Book Review of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Before making a great success in the restaurant and wholesale beverage businesses, Alice Foote MacDougall and her three children had been thrust into deep poverty by her husband's financial failure. Raised in wealth and high social standing, she had been forced to ask relatives for help and was humiliated by their presumptuous inquiries about her lifestyle and expenditures. In her autobiography, recalling the period of deep poverty that followed her affluent childhood and preceded her …

…Sixty-seven years later, we have not quit this business of welfare. The public would be far better served if TANF moved out from the social services role it now plays and under the Department of Labor to ensure it is treated as a true unemployment program. Furthermore, to combat the underlying problems of poverty, social services could then begin to address issues that truly require social services - mental health, developmental disabilities and substance abuse.