Poverty And Poverty

People generally enjoy working and being productive members of society. The positive effects of the Welfare Reform Act is moving to eventually end poverty in America and promote economic growth. According to the 2005 report measuring welfare dependents “Poverty in 2003 remains much lower than in 1996, the year of passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The official poverty rate for 2003 was 12.5 percent, compared to 13.7 percent in 1996.” ( Gil Crouse, Susan Hauan, Julia Isaacs, Kendall Swenson and Lisa Trivits, 2005 ) States that design welfare-to-work policies that emphasized getting recipients into jobs by shifting to “work-first” welfare systems can modify program rules to allow more earned income,

In 1996, the United States came up with the welfare to work law, which is now known as the Welfare to Work program (Hill). The purpose of this program was to encourage Americans on welfare to go back to work and not just stay at home and do nothing (Hill). The main goal was to reduce welfare by increasing the income of people on welfare (Greenberg). The program required people to get in an education program, get some type of training, or try to find a job (Greenberg). These requirements were intended to eventually get welfare recipients to get a job and not depend on welfare (Greenberg). Like

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.

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.

The concepts of “worthy” and “unworthy” poor came about during the English Poor Laws that were introduced in the 1500’s. The English poor laws classified poor or dependent people into three major categories and established many requirement before aid was provided. Dependent persons were categorized as: vagrant (nomadic; with no permanent home or employment), the involuntary unemployed and the helpless. In effect, the poor laws separated the poor into two classes which were the worthy and the unworthy. The worthy were classified as orphans, widows, handicapped, or the frail elderly. The unworthy were the drunkards, suspicious, or lazy. (Hansan, J.E. (2011). Poor relief in early America)

Welfare policy made its formal debut in America in the late 1930s during the Great Depression. Though, before the Depression, there were several small programs that the United States government supported. When the depression hit, it crippled Americans. The proposed Welfare policy seemed perfect for getting them back on their feet. In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt created two programs that are still in place today: the unemployment compensation and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Though now the AFDC has changed and taken a new name. The Welfare policy that was formally put into place lasted until the 1990s when individuals became concerned that some were abusing the system. They believed that some were having more children to qualify for more aid, staying unmarried, and just not applying for jobs. American’s were so concerned with the policy that they elected a president based on his proposal for a welfare system reformation. President Bill Clinton promised hope for Americans and their policy.

In August 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) passed. This legislation ended the Family Aid with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Unlike AFDC, TANF is not an entitlement program. This means that states are under no obligation to provide cash assistance to eligible families. Instead the federal government gives block grants to assist poor families with the emphasis on moving them from welfare to work or deterring them from applying for welfare in the first place. States are no longer obligated to match federal funds, creating an incentive to eliminate their previous portion of the funding for critical programs. Now due to

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, welfare is defined as “a government program for poor or unemployed people that helps pay for their food, housing, medical costs, etc.” (Dictionary) Some of these programs include; Food Stamps, Medicaid, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Head Start, Medicare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Work Study.

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was enacted in order to change the current welfare policy at the time. This welfare policy that existed was originally meant to provide financial assistance as well as decent healthcare coverage during times of economic hardship (Kaestner, 2004). This policy was implemented as a way to help hundreds of thousands of families overcome financial hurdles. However, the idea behind the reforming of welfare was to avoid the stereotypical individuals that lived off of welfare to continue doing so. Evidence existed that concluded that people who lived off of government welfare assistance were actually allowing this system to destroy their desire to work and sustain themselves (Rector & Marshall, 2013). Welfare was seen as a detrimental part of the government and it was viewed as feeding into a lazy and poorly disciplined class of individuals. Welfare's initial intention was to aid widows who had children to support, but in a matter of decades the entire welfare system converted from being a safety net for individuals in dire times of need, to a support system for able-bodied men who lacked motivation to find employment and sustain themselves and their families (Rector & Marshall, 2013). The Welfare Reform Act came as a way to remedy these problems. Stipulations were put on those applying to receive welfare benefits. Limits were enacted that would reduce the amount of time that people could receive the benefits in order to speed up their

