomings. “The high marks given to the 1996 reform at its 10-year anniversary are much lower now as we approach its 20-year anniversary,” Danziger says.

Kathryn J. Edin, coauthor with Luke Shaefer of $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, is also cited in the piece. Edin, who says that the United States has "shredded [its] cash safety net," describes a few of the survival strategies being employed by some of America’s poorest families in the absence of cash assistance. 

Sandra Danziger is the Edith A. Lewis Collegiate Professor of Social Work and a research professor of public policy at the Ford School. She is director of the Ford School's Michigan Program on Poverty and Social Welfare Policy.

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 1, 2015. Written by Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edin, the book documents the troubling rise of extreme poverty in the wake of America’s 1996 welfare reforms.