The War on Poverty is 50 years old. Over that time, federal and state governments have spent more than $19 trillion fighting poverty. But what have we really accomplished?Although far from conclusive, the evidence suggests that we have successfully reduced many of the deprivations of material...

News that the poverty rate has risen to 15.1 percent of Americans, the highest level in nearly a decade, has set off a predictable round of calls for increased government spending on social welfare programs. Yet this year the federal government will spend more than $668 billion on at least 126...

Citing the failure of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, a pubic policy research foundation dedicated to traditional American principles of limited government and individual liberty, argues that the American welfare system should be...