Michael Tanner

Michael Tanner is the director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.

The welfare system wastes money and is unfair to all Americans, including the five million families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Substantial evidence proves that there is a link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births, that welfare contributes to increased crime, that job-training programs are ineffective, and that government policies cannot improve the behavior of welfare recipients. The welfare system— including AFDC, food stamps, subsidized housing, and other assistance programs—cannot be reformed and should be eliminated.

From across the political and ideological spectrum, there is almost universal acknowledgment that the American social welfare system has been a failure. Since the start of the War on Poverty in 1965, the U.S...