A Breakdown of Consensus: Mounting Problems in the Welfare State

Traditionally, it has been the role of the left to question whether an adequate welfare program could ever be developed and maintained within the American economic system. Now, suddenly, we find politicians in both parties arguing that the development of such a program is impossible (or unnecessary). This emerging consensus creates a short-term problem and suggests a long-term one. The short-term problem concerns the question of how one defends admittedly defective programs, with full knowledge of their defects, when the only alternative is to allow them to collapse. The long-term problem concerns the question of how to advocate necessary structural changes, when the transitional programs are, perhaps necessarily, so unsatisfactory that ...