When President Bill Clinton slashed welfare benefits in the 1990s, he ushered in a new approach to poverty relief in the United States. The federal government would still provide some cash assistance to low-income families but only if they worked enough to deserve it.

This reallocation of welfare benefits from the poorest of the poor to the working poor devastated the former group. Extreme child poverty nearly tripled, and young adults with disabilities saw their incomes cut by two-thirds.

One of the centerpieces of this brutal new welfare regime was the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). While Clinton cut programs like Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), he expanded the EITC and triumphantly declared that, for the first time in history, all families with children that work a full-time, minimum-wage job would be guaranteed to have a final income above the poverty line.