Among the public-policy achievements of the past two decades, welfare reform may simultaneously be the best known and least understood. It is now remembered as a bipartisan triumph that ended "welfare as we know it," to use President Clinton's phrase, transforming the character of federal anti-poverty policy. The true history, however, is less august: The struggle to enact welfare reform was in fact bitter and arduous, and the policy changes that finally became law were but a first step toward a real transformation of the system.
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