What Comes After Welfare Reform? Two authors from the Center on Hunger and Poverty at

Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management suggest — novel idea — that we consider ways to ensure economic security for all Americans.

The reauthorization debate is the domestic policy opportunity of the near future, but it will be a lost opportunity if it devolves into an argument over whether this or that element of the 1996 changes succeeded. No honest analyst should feel good about discussing the minutiae of an economic security policy that clearly has not been a credible success. Reauthorization will also be a lost opportunity if it focuses only on the poor to the exclusion of other low-income working families, or even the conditions of tenuously “middle class” families. The upcoming debate offers a tremendous occasion to focus the nation and its leaders on the needs that all households have for a meaningful chance to achieve economic well-being, and it can start a discussion that one day results in a new domestic framework with asset-building policy as its common core. An asset policy framework appeals to fundamental values: opportunity, choice, personal responsibility, fairness, and social responsibility. Boston Review