Last summer President Clinton signed into law the vast new welfare overhaul that the Republican Congress had sent him. The law abolished the federal government's welfare bulwark, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, replacing it with block grants and wide new authority for the states.
Now the states must design welfare programs that conform with the law. They could do worse than to follow the guidelines that Hoover fellow Martin Anderson set out nearly twenty years ago. Anderson's book Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States, published in 1978, represents a tour de force-a thorough analysis of the welfare system, of the proposals for changing it, and of the practical and moral arguments underlying the entire debate.
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