Law Commons^™

Forty Years Of Welfare Policy Experimentation: No Acres, No Mule, No Politics, No Rights, Julie A. Nice

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This introductory essay questions putting nearly all effort into social policywhich has failed to reduce povertyand calls instead for reinvigorating other tactics and re-imagining the unfinished dream of economic justice. Indeed, what Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned was an actual war on poverty, not merely the abbreviated, under-funded, and ultimately unsuccessful effort of the 1960s, nor the imposter war on welfare that has dominated our social policy effort since. But our social policy has not only failed to reduce poverty, it failed to focus long-needed attention on poverty and inequality. Nor has social policy facilitated the political mobilization of poor …