Does The Welfare System Work Essay

Can a single mother of three working full time for minimum wage afford to pay ' by herself ' for food, clothing, transportation, childcare, occupational training and medical care? Without government aid, the obvious answer is no. Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), as described by Robert Kuttner, is a government aid program designed 'to help all of the working poor rise out of poverty.' It includes tuition reimbursements, wage supplements, and above all, childcare? (Kuttner). It creates a more equal opportunity for those at a disadvantage to improve themselves and their situation. TANF, 'which limits the time families can remain on welfare, appears to be a smashing success' (Cohn). First, if eligibility were to become stricter, seeking

However, US citizen begun to be uncomfortable with the old welfare system by the 1990’s because it did not offer incentive for the beneficiaries to seek for employment. The welfare became both rewarding and perpetuating even though it did not reduce the level of poverty in the United States.

America spends an annual amount of 131.9 billion dollars on welfare alone (Department of Commerce). So many facts about welfare are overwhelming, such that over 12,800,000 Americans are on the welfare system. The entire social welfare system is in desperate need of a complete reform. In order for a proper reform to ensue, the people of America must combine efforts with the U.S. government to revitalize the current welfare system. This reform would involve answering two important questions. First, how has today’s welfare system strayed from its original state and secondly, how is the system abused by welfare holders in today’s economy?

Welfare started as a temporary response to the economic crash in the 1930s. Its primary goal was to provide cushioning to the families who lost the ability to be self-sufficient during the Great Depression. Yet, as America slowly rose back to becoming prosperous and wealthy, a significant chunk of America's population stayed below in the transitioning social system. The welfare system started to become counterproductive to the government so that, in the 1990s, Clinton hastily came up with legislation to end welfare, more famously known as the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. This road that Clinton led ended in a downfall as more people than ever before are now dependent on the federal government for food, housing, and income. Our current welfare reform may need another reform before welfare can truly end.

The welfare system first came into action during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployed citizens needed federal assistance to escape the reality of severe poverty. The welfare system supplies families with services such as: food stamps, medicaid, and housing among others. The welfare system has played a vital role in the US, in controlling the amount of poverty to a certain level. Sadly, the system has been abused and taken for granted by citizens across the country. The welfare system was previously controlled by the federal government until 1996; the federal government handed over the responsibility to the states in hope of reducing welfare abuse. However, this change has not prevented folks from scamming the system. The

Thousands of people are signed up to receive welfare in America, this program is designed to aid poor and needy families. However, it has become some people’s way of earning an income. Several argue against and say that welfare is not destroying our country and creating a dependent people who have learned to abuse certain privileges that come with living in this nation.

My mother received SNAP benefits for three months while she was unemployed in 2013, but only received $17 a month for a family of three. The most one can receive in SNAP benefits for a family of three is $497. Now that she has a stable job and can afford groceries without the help of government aid, there is no way she ever spends $497 on food. The people who receive the entire amount allotted for their family size should not receive that much. This is more than enough money for a family of three to eat very well every single day, while there are some people in the lower middle class that cannot afford to have three meals a day. My father, for example, went through a time where he made too much money to receive any type of food stamps from the government, but he could not afford to have three meals a day. When he applied for SNAP benefits, he was denied due to the fact that he made around $1,300 per month, which is not very much because he had to pay for rent, a car payment, car insurance, and the utility bills. It was difficult for him to find enough food to make dinner for two people, if I was there over the weekend. The maximum one can make in monthly gross income for a household of one person is $1,245 to be eligible for SNAP benefits (Saddler, dhs.state.il.us). In Figure 1, there is a chart stating the amount of money a household is expected to receive in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

Welfare abuse is a severe problem across the country. Each year, millions of Americans receive government benefits such as housing assistance, food stamps, telephone service, and other funds. Welfare is a kind of system that is being set by a government to help and assist families and individuals who are having a hard time providing for themselves such as food, clothing, education and health assistance. This program helped many families survive during The Great Depression and still helps families survive today. Welfare, which was once meant to help individuals re enter society, has been abused and manipulated. The abuse of the Welfare System has become a serious problem. Many dependent persons rely mainly on welfare for their sole source of

The welfare system was created before the government welfare programs started. The system was created to help single mothers, children with disabilities, unemployment and, underemployment. The system offers many different ways to help such as: cash assistance, food stamps, employment assistance, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The system has helped a lot of needy families and still continues to help a lot of families. Many Americans have now started to qualify for help from the system. So people will get help from the system and stay on it just because it’s free.

