1. An explanation for the limited American notion of social citizenship and social contract is beyond the scope of this article. Briefly, I think it rests on the distinctive American notion of equality as equality of opportunity, not equality of condition. What government owes its citizens is the right to compete unfettered in the national race for success. This explains why America was so early to adopt universal free public education and so late to adopt social insurance and why its War on Poverty focused on opportunity, education, and job preparation rather than job creation.

2. “The ‘Poorhouse State’ Is the Right Name for It,” Saturday Evening Post, 19 November 1949, 10, 12.Google Scholar

3. The discussion of the origins of the term “welfare” and of the architecture of the American welfare state are based on my book The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (New York, 2001; rev. ed., Philadelphia, 2008)Google Scholar.

4. The discussion that follows summarizes the description of the welfare state in The Price of Citizenship. The exceptions are the bracketed elements that have been added since the book’s publication but are not yet fully developed.

5. Steensland, Brian, America’s Failed Welfare Revolution: The Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton, 2007)Google Scholar.

6. Reese, Ellen, Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005), 5–12Google Scholar.

7. An important book which makes this point is Howard, Christopher, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditure and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar.

8. See the discussion of the LIHTC and other programs to increase the supply of affordable housing in Erickson, David J., The Housing Policy Revolution: Networks and Neighborhoods (Washington, D.C., 2010)Google Scholar.

9. Price of Citizenship, updated edition, 368.

10. The scholar who has drawn most attention to Civil War–era veterans’ pension is Theda Skocpol in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)Google Scholar.

11. For making me realize that veterans’ benefits must be integrated into my conception of the architecture of the American welfare state, I am indebted to the Israeli political scientist Michael Shalev, who has argued for the importance of “loyalty benefits” in an unpublished paper. My “Public Education as Welfare” is in the summer 2010 issue of Dissent. Recently, the case for including public education as part of the welfare state has received powerful support in Garfinkel, Irwin, Rainwater, Lee, and Smeeding, Timothy, Wealth and Welfare States: Is America a Laggard or Leader? (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

12. Salamon, Lester M., “The Marketization of Welfare: Changing Nonprofit and For-Profit Roles in the American Welfare State,” Social Service Review 27, no. 1 (March 1993): 19–20Google Scholar.

13. The best sources for following trends in employee benefits are the many publications of the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

14. Freeman, Richard B., “Labor Market Institutions and Earnings Inequality,” New England Economic Review 157 (1996): 12Google Scholar.

15. Fairbanks, Robert P. II, How It Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia (Chicago, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. See, for instance, Roy, Ananya and Alsayad, Nezar, Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham, Md., 2004)Google Scholar.

17. A brilliant exposition of the marketization of public policy and its implications for citizenship is Somers, Margaret R., Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar.

18. Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, 1971)Google Scholar.

19. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.

20. Esping-Andersen, Gosta, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990)Google Scholar.

21. Gordon, Linda, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Ignatieff, Michael, The Needs of Strangers (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Brown, Michael K., Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, 1999)Google Scholar; Gilens, Martin, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Katz, Michael B., The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

23. I have written about the origins and history of poorhouses and about scientific charity in my book In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986; expanded edition, 1996)Google Scholar.

24. There are excellent literatures on the relations between welfare and gender and between welfare and race. On gender, see, especially, Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. On race, see Quadagno, Jill S., The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and Lieberman, Robert C., Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)Google Scholar.

25. Sullivan, Teresa A., Warren, Elizabeth, and Westbrook, Lawrence Jay, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar.

26. The House Tri-Committee Health Reform Discussion, Draft Summary, 18 June 2009, http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090619/healthcarereform_summary.pdf, accessed 13 July 2009.

27. Barbara, Michael and Pear, Robert, “Wal-Mart and a Union United, At Least on Health Policy,” New York Times, 7 February 2007Google Scholar.

28. Industry Canada, “Cars on the Brain—2005 in HTML” http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/auto-auto.nsf/eng/amo2094.html, accessed 13 July 2009.

29. Katz, , Price of Citizenship, 277–78Google Scholar; Baldwin, Marc, “Benefit Recipiency Rates under the Federal/State Unemployment Insurance Program: Explaining and Reversing Decline” (Ph.D. diss., MIT, 1993), 114–18Google Scholar.

30. Steensland, , America’s Failed Welfare Revolution, 39Google Scholar.

31. In fact, the title “Contract with America” can be read as either a cynical appropriation of the language of social contract or as an attempt to cast the mantle of marketization over the entire operation of the federal government.

32. A useful source of viewpoints on the New York fiscal crisis is Alcaly, Roger E. and Mermelstein, David, The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities: Essays on the Political Economy of Urban America with Special Reference to New York City (New York, 1977)Google Scholar. Faced with unprecedented public outrage, Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia backed away from his plan to close libraries. On the rollback of state transfer programs, see Nicholas Johnson and Erica Williams, “Some States Scaling Back Tax Credits for Low-Income Families: Measures Would Increase Poverty, Slow Job Growth,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, revised 3 May 3 2010.

33. Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed; How They Fail (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

34. Amenta, Edwin, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton, 2006)Google Scholar.

35. Gottschalk, Marie, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Western, Bruce, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

36. Jacobs, Meg and Zelizer, Julian E., “The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Jacobs, Meg, Novack, William J., and Zelizer, Julian E. (Princeton, 2003), 6Google Scholar.

37. Skocpol, , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 56, 58, 59Google Scholar.

38. See, for example, Berkowitz, Edward D., America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore, 1991), 32, 42Google Scholar.

39. On the strange, unhappy history of attempts to enact national health care, see Gordon, Colin, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar.

40. For a superb discussion of social reform and the origins of social insurance, see Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)Google Scholar.

41. Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Hodgson, Godfrey, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

42. Soros, George, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

43. Kuttner, Robert, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

44. Hacker, Jacob S., The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.