In November 2016, Barack Obama was largely expected to ‘turn over the keys’ to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, the continuity candidate, had run on ‘a shared prosperity’ agenda. She had promised to ‘build on the Affordable Care Act to cover more Americans’ and finish ‘the long fight to provide universal, quality, affordable health care to everyone in America’ (Clinton, 2016). She also had a plan for helping America's poor, which included ‘directing 10% of federal investments to communities where 20% of the population has been living below the poverty line for 30 years’ (Clinton, 2016). However, Clinton was mostly silent about ‘welfare’.

Welfare has two meanings in America: it can refer to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a cash assistance program for single-parent families; or it can refer to other means-tested programs, such as housing assistance, health care (Medicaid), food stamps (ie the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP]) and social assistance for people with disabilities (Social Security Income [SSI]). In the strictest sense of the term, welfare is TANF, a program that served 4.1 million individuals in 2013, three million of whom were children. However, ‘welfare’ is a pejorative term. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ronald Reagan derided poor single parents as ‘Cadillac queens’ driving around on federal dollars. The idea that lazy – mostly black – female recipients receive taxpayer money without giving anything in return is deeply ingrained in the American collective psyche (Gustafson, 2011). That is why Democrats stay away from welfare: it is politically toxic, even though there is not much cash assistance left for single-parent families in America (less than one million adults are TANF recipients today).

President Trump, apparently unaware that financial aid has been reduced to next to nothing, promised to get ‘millions’ off welfare and back to work in his 2017 address to Congress. If, by welfare, Trump means food stamps, then it is a considerably larger population than TANF: about 43 million Americans received food stamps in 2016 (USDA, 2017), though caseloads have been steadily declining since 2013.

There are not many politicians willing to take up the mantle of the fight against poverty today.