The 1996 welfare reform law was the result of a decade of often dramatic and contentious debate about the proper nature of reform. On the one side were conservative reformers who demanded work requirements, illegitimacy prevention, and general de-entitIement. The heat of the last debate was often painfully intense, but perhaps the lull before the next welfare debate begins will afford both camps of reform- ers the opportunity to learn from each other especially when it comes to the hard work of recreating civil society and a private sector approach to caring for those individuals in need. Ironically for a liberal welfare tradition that had its roots in religious revival, many of today's liberals acknowledge that religious faith is certainly a matter of importance, while ignoring or being actively hostile to its policy potential as a catalyst for radical change in people's lives. It is vital that political liberals embrace this idea.
Governmental programs can do and have done good.
In just the past few decades, hunger and malnutrition have become far less serious social problems thanks to food stamps. Where once one out of every three elderly Americans was in poverty, today that number has dropped to about one in ten, thanks to the indexing of social security ben- efits and medicare. These are social policy successes virtually without parallel. Despite its well-documented failures, the War on Poverty changed the face of poverty. The lesson for conservatives is that keeping intact a safety net of noncash services for the poor and especially for the children is crucial to preventing future welfare dependency.