Visions of Poverty
Subtitle: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination (Rhetoric and Public Affairs)
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Published: March 2002
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 325
ISBN-13: 9780870136061
Subjects: Poverty; Social Work; Public Policy - Social Services & Welfare; Social Science; Politics / Current Events; Politics/International Relations; United States; Public welfare
Description: "Images shape the debate surrounding poverty. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation repealing the principal federal program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the president's signature this originally uncontroversial program became the only title of the 1935 Social Security Act to be repealed. The legislation completed a retrenchment era in welfare policy that began in the early 1980s.".

"Robert Asen explores the ways in which images of the poor functioned in policy debates to advantage some positions and disadvantage others. Visions of Poverty demonstrates that any future policy agenda must first come to terms with the vivid, disabling images of poverty that continue to circulate. In debating reforms, participants - whose ranks should include potential recipients - need to imagine poor people anew."--BOOK JACKET.