Low-Income Families in the Context of a Vanishing Safety Net

Abstract

AbstractWelfare reform and expansions to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), both of which occurred in the late 1990s, changed the amount and the nature of assistance available to low-income families. This essay reviews four books about the experiences of low-income families in the twenty-first century: $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer; Ain’t No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters by Judith Levine; Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City edited by Javier Auyero; and It’s Not Like I’m Poor: How Working Families Make Ends Meet in a Post-Welfare World by Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Kathryn Edin, Laura Tach, and Jennifer Sykes. It concludes that the assistance available to low-income families often leaves them in a dire position and more research is needed into the experiences of children in these families.