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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
From British debates over the 1832 New Poor Law to the near present, the notion of “desert” has long had a clear referent in discussions of social welfare policy. The designation “deserving poor” was reserved for those with legitimate grounds for not supporting themselves through paid employment. Invariably among them were the very young, the very old, and the mentally and physically very disabled—people who literally could not work for a living. Also included were various categories of people who, according to the varying conventions of the day, were socially excused from paid labor—widows in the Victorian era, students in the postwar era, and so on. Anyone who could and should work for a living but refused to do so was traditionally deemed to be among the “undeserving poor.” Those were the people whose “welfare dependency” has long been the target of welfare reformers, most recently Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
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