ABSTRACT
As we have seen, U.S. welfare policy has never fully provided for the subsistence needs of impoverished lone-mother-headed families, and it still does not do so today. Indeed, U.S. welfare policy has functioned in ways that have left many eligible families without any public assistance at all. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 effectively abolished the weak income safety net on which at least some of the nation’s neediest families had been able to rely. In adopting this legislation, U.S. political elites proceeded as if economic human rights simply did not exist. Indeed, in the years of debate over welfare reform preceding passage of the act, the human rights of the poor were never the subject of White House statements or Congressional debate. As chapter 1 demonstrated, U.S. political elites do not accept the notion that poverty is a violation of economic human rights or that those whose human rights are being violated include impoverished families in the United States.
