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Title: Flat Broke With Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform by Sharon Hays ISBN: 0-19-513288-2 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: February, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Ignoring reality
Comment: This book critiques welfare reform by giving the reader a teary eyed story about people who have no money and have lots of kids to raise. Yet this argument simply ignores the facts. First of all this book ignores personal responsibility. How bout people on welfare taking responsibility for having unprotected sex and having ten kids without ever bothering to get married. How bout taking responsibility for not having a job. People that don't have jobs and can never find work are in that situation because they actually work to not find work. Most people that are unemployed love being unemployed and they love living off the government dole and being lazy. And this book simply ignores this fact. This book tries to make everyone feel so bad for people that are basically in a situation they themselves caused. Rather then trying to exhort these people to learn a new skill and not have as many kids instead this book blames the government because the government has dared to say 'if you don't find a job in five years we might decrease your stipends'. Amazingly enough in countries that don't have welfare people manage to find work. If welfare ended tomorrow all these people would go get jobs, in fact it is welfare that pays them not to work and discourages them from having a honest job.
(...)
Rating: 5
Summary: "Reform" Sucks
Comment: This book will prove enlightening to anyone who is concerned with the consequences of "welfare reform." Flat Broke, while "putting a face on" reform, provides the analytical tools with which to understand the crux of the welfare dilemma. The dilemma is not unique to those women who must turn to public assistance, it is one faced by all those that live within American culture. Work and family. We all know the struggle - at least in some form.
Hays does an excellent job illustrating how welfare recipients DO pursue mainstream ideals, DO foster mainstream American ideals. . . but are systematically denied the ability to live up to our cultural ideal of middle class. As always, those at the bottom bear the brunt of our cultural contradictions more than any other social group.
Rating: 5
Summary: Incredibly insightful
Comment: Hays does a remarkable job of revealing the cultural logic behind welfare reform. In the process, we do not "just" learn about welfare recipients and their values, we learn something about our own values. It becomes very clear in reading this book that we must resolve the tensions that all families (and especially women) feel when it comes to which comes first: work or family. Only then can we figure out what is fair and good to ask of welfare mothers.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who seeks a better understanding of the paradoxes and contraditions in our laws regulating the family.
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Title: The New World of Welfare by Rebecca M. Blank, Ron Haskins, Michael H. Armacost ISBN: 0815710119 Publisher: The Brookings Institution Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: The Working Poor : Invisible in America by DAVID K. SHIPLER ISBN: 0375408908 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 03 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Poverty in America : A Handbook by John Iceland ISBN: 0520239598 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: What's Love Got to Do with It?: A Critical Look at American Charity by David Wagner ISBN: 1565846370 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: September, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State by Charles Noble ISBN: 0195113373 Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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