Economic crises, neoliberalism, and the US welfare state: trends, outcomes and political struggle

The rise of neoliberalism in the US represents a response to the second economic crisis of the 20th century. Seeking to restore profits and economic growth, neoliberal proponents called for redistributing income upwards and downsizing the state. The resulting tax and budget cuts, privatisation, devolution and weakening of social movements led to greater economic insecurity/poverty, increased social problems, greater privatisation of services and increased regulation of the poor. Neoliberalism created enormous wealth for the top earners but it failed to produce the promised economic growth. Three intertwined political tactics helped to convince the American public to support polices that undermined their well-being and political power: the fabrication of a crisis, the generation of four panics and the exploitation of the resulting fears to impose policies that people would not otherwise stand for. Social workers are encouraged to engage in political struggle to reverse the unjust outcomes of the neoliberal assault on welfare states around the world

The Conservative Program is a Women\u27s Issue

The Conservative program strikes deeply at the institutions that support the economic independence and security of women. This paper reviews social welfare budget cuts, the relaxation of affirmative action and workplace health and safety rules, and the social issues agenda of the New Right for their impact on women\u27s economic, social and political status. It describes how the Reagan Administration\u27s economic recovery program victimizes women, especially minority women. Not only is the feminization of poverty intensified, but women are sent from the paid labor market back to unpaid labor in the home, aided and abetted by the social issues agenda of the New Right. The Administration\u27s domestic program is analyzed in the context of its broader strategy for coping with the current economic crisis. It is viewed as part of a long range plan to redirect capital into the private sector by redistributing income upwards and weakening the political power of women, minorities and organized labor whose empowerment and demands for an improved standard of living have become too costly for business and government

Saving Capitalism from Itself: Whither the Welfare State?

The U.S. welfare state has been under attack from both sides of the aisle since the mid-1970s. Using the lens of history, the following pages will argue that neither the rise of the welfare state in the 1930s nor the current attack were merely accidental. Instead, each was a response to a particular crisis of profitability because the institutional arrangements that had created the conditions for profit-making in the prior fifty years had deteriorated. The policies no longer worked for the powers-that-be and had to be “reformed.

The Reagan Legacy: Undoing Class, Race and Gender Accords

The impact of Reaganomics on women, workers, and person of color is explored by looking at structural forces in the political economy that encourage business and government at one time to support and another time to undermine the welfare state. The expansion of the welfare state from 1935 to the mid-1970s meshed well with the needs of profitable production, political legitimacy and patriarchal control. With the economic crisis of the 1970s, the welfare state became too competitive with capital accumulation and too supportive of empowered popular movements and had to go. Women, persons of color, and the poor ranked high among the victims of the new austerity plan

Reaganomics and the Welfare State

Supply-side tax and spending policies have intensified poverty, unemployment and inequality, especially for women, minorities and organized labor. At the same time Reaganomics is shrinking and weakening the welfare state. To better understand and resist this conservative assault it is necessary to demystify the economics and politics of supply-side doctrine. This paper (a) defines the basic assumptions of supply-side economics; (b) identifies some of its problems and contradictions; (c) discusses its impact on the welfare state; and (d) analyzes it as part of a broader plan for coping with the current economic crisis. It argues that the supply-side tax cut not only lowers government revenues, but provides a justification for cutting domestic programs. Domestic cutbacks, in turn, are achieved by new laws that change program rules and regulations, transfer federal social welfare responsibility to the states, that weaken the political support for the programs themselves. This legislated conservative legacy will be more difficult to reverse than if the cuts were achieved by just lowering appropriations. As a domestic strategy, Reaganomics is part of a broader response to the current economic crisis that involves redirecting larger amounts of capital into the private sector and weakening the political strength of women, minorities and organized labor whose demands for an adequate standard of living have become to costly for business and government to absorb

Indicator Analysis for Unpacking Poverty in New York City

This article presents work that is part of a larger and ongoing research agenda exploring the persistence of health and social problems in some parts of New York City. To this end, the authors have developed a GIS framework that translates a highly diverse set of variables into neighborhood indicators that can help local residents as well as decision makers to understand the relationship between “place” and individual behavior. Using the example of two new indices, Community Loss and Neighborhood Risks, the readers will learn how data can be transformed to emphasize the communal nature of phenomena that is typically understood only in relations to individuals

Community Loss: a new social indicator

The Community Loss Index ðCLIÞ, a new social indicator, focuses on the understudied role of place as a source of stress and an aggregator of individual experiences. Building on the relationship between loss and stress, the index attempts to capture collective loss, defined as the chronic exposure by neighborhood residents to multiple resource losses at the same time. Using maps, the article analyzes the spatial distribution of six types of loss in New York City and the characteristics of people who live in high- and low-loss neighborhoods. Regionalization reveals a neighborhood-based concentration of loss, patterns of loss that are both widespread and variable by location, and that a group’s vulnerability to the adverse effects of community loss depends on where the group lives. The CLI provides a place-based context for investigating neighborhood-based collective loss and allows community members and public officials to fine-tune interventions based on actual community needs

Moving Toward Racial Equity: The Undoing Racism Workshop and Organizational Change

Abstract Since 2002, social workers and others in New York City have attended Undoing Racism TM Workshops (URW) designed to encourage participants to advance racial equity in the organizations in which they work. However, little is known about the extent to which participants pursued these goals following the workshop. Drawing on a participatory action model, this study explored the impact of URW by examining the participants' (1) change in knowledge and attitudes about structural racism, (2) engagement in job-related racial equity activities, and their (3) view of their organization's progress toward racial equity. The study also explored (4) factors that might be associated with personal engagement and progress toward organizational change and (5) the role of race in the outcomes. Findings include increased knowledge and attitude change, considerable individual engagement, mixed organizational progress, and identification of facilitators and barriers with some differentiations by race

Book reviews

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45604/1/11199_2005_Article_BF01544673.pd