Introduction

In the contemporary United States, “welfare” is virtually synonymous with federal cash aid to poor single mothers and their children: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) before 1996 and Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) since then. Yet any number of government assistance programs might also be labeled welfare, including Old Age Assistance, Aid to the Disabled, Supplemental Security Income, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment insurance, public housing, legal services, student grant programs, corporate bailouts, corporate subsidies, and food stamps. Some of these are programs targeted to the poor, but the nation's most generous social welfare measures—such as Social Security, Medicare, and veterans' benefits—are available to people regardless of income status. By the 1980s, the federal government was spending twenty times as much for Social Security payments as for AFDC grants. The federal government has also spent tremendous sums on veterans, particularly since the creation of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (more commonly known as the GI Bill), which provided veterans with benefits such as pensions and disability assistance, employment preferences, medical care, higher education aid, and a mortgage assistance program, at a cost of $14.5 billion in the decade after World War II. Scholars refer to this broad constellation of federal programs and benefits as the “welfare state,” though Americans make sharp distinctions between aid to the poor and other kinds of federal programs.