The federal minimum wage does not enable families to earn enough to pay rent and feed their children. We have to move away from these individual levels of analysis, that look at what one person can do to improve their life, and look at the systematic problems - lack of jobs, inadequate education, low wages, lack of pension benefits - that are the foundation of growing economic inequality in this country over the past 30 years.

Historian Premilla Nadasen explains how Bill Clinton's "reforms" dismantled America's welfare system by criminalizing the poor, redirecting resources from families to private interests, and strengthening levels of surveillance and punishment that mark the modern mass incarceration state.

Premilla wrote the new Jacobin article How a Democrat Killed Welfare.