“We do indeed need to end welfare—but as poor single mothers experience it, not as middle-class moralizers imagine it.” —Gwendolyn Mink, 1998

“The success of welfare reform demonstrates that failed liberal policies . . . need not be passively accepted as inevitable features of modern life.” —Ramesh Ponnuru, 2001

While campaigning for the presidency in 1992, former president Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.” Clinton was responding to public pressure to reform the program of public aid to the poor, known simply as “welfare,” which by the early 1990s had developed a reputation as being wasteful and ineffective. In some ways, Clinton’s vision of welfare, a vision that emphasized work instead of dependency on the government, was quite different from the program that originated with Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), created by the Social Security Act...