In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act which, among other things, provided for the financial, medical, and material needs of the poor (Komisar 125,128). Since then, there have many additions and reforms to the bill, none of which has served to quell the controversy surrounding the effectiveness of the welfare system in the United States. The main concerns of the distribution of welfare dollars and resources can be answered by the questions ?Who gets assistance?? and ?How much do they receive??. The U.S. welfare system is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, which attempts to answer these questions through a system of minimum incomes, government-calculated poverty levels, number of children, health problems, and many other criteria. This complicated system leads to one of the critiques of the welfare system?that it is too large and inefficient. President Lyndon Johnson declared a ?War on Poverty? in 1964 designed to alleviate the burden of the poor and established the Food Stamp program the next year (Patterson 139). In 1996, a major welfare reform bill was passed that placed time limits on welfare assistance, required able participants to actively seek employment, and implemented additional services for the needy (Patterson 217).

Welfare has been a safety net for many Americans, when the alternative for them is going without food and shelter. Over the years, the government has provided income for the unemployed, food assistance for the hungry, and health care for the poor. The federal government in the nineteenth century started to provide minimal benefits for the poor. During the twentieth century the United States federal government established a more substantial welfare system to help Americans when they most needed it. In 1996, welfare reform occurred under President Bill Clinton and it significantly changed the structure of welfare. Social Security has gone through significant change from FDR’s signing of the program into law to President George W. Bush’s

What is welfare? Welfare is a government support system that was developed to support the states' so the states' can help out their own people. The "people", are referring to the lower income families who are struggling both financially and with health insurance. Welfare is defined as "aid in the form of money or necessities for those in need" (Webster). The system is an imperfect system, that was intended to help people in need, but as time gone on people are abusing and misusing the system, instead of using it as a temporary aid to get back on their feet. The problem that needs to be changed is the continuance of using the welfare system yearly instead of intending to use it temporarily. Even though welfare has many benefits, the system needs to make it more inconveniently for those who temporarily need it.

United States Government Welfare began in the 1930’s during the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt thought of this system as an aid for low-income families whose men were off to war, or injured while at war. The welfare system proved to be beneficial early on by giving families temporary aid, just enough to help them accommodate their family’s needs. Fast forward almost 90 years, and it has become apparent that this one once helpful system, has become flawed. Welfare itself and the ideologies it stands on, contains decent fundamentals; furthermore, this system of aid needs only to be reformed to better meet the needs of today’s society.

There is much controversy on whether social welfare programs truly assist those in need to become more self-reliant or just make them more reliant and dependent on the government for support. Many Americans are under the misguided belief that all of their hard earned money is handed out to those who are simply too lazy to work. While this statement is certainly untrue, the age old question about the effectiveness of welfare weighs heavy on the minds of many. The following is going to convince and prove the effectiveness of welfare.The welfare system was created to help our citizens and government work efficiently and smoothly with all the programs it offers.

109,631,000, that is the number of Americans that lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded "means-tested programs" — also known as welfare — as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released by the Census Bureau.( Jeffrey 1) This is my objective to tell the history and statistics of the welfare system in the U.S. There is no lack of information on the topic of welfare due to it being a topic of politics in the nation. Accordingly most information I have is from databases and news reports or speeches over it. However a lot of these areas of information can be biased which is something to avoid. To evenly space the information I will supply you with I am going to split it up into two halves. The first half will be the history of welfare and how it affects the country. The second half will be over the statistics and who all is eligible for welfare.