Programs to Take Families Off the Welfare System Essay example

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,

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).

A great number of those who reside in New York find the current U.S welfare reform to be very exhausting, humiliating as well as fraught. According to New Yorkers, this welfare will fail them. These simply because they are not poor enough, most of the citizens are already working (De Mause & Lewis Pp 1). The centerpiece of this welfare reform demanded that every citizen to work. There is a need that the state should ensure that almost half of the citizens get public assistance from the government. The beneficiaries should be working for at least thirty hours a week since working for more hours is one of the necessary in welfare reform (Eaton 7)

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.

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 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.

Did you know that around 15 million Americans, and single mother and their children are on welfare? Sometimes working 20 hours is not a possibility for a full time single parent, due to the expenses of babysitters, and schooling. These parents have only one option, which is to apply for welfare to get the assistance required to cover those expenditures so they will be able to work the 20 hours mandatory. Other single parents cannot find a job or have a challenging time keeping them due to mild disabilities and mental health issues( in line citation interview), which are out of their control. This causes worthy families to lose their rights to their children. When that happens numerous children will be taken away from their homes and placed into child protection services. Which could lead to countless future difficulties within the child’s life, when in fact this contradicts the intentions of the welfare reform act. Even though this problem can be completely avoided if benefits were not cut or denied. Although, the main idea of the welfare reform act is to insure the well-being of young children, the loss of benefits could leave many children poverty stricken. Which, ironically is what Clinton and others involved were trying to

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).

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).

Being on welfare is a curse in disguise to single parent households. To be eligible for welfare you must have little to no household income, meaning that you can’t have a job that pays a living wage. Also, it does not raise up children who are on it, so it is essentially useless for them. Some people on welfare have said that it has trapped them into poverty and they have no independence, self-sufficiency, and it doesn’t promote an industry of ambition. It has also been said to be part of the poverty problem that is so apparent in The United States. Despite the fact that welfare was made to help impoverished people it hasn’t done so, especially for single parent households.

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).