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Of course, the anti-fraud campaign never directly implicated the vast majority of families receiving AFDC, but it ended up further stigmatizing the entire program and all its beneficiaries.

The neighbors should be spending their energy signing up for AFDC, checking in to food banks, and doing what they can to take care of their kids.

In contrast, AFDC, the precursor program, supported 4.7 million families in 1995 — 76 percent of the nation’s poor families.

But only one-third of the poor collect AFDC.

That doesn’t mean that Hillary Clinton wanted to leave the welfare system—then known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children, or AFDC—the way it was.