In their previous book, We the Poor People: Work, Poverty, and Welfare, published ten years ago, Handler and Hasenfeld argued that welfare reforms in the USA were largely symbolic politics. According to them, the ‘real problem’ was not the spread of welfare but the spread of poverty among the working poor, and the best way to deal with the problem was to create jobs and supplement low-wage work. With this in mind, Handler and Hasenfeld put forward a series of proposals that would make it possible for poor people, in particular single mothers, to support themselves and their families by working and also by establishing an effective safety net for those who were unable to do so. These policies ranged from creating jobs and supplementing income through raising Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the minimum wage to providing health insurance and child care.

Their latest book, Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality, is, in many ways a sequel to their earlier book. It focuses on the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which was passed by Congress in 1996 in response to President Clinton's campaign promise to ‘end welfare as we know it’. The centrepiece of the new legislation was Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), generally known as ‘welfare’, the much reviled cash assistance programme for single mothers and their children. Most Americans appear to think that the replacement of AFDC by TANF has been a success. The number of people in receipt of ‘welfare’ has declined, and welfare is no longer a politically contentious issue. Handler and Hasenfeld challenge this complacent view, arguing that, in terms of poverty and inequality, welfare reform has been a complete failure. This is because child poverty in the USA is higher than in any other ‘affluent’ society and the children of single mothers experience many forms of inequality.

The thesis of the book is that Americans have always ‘demonised’ welfare and, in particular, poor single mothers, and that this has allowed them to ignore the structural conditions that produce poverty and inequality. This process culminated in PRWORA, which transformed welfare from a measure that was thought to corrupt those who depended on it into a measure that enforces work requirements and family values. PRWORA assumes that there are sufficient jobs in the economy for current and potential welfare recipients, in particular single mothers; that any job is better than no job; that by taking a job and sticking with it, single mothers will be able to escape poverty; and that there is sufficient child care available for them to work without disadvantaging their children. It assumes that the problem with welfare recipients, and in particular single mothers, is their poor work ethic, and that by working instead of being on welfare, they will be better role models for their children. It also assumes that establishing paternity, enforcing child support obligations on absent fathers, and encouraging single mothers to marry or to live with their own parents are preferable to ‘passively’ supporting single parents on welfare. However, the book attempts to show that ‘just about every one of these assumptions is a myth’. Although cases can be found that support these myths, the book claims that they are the exception rather than the rule and that the major concern of welfare reform in the USA has been to blame the victim and appease the moral majority. It argues that, although welfare reform purported to address the problems of poverty and inequality, it has failed to deal with their structural causes or with the reality of welfare recipients’ experiences.

Ten years is an appropriate period of time in which to assess the impact of a piece of legislation and, in so doing, the authors cover a very wide range of topics. They review an enormous amount of empirical research on the extent of poverty, the delivery of ‘welfare’, the rise of non-standard work and the costs of child care. One chapter (Chapter 3) contains 507 footnotes. Although it is very impressive that they have read, absorbed and assimilated so much information, it has resulted in a book that is very long and extremely detailed. The authors are clearly aware of this because, in one throw-away line on page 316, they acknowledge that it is ‘too long’. The very detailed commentary on research findings, and the fact that the authors do not really put forward an analytic framework that would help the reader to absorb all this material, do not make the book one that can easily be read from beginning to end. Fortunately, the introduction includes a summary of the thesis and of each chapter. I suspect that most readers, certainly most non-American readers, will confine their reading to this chapter and, perhaps, the concluding chapter, in which the authors put forward an alternative approach to reducing poverty and inequality that would replace TANF with a non-means-tested children's allowance, guarantee jobs for everyone who wants to work, raise the minimum wage, increase tax relief on earned income and enhance the provision of child care.

Although I am very comfortable with the approach taken by this book and very happy with the conclusions it reaches, I suspect that this is, in large measure, because my value position is similar to that of Handler and Hasenfeld. However, I do worry that the arguments advanced in the book are unlikely to persuade those who start out from a different value position. They are too predictable and the authors do not pose any really awkward problems or propose any solutions that are likely to cause readers to question beliefs that they already hold. I also worry that the book paints too ‘black and white’ a picture of the myths of the moral majority, and their political representatives, on the one hand, and the ‘truth’ of liberal critics and social reformers, on the other. These criticisms are, unfortunately, likely to limit the impact of this wide-ranging and well-informed book.