188
Maxwell Meadows
(Data from Pew Research Center 2009, 35)
Policy Stream Social policy formation is an inexact process and there is rarely consensus on what outcomes will result from policy proposals. As Kent Weaver stresses in Ending Welfare as We Know It (2000), there was no concrete agreement between party leaders and experts in the field on the path for welfare reform in 1996 (133-134). Some contemporaries went so far as to express that, “many of the current “welfare reform” plans (including the Clinton Administration’s proposed Work and Family Responsibility Act of 1994 and the Republican Contract with America’s proposed Personal Responsibility Act) are based on faulty assumptions concerning the behavior of AFDC recipients” (SpalterRoth et. al. 2003, 602).