ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have emphasized the failure of the United States to recognize and respect economic human rights. U.S. political elites do not view the existence of poverty in the United States or cutbacks in income assistance to the poor as human rights violations. Moreover, they have rejected the notion that government has a responsibility to initiate programs whose goal is to end poverty. Poor families’ escape from poverty is considered their own personal responsibility. U.S. political elites underscored this message in 1996 by adopting welfare reform legislation that abolished impoverished lone-mother-headed families’ sixty-one-year-old legal entitlement to income assistance under Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
