American welfare policies and programs frustrate both conservative and liberal advocates who fail to realize that American welfare policy cannot be any more than, or any less than, the distinctly American framework in which it operates. Moral Authority, Ideology, and the Future of American Social Welfare departs from standard presentations of social welfare by dealing directly with the ideologies that have shaped the American experience and illustrates how the values these ideologies generate define the framework of American social welfare through existing economic, governmental, and...

The future of the United States' social welfare commitments, including retirement and disability payments, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and the State Child Health Insurance Program, poses urgent questions as social and demographic change in the country accelerates. Yet even many social welfare policy experts fail to grasp the sheer size and intricacy of the Social Security Act, which governs those commitments, and the resulting complexity of any reform efforts. In this outstanding guide to the Act's programs and policies, along with the context that shaped them, Andrew...

This book attributes American poverty to consequences 19th Century social welfare policies within an economy stretching to meet its 21st Century economic potential, arguing that American poverty persists as economic and political structures have moved into the world of fiscal planning but social welfare remains in its Depression-era structure.