Poverty, Social Security, and Conspiracy Theories

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was an attempt by the government to get people to be more efficient and less reliant on the government. There was a sort of “exchange” between the government and citizens. Citizens work and in return they receive financial assistances. This is referred to as the TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. It was supposed to motivate people to work, or that was the goal. Recipients were required to work at least 20 hours a week. This was actually successful in decreasing the number of Americans who were dependent on welfare systems. As diversity greatly increased, the need for welfare also increased. Welfare reform efforts were attempted because of the various changes occurring. Welfare in the United States is

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”).

In the 1960’s the ADC ballooned into Aid to Dependent Families and Children allowing the stipend to increase to involve the caregiver. The Families used ADFC income to pay for expenses such as rent, utilities, food and other needs (hhs.state.ne.us,2009). ADFC discouraged marriage, pursuing a job which created a dependency on the program. By 1996, TANF was created to replace ADFC and created caps on the system. TANF is public assistance that requires participants to maintain a job and they can only receive benefits for a total of five years. People who qualify for TANF fall under the public’s eye as having a worthiness problem (N. Reid, personal communication, November, 2010). People tend to judge recipients of TANF creating harsh criticism about the program.

As the debate over Social Security reform heats up, several questions have been raised that are of particular interest to the African-American community:

The current (US) welfare reform consists of more than cash payment that the poor US citizen could bank on. There is a monthly payment that each poor person received in spite of their ability to work. The main people who received this payment were both mothers and children. Moreover, the payment does not have time limit and those people could not remain on the welfare for the rest of their live.

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.

It is easy to see that the politics that led to the adoption of AFDC as a social program and policy and the way in which AFDC expanded was quite radically different from the political trends that led to the welfare reform of 1996. And in discussing welfare state "retrenchment" Paul Pierson makes what seems to be an argument based on semantics as much as substance. It takes him several pages in some cases to point out evidence to be used in his strongest positions. This is not to say he is totally spinning wheels in his narrative, but as Pierson goes into great detail about the dynamics of retrenchment (which also refers to cutbacks, economizing and re-thinking of policies), he shows his skills in descriptive scholarship more so than coming directly to the point of his thesis.

Sharon Hays argues that welfare reform policymakers were legislating moral prescriptions for women in poverty who were to take on Welfare aid. I think it could be argued that moral prescriptions on the lives of Welfare recipients was purposeful. Politicians felt Welfare needed to change and help recipients become more self-sufficient over time. This would save money as time went on but would also be a measure of success if less people were on Welfare as time went on. To make Welfare more temporary, inefficiencies had to be addressed and solved. Welfare legislators decided to put the inefficiencies and prescriptions on the recipients themselves and not take into account any other barriers that could be preventing poor individuals and

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.

They hope that the recipients will work towards someday leaving the program. While this is the goal, many recipients will not attempt to find work or the job is consider too low paying for them. Therefore, they continue to be a welfare recipient or are forced out of the program. There have been many changes in the welfare system and how to deal with the poor and less fortune. If you are having a difficult time paying your medical bills, housing and most important food for yourself and your family, you are definitely not alone even in 2014. Temporary assistance for needy families TANF replaced the traditional welfare programs known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children ( AFDC) . The welfare system would be an unlikely model for anyone designing a welfare system 1996. The type and amount of aid available to individuals and dependent children varies from state to state. Failure to comply with work requirements could result in loss of benefits . Current

From “The Other America,” in Major Problems by Michael Harrington is a document that tells of the poverty present in America that is often skillfully and unintentionally concealed and also speaks of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty and briefly of how poverty rose during the Reagan administration. After Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty, there was significant change regarding the climate of the social, economic, and political in the America of those times. And while Johnson’s countless social programs helped decrease poverty immensely, it also left a huge number drowning in it still. Later Reagan’s administration would cite George Gilder on the fact that welfare did not reduce poverty but increase it to explain why the levels of poverty rose during the first few months of Reagan’s administration. Democrats and liberals would argue against this and say that poverty

It is important to discuss the history of the emergence of this social problem. I will discuss the essence of poverty as a social problem and how that has affected how welfare is distributed among single mothers. Some factors that contributed to this social problem are the economy and he increasing amount of people who lived in poverty. The government felt that it was necessary to be proactive about the growing issue of poverty. The government was also taking a look at how money was being spent and how that contributed to the nation’s debt. As a result some policies were put into place to address those issues. Many programs were on a trial and error period to determine the success rate of that program. If the social program had expenses that seemed to add to the deficit then those programs were either revamped or eliminated. It is important to examine how Welfare has changed from the Colonial period to present.

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).

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