In the United States there are “over 100 million people receiving some form of federal welfare” (Munoz#7). The purpose of creating the welfare system was to provide aid to those families with “little to no income” (article 1). Back in 1996 Clinton passed the welfare reform act; allowing state full control of the welfare system. The Welfare Reform Act was to help steer welfare

     Welfare is a means of financial assistant for poverty stricken individuals. Year after year presidents have attempted to reconstruct the welfare system so it does not act as a backbone for those who do not want to work, and year after year success seemed out of reach. That is, until President Bill Clinton thought he had the answer. He signed the new welfare reform act in August of 1996, vowing to “end welfare as we know it.” Terminating a 62 year-old federal entitlement, President Clinton put a limit on how long one can receive federal welfare assistance (Casse 36). Yet, this so called reform is not that at all. The government doesn’t see what happens to ex-welfare recipients after they

Throughout modern human history there has been an ongoing struggle of whether to help the poor and how to help them. In today’s political scene in the US mostly only extremely staunch conservatives feel that we should offer no aid to the poor of America. So, then the argument becomes how to best help them. Welfare is widely considered to be the main way that America helps the poor. So what is welfare exactly? Welfare can be defined as aid in the form of money or necessities for those in need distributed through an agency or program. In general liberals feel that America should offer a large amount of aid and pull people out of debt with government funds while still trying to get them back to work. In general conservatives feel that the poor should have to already have a job before we help them and many also call for drug testing before offering assistance. To try to create these scenarios, parties use welfare reform. Welfare reform is a bill that alters the current program so that it operates in a different way. The most recent welfare reform was in 1996 by Bill Clinton and was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. This act in general aimed to hand over

In 1996, the federal government came to the conclusion that the welfare system should be placed in the hands of the state governments. With this in mind, the Temporary Aid to Needy Families was established. The TANF is more governed towards getting people back into the workforce by requiring recipients to engage in job searches, and participate in community service. The previous phase of welfare was more for providing people with capital in the hopes that he/she would use it to get back on his/her feet. The TANF is still known as welfare to the public (“Government Spends”). In the new welfare program,

Poverty for centuries has been a very severe issue that has troubled many nations while impeding economic developments and progress. Poverty stricken countries are majorly concentrated in the continents of Africa and Asia. Continents like the Americas and Europe have globally been recognized as been wealthier yet still many parts of these ostensible countries face massive cases of poverty. Most at times, countries with high populations owing to high birth rates face the most cases of poverty. The definition of poverty can be boundless in the sense that poverty entails so many subsections as it sometimes gets complicated to group everything under one umbrella. Society tends to focus more on the tangible aspects of poverty because many people associate poverty with lacking money and it makes sense because poverty in terms of lacking money is a major problem affecting almost every country in the world. Even though it is debatable that poverty can be physical, intellectual, spiritual and even emotional, it is best to talk about the lack of money and economic developments in this essay. With reference to the oxford English Dictionary, poverty is state of being extremely poor and the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount. Reflecting on this definition given, I deduced that malnutrition and hunger can define poverty. In the light of this, I think poverty is lacking a comfortable place of shelter, being ill and not having access to a better

Poverty traps are economic anomalies that continually reinforce poverty within a country’s, or multiple countries’, economies. There are many different types of poverty traps such as savings traps, “big push” models, nutritional traps, behavioral traps, geographic traps, etc. that all affect an economy in different ways. Not only can poverty be enforced through these traps, but also through the way an economy is run or the moralities of the government. According to Mark Koyama (2015), poverty traps are important due to more than 3 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, living on less than $2.50 per day, and about 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty on just $1.25 per day. Among these 3 billion some people living in poverty, one billion of them are children of which thousands are dying daily. It is necessary to study these different poverty traps in order to begin to decrease the distressingly high percentages of people living in poverty.