HOW CAN WE STOP THE ABUSE OF THE AMERICAN WELFARE SYSTEM? Essay

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.

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.

There remains a remnant of citizens who honestly cannot do without the welfare system and who abide by the regulation of the welfare system, however, the system unintentionally invites scam artists. The ways of abusing the welfare system continuos to grow. Here are just a few of the examples. Citizens are staying single parents in order to receive aid. Parents view having more children as a gateway to receiving more money from the system. Recipients refuse to search for jobs and report employment in order to continue receiving assistance. People seem to easily make false claims, requesting assistance when they do not need it. Although, there is a set time period for receiving funds many citizens become comfortable and lazy during assistance. The whole purpose of the system is to get citizens through rough economical problems and back to a independent lifestyle without government aid. However, the systems seems to encourage complacency in society and provide fraud play in

They themselves also felt the stigma of being on wellfare and did not want to be dependent on the system. But with limited education finding a job a job was difficult. Transportation was also limiting. Few of the recipients had cars and with public transportation the way it was many found that the time and money it took to commute simply did not pay over the meager amount they received from welfare. The issue was compounded for single mothers. Transportation issues asside, childcare costs were almost entirely prohibitive. For a single mother trying to raise a child—or multiple children— working was simply not an option. Leaving a young child home alone was clearly not an option so unless they had a family member willing and able to watch their children they could not leave the house to go to work. Also, to insinuate that the women Zucchino met did not work is an insult. She may not have been employed, but Odessa Williams slaved away driving from store to store to keep costs low, fishing to limit food costs, and chuaffering people around to make a little extra cash. All so she could provide the best life possible for her

Through interviews with welfare workers and recipients, Hays demonstrates the high costs welfare has had on the moral, economic, physical and mental well-being of poor women and their children due to what she considers to be the conflict between the two opposing aspects of reform: work values and family values. She believes that these conflicting values and the inherent weaknesses in the Act contribute to serious and ongoing problems for welfare recipients.

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.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act also shifted the spotlight of welfare from family maintenance through government-supported financial assistance to family economic self-sufficiency through paid employment. This federal welfare reform policy known as TANF encourages employment and personal responsibility by mandating states to provide financial benefits to families on a temporary basis, having recipients participate in a work requirement while receiving aid, and providing incentives for recipients to transition off welfare. The programs name indicated its purpose and the social message to the recipient.

“Lana M. and her husband collected welfare benefits in 2003, claiming they earned less than $24,000. But authorities say Lana M., the former office manager of a job-training center for immigrant welfare recipients, also owned a liquor store and recycling business. Authorities say, she drove a $76,000 luxury car, shopped at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue and had $147,980 stashed in her bedroom dresser” (“Welfare” 7). This case for instance, how did this couple’s income go undetected by the system? How did their greed get away with thousands of dollars they obviously did not need? Not only did they cheat and scam the welfare system and tax payers, but they took away the assistance from a family or individual that where truly seeking aid. While reading through some articles when researching information on this matter I learned that it is not easy to apply for Welfare Programs. Applicants are required to provide important documentations such as “Source of income, proof of identity, social security cards, proof of residence cost, copy of mortgage payments, pay stubs and applicants are even required to provide saving and checking accounts information and cash on hand” (“Tips” 7). With all these information in our government’s hand, fraud should be the last thing on peoples’ mind. Tax payers should rest assured that the money they have worked so extremely hard

Welfare reform sparked a great deal of interest in the 1990’s when President Clinton called together a speech calling for dramatic changes to the welfare policy. In his speech he stated “No one who works full-time and has children at home should be poor anymore. No one who can work should

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).

the unemployed mother who is receiving food stamps and monthly social security unemployment benefits as a serious problem to the welfare system. The program which

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.

The history of welfare reform reveals that the question of personal responsibility versus assistance to those in need has been a constant in the debate over welfare. In the 1950s and 1960s, welfare reform was limited to various states' attempts to impose residency requirements on welfare applicants and remove illegitimate children from the welfare rolls. During the 1970s advocates of welfare reform promoted the theory of

Throughout history, there have always been people willing to work for what they want, and those who expect things to be handed to them as if it was a natural-born right. While the welfare system does positively impact some families in need, many people take advantage of it. With this being a well known fact, the government still continues to use ten percent of the federal budget on welfare (“Budget” 1).

Several people felt as though receivers were abusing the program by staying unmarried and unemployed to remain eligible for the program and some were having more children to become qualified for a greater amount of benefits.6 Others felt as though the AFDC program had made welfare a way of life rather than a short-term assistance mechanism to help individuals get back on their feet.7 The public at large grew frustrated with the system for the lack of evidence provided that the system actually achieved any of its goals towards reducing poverty. Needless to say the issue of welfare reform became a recurrent topic.