In his recent publication in Harvard Law Review Blog, Professor Ezra Rosser weighs in on President Trump’s new executive order called “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility.” The order, in part, mandates federal agencies to enforce existing work requirements for welfare beneficiaries. Rosser says these “[b]lanket work requirements not only fail to take into account market conditions and individual limitations, but they also imagine that the poor do not want to work or are not working.”

And in the larger context of poverty and inequality in today’s America, Rosser writes: “The question for anti-poverty advocates today is not whether Trump’s executive order is a bad thing, which it certainly is, but: how can debates about poverty, inequality, and economic mobility move beyond blaming those at the bottom of the economic system for their own poverty?”

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