an honest liberal

...But while direct federal assistance Contributing editor John J. Dilulio, Jr...

...In truth, youth crime and violence have soared, especially in inner-city neighborhoods...

...Likewise, she agrees that the "rising number of single mothers . . . is one reason that poverty rates have remained high" and that children "raised in single-parent families are at greater risk of cognitive and behavioral problems...

...She does not, however, pine for a rebirth of or a wholesale return to AFDC...

...She makes a strong case against the conservative article of faith that the rise of out-of-wedlock births "was fueled by AFDC payments...

...Libertarians who had hoped that the 104th Congress would actually roll back low-income transfers while laying a glove or two on middle-class entitlement programs like Medicare got a rude political awakening when they saw just how big and amorphous the block grants were...

...Over half of all women who receive welfare receive it for three years or less over their lifetimes...

...Even those who disagree strongly with Blank's analysis should agree that It Takes a Nation takes a prize for honest, meticulous, and morally alert scholarship...

...And while preserving high levels of government spending on anti-poverty programs and tax credits, the system she recommends would require most applicants for assistance to search for jobs "as a condition of monthly cash support" and would incorporate no-nonsense messages such as "that raising a child at age 16 is not smart...

...Short-term welfare rolls have already fallen sharply in some states, but those drops are largely the product of welfare-to-work efforts that predated the new program...

...Typically, families become poor long term (i.e., for more than 2 years at a stretch) when parents break up or never marry and when neither parent works consistently...

...And what is so "compassionate" about making poor kids wait for the next revolution before making sure they get their next meal...

...Inflation-adjusted monthly public assistance payments "have declined over the past two decades, yet the out-of-wedlock birthrate has increased rapidly...

...When Blank addresses topics on which she herself has done less research, it shows...

...Cultural conservatives failed to leave a lasting mark on the bill...

...In 1994, the official poverty line was $15,029 for a family with two parents and two children, and $11,980 for a family with one parent and two children...

...She served in the Bush administration as a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, and she has often been the gadfly at liberal-dominated poverty conferences and academic symposia...

...In a 1994 article published in Social Service Review, New York University political scientist Lawrence Mead offered the best synthesis yet by a conservative scholar of what is known from empirical research about poverty in America: Nearly one-quarter of American families become poor at some time in a given decade...

...Skocpol asserts that over "the past several decades liberal anti-poverty warriors have suffered from a crimped sense of political realism...

...The welfare bill congressional Republicans forced President Clinton to sign last year did not, in fact, "end welfare as we know it...

...There are no sheltered-living requirements for unmarried child-bearing teenagers on public assistance, and no real crackdown on fathers who take the sex, take the money, abuse welfare-dependent women and children, and run...

...Indeed, only about two-thirds to three-quarters of those eligible for welfare actually make use of the program...

...And, of course, many liberals and other defenders of the status quo have been doing little but finger-pointing and blame-shifting since welfare reform became law...

...We may never know whether the Temporary Assistance program works because many of its provisions—work rules, time limits—are already being waived and interpreted into insignificance in many states and counties...

...Under its provisions, welfare families have two years to get work before they are forever cut off from aid...

...Still, aren't the national poverty numbers inflated by counting fulltime college students or business owners who report low or negative incomes for the year, making them officially "poor" even though they live well, have plenty of economic assets, or will enjoy above-average incomes in future years...

...In short, "the large increases in out-of-wedlock births are very hard to match with trends in AFDC support levels...

...In fact, almost no one is truly happy with the state of federal anti-poverty policy after the welfare-reform bill...

...The assertion that targeted, work-focused reforms are "pie in the sky" will come as news to the White House and Capitol Hill staff on both sides of the aisle who are now busily crafting a wide variety of Blankesque, post-AFDC welfare-to-work initiatives, including a possible expansion of the Bridges to Work Project that links low-income people in central cities to jobs in surrounding suburban areas by providing job placement, counseling, and transportation...

...The poverty center was launched last year with a $7.5 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services...

...Today's "poor families" are "unambiguously better off than the poor of thirty years ago," and better off than they would be in the absence of Med-icaid, food stamps, and other programs...

...For example, she dismisses the "popular perception" that street crime is a real and growing problem, a misperception, she says, fed by watching "movies or TV shows that feature murder and threat as their primary plot device...

...Blank does an eye-opening job taking on a conventional conservative objection—that these poverty-line calculations are inflated by the failure to factor in all the other public assistance received by welfare recipients (Medicaid and more...

...In sum, poverty in America is a hard social fact, as is its post-1990 growth among children in many big cities...

...Blank, she charges, is guilty of "retai-loring narrow policy prescriptions to the perceived mood of the moment in Washington, D.C...

...It ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which represented less than half of all cash assistance to welfare recipients, and not even a sixth of the value of programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and subsidized housing...

...is officially gone, federal welfare dollars continue to flow as block grants to the states, courtesy of the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program...

