Letter to Hillary Clinton: Let’s Talk About Poverty

We don’t know whether you will run for president in 2016, but whatever you decide, we think that you should step forward now to launch a national debate about poverty and welfare. You are uniquely positioned to exercise leadership in discussing how public policy fails to respond to the needs of the poor. Specifically, we are asking for you to open a conversation about the shortcomings of the 1996 welfare legislation that was passed when you and Bill Clinton were in the White House. Such a conversation is urgent regardless of who might run for president in 2016. Permit us to lay out some of this history—not to blame any of the participants, but to establish the context that influenced them. Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency in 1992 with the promise “to end welfare as we know it.”