By making improvements to the Welfare System in America has become a way of life that has entrapped so many single and married households across the country. Statistics show that there were 108,592,000 people who are recipients of one or more means of the government benefit programs. The Census Bureau recorded by surveys over 101, 716,000 people who worked full time year around in 2011 which only allowed one member of the family to work year round. The system is meant to help low income families, however; they don’t want to be not allowed to grow by becoming more independent and have opportunities to rise above poverty. The quest to change the welfare system is to ensure the welfare and the rights of children, their parents and …show more content…
The welfare reform system’s goal was to get people off the welfare system and onto the job market. The hope was to move people from dependency to self-reliance. Opposition to the new welfare reform system has occurred. Some believe "support in a welfare-to-work program might create new problems for children by adding strains to family life or by exposing children to poor substitute care arrangements for policies that design welfare-to-work programs that pursue the dual goals of economic self-sufficiency for families and healthy development of children." (http://www.nga.org/welfare/employmentretentationemployed.htm).
Welfare policies aimed at improving family circumstances for both children and parents must not make the error of focusing solely on parents; if the intention is to enhance the immediate and long-term development of both generations within the family, then policies must differentiate between youth and their parents. These issues have brought about numerous debates. These debates have focused on the welfare reform system. Still in the debate are the pros and cons of this new system, focusing on the welfare of the child, the parent, the employer, and the taxpayer. Improvements to the Welfare System will prevent fraud by allowing more than one family member to work; limiting opportunities to receive a higher education; and providing opportunities to rise above poverty.
First, by allowing more than one family member to work will
The level of pay and the general material prosperity of American families has been an issue of developing concern in national discussions. Specifically, the progressing welfare open deliberation has centered consideration on the living states of poor families, both in an outright sense and with respect to those of different families. Primarily, government and culture must clearly communicate the serious importance of marriage to decreasing future poverty and other social troubles. Youth at risk of becoming unwed parents deserve information and assistance to prepare them for the task of bearing and nurturing children. Welfare should be changed to inspire rather than punish marriage, as the current system does. Also, by differentiating out results for people in both poor, single-folks families and families accepting welfare, America has the capacity to better concentrate on those people well on the way to be influenced by welfare change. Along the majority of the measurements citizens talk about, poor people, particularly those in single-guardian families, are fundamentally more regrettable off than the non-poor (Manning).
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
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 short article cut from “America’s New Working Class”, by Kathleen R. Arnold, depicts the failure of the American’s federal welfare system. It seems like mostly Americans agree that the propose of federal welfare programs is to provide economic assistance such as food stamps to people who need it. However, Arnold states that the real propose of welfare programs is to maintain a supply of cheap labor in order to make them to have obedient adaptive function and closely keep watch on those welfare recipients. For example, the bad treatment for parole people will only lead them go back the prison; and for those noncompliance workfare recipients, the bad treatment and poor support will lead them to become homeless and malnourish, which make them become much more poverty.
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
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.
Kandaswamy's essay incorporates views and sources from both welfare advocates and advocates for welfare reform to create a dialogue around welfare reform, specifically around the PRWORA and FVO (an American welfare reform policies implemented in the 90s centered around domestic violence and regulating who can receive welfare). During the dialogue Kandaswmy presents throughout the essay, Kandaswmy provides insight into each side of the argument giving information about the intentions of each side and the downfalls that came from the actions of each. This essay is centered around both sides of the argument for and against welfare reform and the failures had by each side. This essay focuses on two main failures of the welfare reforms the first
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 welfare system has a been a debatable topic for many years now. People have various viewpoints that relate to the welfare system. Most people believe that the welfare system is abused. On the other hand, people do not mind paying more money for the less fortunate to be provided with food, shelter, etc. This is a hard topic to consider because there are countless variables that play a major role in how much money one could receive from welfare or other forms of government assistance. Mountain Heights Academy presents an argumentative speech. In this argument, the unknown author addresses that the welfare system must be reformed because the current system has only increased poverty levels. It additionally addresses that there is a wide range
On the other hand, welfare to work may be working because when Clinton signed the welfare reform bill in 1996, his goal was 10,000 new federal hires, but the federal Office of Personnel Management reports that as of January 2001, 50,827 former welfare recipients have found work (Doherty 1). Single parents are now receiving earnings and it does not seem as if they are getting "hand outs?anymore. Our society greatly values paid work, so single parents are building up their moral. These parents may even feel "I am?worth something in society because I am earning my living as opposed to receiving "hand outs.?Working also allows for economic security and financial independence. Under this new bill, the once ever-growing number of recipients on welfare is rapidly decreasing. For example, a Job Center in Los Angeles had 9,100 families on welfare and it has decreased by fort percent. Currently, the rate is falling by 6,000 recipients a day. (Haskins 3). James D. VanErden, vice president of the National Alliance of Business, declares this law has "changed the outlook for the welfare population?by instilling in them an expectation of work, but it also "has been a boon for business?(Miller 2).
The welfare reform law in 1996 mostly tried to solve marital evils rather than efficiently dealing with welfare. It encouraged marriage and attempted to lower single parenthood. However, when one looks at this issue, this is mostly a gender status issue rather than an income issue. Also, many policymakers impose conditions to families receiving governmental benefits. Although I acknowledge that these policies attempt to solve problems with poverty, I disagree with how the policymakers approach these issues. Instead of focusing on incomes of each family, they mainly focused solving social issues. Would you say that poverty is caused by single mothers? What if I told you that marriage rates have fallen since the 1960s? Our policies are indifferent to these questions. The policies mainly focused on the shortcomings of the poor rather than trying to save them from poverty. J.D. Vance mentioned that low-income children face childhood trauma that affects them, and the despair and low social capital these families are going through. Focusing on the crimes parents do mainly out of desperation rather than malicious intent to pass welfare bills would be even more traumatizing to kids. We probably are not doing much to help the impoverished if we are focused attacking the moral shortcomings of poor families rather than implementing policies to help families in general.
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.
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
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).