...In 1995, the national poverty rate fell to 13.8 percent, but the drop was concentrated in a single region, the Midwest...

...Enter Rebecca M. Blank, who has written an important book on poverty bound to displease some liberals while challenging both libertarian and cultural conservatives to rethink, if not abandon, their respective anti-poverty positions...

...Probably so, but Blank has produced the most interesting and useful liberal book on anti-poverty policy since Murray's conservative classic...

...Apart from a provision that props open the door to local faith-based organizations in administering welfare programs, the bill does nothing toward converting the welfare culture of poverty into a culture of faith and family...

...But Blank is back on thick empirical ice when she claims that, administrative warts, perverse incentives, and all, federal anti-poverty programs "have accomplished pretty much what they set out to accomplish...

...and a more savvy corporate, philanthropic, and civic sector that sees such "a new agenda for fighting poverty" as an expression of its own enlightened economic and social interest...

...As several recent studies have plainly documented, the crazy-quilt administrative rules governing federal anti-poverty programs have turned the safety net into a safety maze in which many truly poor children don't get the food, money, medicine, and shelter they need and are eligible to receive...

...For example, Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol scolds Blank's book in the Atlantic under the headline "The Next Liberalism...

...Americans now suffer at least 40 million crimes a year, an estimated quarter of them violent crimes, and a third of those violent crimes at the hands of offenders out on probation, parole, or pretrial release...

...For the most part, however, Blank struggles to rebut conservative ideas about poverty, welfare, and related social ills...

...Whether the largely illiterate, low- or no-skills recipients who have been living off federal welfare money for a decade or more can be brought into self-sufficiency by the Temporary Assistance program remains highly uncertain...

...Such a system," she argues, "would provide the states with substantial flexibility to run the programs they believe to be most useful, as well as placing the initial emphasis in the system on 'What do you need to get back on your feet?'" To make this system work, Blank believes that "it takes a nation"—not as in more welfare mega-programs, but as in a smarter, less rule-bound federal bureaucracy...

...Tier Two consists of job-search and training assistance for less job-ready individuals...

...It Takes a Nation begins by showing that concerns about the problem of poverty in America are not merely radical-liberal bugaboos...

...But most people who experience poverty also escape it quickly, usually by remarrying or returning to work...

...Most welfare recipients simply do not receive the full range of government cash and in-kind assistance for which they are theoretically eligible...

...a less administratively hidebound cadre of state and local social-services agencies...

...Blank concedes that "the results of this research are quite consistent across studies: higher welfare payments discourage work...

...No, argues Blank: Only 1 percent of the official poor have negative incomes or earnings, and only 6 percent are full-time students (some of whom, of course, are from poor families...

...Skocpol predicts that It Takes a Nation will "never achieve even a fraction of the political influence" achieved by Charles Murray's 1984 book Losing Ground...

...Indeed, she huffs, "Blank's three-tiered welfare reform scheme is pure pie in the sky at this point...

...The typical pattern is that fathers leave their families and do not pay child support and the mothers go on welfare...

...Rather, in her concluding chapters, she sketches out "a reconfigured system of public assistance that moves us away from large-scale cash support toward a more work-focused system...

...But she is not HHS standard-issue...

...directs the Partnership for Research on Religion and At-Risk Youth at Public/Private Ventures in Philadelphia...

...In a recent cover story in the Atlantic Monthly, Peter Edelman, late of the Clinton administration, called ending AFDC "the worst thing" that Clinton has yet done and expressed shock that his friend Bill had done so politically dirty, so socially devastating, and so morally dastardly a deed...

...Specifically, in place of AFDC, Blank proposes a three-tiered "Family Assistance" plan for reducing poverty...

...And Tier Three consists of cash support for the most socially and educationally dysfunctional poverty populations—adults who need close supervision, guidance, and training if they are ever to get off the dole, into work, and on to raising their children in a self-sufficient way...

...But what about the usual conservative ideas about the causes of poverty...

...population—lived in poverty in 1994...

...Blank, a self-described liberal, is a professor of economics at Northwestern University...

...By this definition, a total of 38.1 million people—14.5 percent of the total U.S...

...Tier One consists of short-term assistance for poor people who need better connections to existing programs for which they are eligible...

...Most studies "indicate that AFDC payments are not related to women's fertility, or that the effect is relatively small," and "the relationship between benefit levels and fertility behavior is slightly stronger among low-income white women than among African-American women...

...She is also director of the Joint Center for Poverty Research run by her school and the University of Chicago...

...In New Jersey and other states that have cut or capped welfare payments, there has been a decline in both AFDC and non-AFDC births...

...Compassionate policies toward the poor await the wider solidarity of a new politics of social and economic security...

...Not surprisingly, Blank's book is drawing unfriendly fire from liberals who remain mired in the AFDC regime or seduced by hopes that a new political coalition will emerge to revive and expand the national entitlement state...

...In virtually every large county in the country, poverty among children has been on the rise...