Arizona lawmakers have restricted federally funded welfare benefits to the narrowest time window in the nation.

The restrictions apply to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which provides cash assistance and potential child-care subsidies for low-income or jobless parents. Under the new state budget, Arizona will cut the longevity of TANF benefits from 24 to 12 months.

State Sen. Kelli Ward, a Republican who debated in favor of the budget cut in March, believes welfare programs are crutches keeping citizens from getting back on their feet.

Several readers have wanted to know more about the plight of the family whose story is the basis for a recent book—Andrea Campbell’s Trapped in America’s Safety Net (University of Chicago Press, 2014)—that I reviewed in WORLD Magazine’s May 16 issue. Here are a few more quotations from the book:

Religious leaders and presidents of faith-based organizations have signed a joint statement pledging to work to eliminate extreme poverty. This month’s “Ending Extreme Poverty: A Moral and Spiritual Imperative” came out of a roundtable discussion sponsored by the World Bank Group earlier this year.

Thomas Sowell is a preeminent economist, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of the best-selling Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, now in its 5th edition. He is one of today’s clearest voices for the benefits of free market policies and the failure of government intervention to improve the human condition. We talked about the factors that create income inequality and the reasons why some politicians look for someone to blame for poverty, rather than considering its root causes.

CHINLE, Ariz.—On a hot, cloudless Monday morning in the heart of the Navajo reservation, women wearing traditional turquoise jewelry and men with silver-buckled belts and cowboy hats gathered at a community center. All came determined to have their voices heard.

NEON, Ky.—On a steep hill overlooking an abandoned coal mine in McDowell, Ky., a broken railroad and rusted coal chute testify to busier days in this isolated community in the mountains of eastern Kentucky.

During the mine’s heyday in the 1960s, sturdy men strapped on heavy helmets with bright headlamps and descended into the earth to extract tons of black rock that powered thousands of homes and most of the state’s economy.

New York is a city of 8 million souls—55,000 of them, just over one-half of 1 percent, are homeless. But it’s still a lot of people, and a lot of suffering.