Is the whole greater than the sum of the parts? Interaction effects of three non-income-tested transfers for families with children.

The article discusses affects of three government sponsored programs that offered refundable tax credit for children, national health insurance and an assured child support benefit for families with children, operating on their own and together. Effects of programs interacting with one another would be much larger than the sum of effects produced by each program alone. As a result of interaction effects, poverty rates drop by 43 percent rather than only 34 percent and AFDC caseloads shrink by 22 percent instead of only two percent. The implication for social work is that multifaceted universal programs are an especially effective means to combat poverty and welfare dependence. To remedy these shortcomings derived from overtargeting, government-sponsored studies of the U.S. welfare system in the 1960s advocated lowering the benefit reduction rate in welfare programs and extending eligibility for welfare benefits to two-parent, working poor families. Academic studies in 1980s generally focused on the shortcomings of income testing per se.