How Has The Welfare System Changed

Welfare has been an arguable topic throughout United States history (“Brief”). Some people agree with it and others do not like it at all. Welfare did not exist until the 1930s during The Great Depression (“Brief”). With millions of people unemployed, Franklin D. Roosevelt developed the welfare system to help these people during the Great Depression (“Brief”). After the Great Depression was over,, the government came up with new programs to help assist the welfare program and help more people in poverty (“Brief”). Some of those programs were Medicaid, public housing, food stamps, and Supplemental Security programs (“Brief”). Theses programs helped and hurt the country at the same time (“Brief”). By having these programs, many people would not look for jobs because they knew they were better off living on welfare (“Brief”).

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

The effects of the 1996 welfare reform bill helped declined caseloads on the social and economic well-being of fragile families, single mothers, and children. Although, the welfare reform was documented for making several positive changes such as reducing poverty rates, lowering the out of-wedlock childbearing, and formulated a better family structure, it is undeniable that poverty remained high among single mothers and their children. The reality of the matter was that most welfare recipients experienced serious barriers to maintain a stable employment due to their lack of skills, not having anyone available to take care of their young children when they leave for work as well as not gaining long-time employment with decent pay to help foster the family. As a result, most poor women and children were faced with the instability of economic and social future as welfare eligibility exhausted their efforts of supporting their families.

This paper will analyze the welfare reform system. Through my analysis I will examine several areas of concern in the welfare reform system. First, as an overview, I will look at the Personal Responsibility & Work Opportunity Act. Second, I will look at the Welfare to Workfare program. We will then examine how welfare recipients with disabilities will be handled under this new reform and finally this paper will examine how the federal government plans on if at all ensuring job retention occurs.

Welfare Policy has helped an abundance of people in America. Sometimes, unforeseen events occur and assistance is needed. Because of these troubling circumstances, the need for institution and development of welfare programs came about. The American Welfare Policy has good intent; it has helped millions of people through its time. Although, there are many that believe our Welfare Policy is in great need of reform and the abuse of the system must come to an end.

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).

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

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).

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.