Review of “Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better: Forward-Looking Policies to Help Low-Income Families.” Edited by Carolyn J. Heinrich and John Karl Scholz. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Paper, 2009, 348 pages.
We always hear about the famous “safety net” and how it serves the poorest Americans out there, struggling to survive. It is very revealing to see what was happening at the end of the Great Recession of 2009!
This is a big book, chock full of facts and figures about the recession, poverty, government programs, and the reality of what has happened in America. The book explains the state of poverty in the US toward the end of the Great Recession of 2009, and it provides a huge amount of data to prove the points of the authors. If you love charts, graphs, and tables, this book will be right up your alley. However, it is not an upbeat book for light reading.
This is demanding reading, to put it mildly. But it is important information for helpers on the street, social workers, and policymakers to wade through. Math teachers, math whizzes, and math fans will get a great deal of information on what is happening with the US “safety net” and how it is supposed to work. It was not working before 2008… during the Recession, or since. It certainly has not worked during or after the worst (so far!) of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The book makes it clear that acting as though there is a safety net handling all of the challenges faced by the poor has not worked. This book dispels many myths about the safety net, and about the “business as usual and all things are good” kind of perspective taken by some and instead paints a very clear and unhappy picture of the true state of our nation after the Great Recession of 2009.
On the more positive side, the book does include several readings meant to provide answers to the terrible problems of unemployment, underemployment, hunger, homelessness, and despair that have been visible in our country for a very long time…
Note that the editors introduce the reader to the problems with the safety net in 2009 and include an overview of the readings to follow. The overall goal of the editors is actually to make the safety net work better, and they introduce the readings with the realities of the situation. They also provide some important reasons we should want to fix the safety net, and they give us several cross-cutting themes.
They also give us questions to consider. They want us to look across safety net “domains” and consider the whole package. Just getting somebody a job does not necessarily solve everything. Will that act impact their access to health care? Will it provide a means for them to pay for child care suddenly? Will it pay enough to house the family? Educate them? Clothe them? Does simply getting a job in itself provide longer-term relief to the family? Does it jeopardize their safety and security by removing other essential forms of support?
To show a wide range of perspectives, the editors have gathered experts from diverse fields, such as education, medicine, economics, and research. All readings show the depth of the problem of poverty in the US and provide a huge number of facts and figures. Accepting the reality of the grave issues facing our nation can be very hard work, indeed, but as educators we must do this work also.
It is interesting indeed to consider what is proposed and established in this pre-COVID explanation of both problems and possible solutions to the struggles faced by the poorest Americans.
Of course, it is also important to understand that from a 2020 perspective, and probably more recent also, “COVID-19 has revealed serious shortcomings of the current safety net to cope with the consequences of mass unemployment, a problem that until now most of us thought fiscal and monetary policies could forestall. COVID-19 shows that such confidence is baseless” (The social safety net: The gaps that COVID-19 spotlights | Brookings). Getting people to work, making lots of money, spending lots of money, and investing in lots of projects, are all important components of a strong American economy.
However, the reader should be reminded that the poorest Americans, the ones living outdoors, the ones facing challenges “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” and those hoping to live back “on the grid” do not get to play. The high consumer prices are one reason. There are many others. The poorest were hard hit during the roughest times of COVID-19, and now afterwards are still struggling (Stimulus Checks Are Great, But America's Poorest Are Still Struggling | The National Interest).
I recommend the book to help readers get a strong sense of the huge amount of poverty in the US toward the end of the Great Recession of 2009…
and proposed solutions for helping families facing the worst of the safety net gaps and faults.
Trying to help the unhoused, the poorest, the wandering masses, and others who need so very much help takes a great deal of work. Seeing that these people needing help are indeed part of a system, part of a culture, is important.
Poor people wandering the streets are not “outside the system.”
Instead, they are a result of it.
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(Editor’s note: for a shocking and revealing account of what happened to more than 14 million Americans who filed for foreclosure as a result of the Great Recession of 2008, see: Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class, by Noelle Stout, 2019, Oakton: University of California Press.)