Congress and the president need to reform Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security because they are no longer able to run on autopilot.

A fiscal crisis threatens to engulf the federal budget, jeopardizing the health and vigor of the American economy. When the next president and Congress take office in January 2009, they will face one crucial question that has been almost absent from the current election campaign: how to close the enormous...

In her recent book, What Money Can’t Buy, Susan Mayer finds that parental income is less important to children’s well-being than scholars have thought in the past. Mayer argues that most American families are now able to provide the basic necessities for their children, in part because government help...

This book explores how low-income children and their families are faring in the wake of welfare reform.

Since the early 1980s, the black middle class has hardly grown. The most achievable remedy is to increase the college graduation rate of African Americans.

Taxing a mere 0.3 percent of the population, as the House health care reform legislation intends, is not a sustainable way to pay for health care reform.

Today's official poverty rate is hardly lower than the 1968 rate, but a closer look at forty years of poverty data tells a more mixed story.