Over the last few years, liberals have become more and more convinced that the welfare reform of 1996 immiserated the poorest Americans. Scott Winship of the Manhattan Institute has a new paper arguing that many measures of child poverty have dropped since that reform. I wrote about the paper for Bloomberg:

His most provocative claim concerns “extreme poverty,” defined as having less than $2 a day to live on. A 2015 book by sociologists Kathryn Edin and Luke Schaefer reinforced liberal opinion against welfare reform by arguing that it had led to a sharp increase in the percentage of children living in such a condition. Not only does Winship provide data denying that this increase has occurred: He finds that practically no children in the U.S. live in such extreme poverty, or did so at the time welfare was reformed. . .

Welfare reform, I suggest, may be our last bipartisan success story.