Justice requires that each receive what they are due. Survivors are due full compensation. Responding to the regulative ideal of full compensation, the first part of this chapter sketches how a programme might set appropriate payment values, arguing that while those values will vary from time to time and place to place, they will be more credible when co-developed with survivors. Moreover, policymakers need to use the best available techniques when appraising the compensatory value of injuries. Later parts of the chapter criticise paternalistic techniques that withhold money from survivors or pay them in-kind and consider how payments should be communicated, reflecting on the role of apologies and on the beneficial potential of communal ceremonies.

This chapter discusses how Republicans at the federal and state level are adding behavior modification requirements to a wide array of public benefits programs, thus driving a divide between red and blue states.  Behavior modification requirements include tying public assistance to work requirements, family caps (limits on benefits based on family size), and drug tests.  Congress first approved behavior modification requirements on a large-scale as part of welfare reform in 1996.  These requirements are attempts to control the behavior of the poor, based on an assumption that poor people are morally deficient.  To implement these changes, Republicans are using federalism tools such as waivers, or statutorily permitted deviations from federal program norms on a state-by-state basis. The Trump administration has already approved work requirements for Medicaid and signaled that it will permit a range of behavior modification requirements in housing and nutrition assistance programs.  As a result, state variations in terms of poverty rates and poverty relief will deepen.  In short, a person’s experience at the bottom of the economic ladder differs widely depending on where they live, and red state versus blue state policy differences are driving part of that geographic divergence.

This chapter focuses on traditional cash welfare. It provides background on federal cash assistance to poor families, explains current TANF policy, and proposes that antipoverty scholars turn their attention to a fundamental precondition of democratic experimentalism: the presence of meaningful and well-functioning democracy that includes the poor. A democratic structure that operates nondemocratically by weakening the political voices of poor people is an insufficient environment for a just approach to welfare. Instead of laboratories of democracy, states in this domain often function as laboratories of suffering –political entities that experiment upon poor people without robust informed consent. While some democratic deficits are likely inevitable in any system, in welfare, we see a governance structure in which the sole direct beneficiaries of the regime are largely shut out of the democratic processes that structure that regime.

Throughout American history, protecting states’ rights within federal health reform laws has served purposes other than the needs of the poor, such as excluding those deemed undeserving of assistance, the “able-bodied.” This chapter explores the role of federalism in health reform, paying particular attention to the importance of universality in programs meant to aid the poor, such as Medicaid. American federalism is dynamic, involving separate state negotiations with the federal government rather than the fixed dual sovereignty imagined by the Supreme Court. Such negotiations lead to variability, which in health care may lower the baseline for reform-resistant states and thus the nation as a whole. This is especially significant when the federal government attempts to improve conditions nationwide, as it did with the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) universal health insurance coverage. The example of Medicaid expansion under the ACA demonstrates how state variability can improve coverage but also jeopardize it; keeping states in the picture sometimes results in restricting access to the safety net rather than strengthening it. The debates of the twentieth century about the role of government in health and who is deserving of aid are bound to repeatedly arise without fully gauging federalism’s mixed effects in health reform.

A resurgence in work requirements for safety-net programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has marked the early years of the Trump administration. Some lawmakers at both the federal and state level have moved to revive and expand SNAP’s work requirements, despite evidence that such work requirements do little to increase self-sufficiency or improve long-term economic outcomes among those living in poverty.This chapter takes up the issue of work requirements in the context of rural communities, where the need for safety-net programs and food system supports is acute. We begin with a brief overview of SNAP and examine the recent push to make SNAP work requirements more strict.We then turn to an overview of the need and current state of use of the social safety net in rural America. If work requirements are to be effective – and, indeed, appropriate – work opportunities must be available.We, therefore, consider employment data and information on safety-net use across the rural-urban axis. Finally, we present a case study about the results of relatively early efforts to impose work requirements on SNAP receipt in Maine.