Welfare reform's failure

Why poverty in Oklahoma is being compared to a Third World nation

Each year, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof holds a Win-A-Trip contest for college students to accompany him on a reporting trip. Most years, his trip explores global poverty in far-flung places like Congo or Myanmar. This year, he decided to add a stop in Tulsa to see the impact of the nation’s 20-year experiment with revamping welfare.

His disheartening findings were featured in a recent Sunday’s New York Times column. “The embarrassing truth,” he writes, “is that welfare reform has resulted in a layer of destitution that echoes poverty in countries like Bangladesh.”

David Blatt is executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute. Find the rest of this article and more at OKPolicy.org.