Their public benefits also keep being slashed in the name of economic incentive and budget discipline. One little-appreciated government program which has not been cut, the Earned Income Tax Credit, is all that has kept welfare reform from being a total catastrophe. And other than EITC, programs that directly benefit the poor are under budgetary siege. However, most such programs do not have the negative incentive effects attributed to the old welfare system. Programs like food stamps simply relieve poverty directly.
Housing subsidies make it possible for low-income families to live outside of squalor.
And programs directed at children and those who care for children increase the likelihood that poverty will not be passed along to the next generation. Although welfare reform is far more punitive than it needed to be, it has one useful side effect. By pushing poor women into low-wage jobs, it invites us to look closely at the bottom end of the labor market. Most of the poor, of course, hold jobs and work hard. They work in nursing homes taking care of our elderly parents, they enter data, clean toilets, push brooms, ship inventory, and sling fast food.