When people are working, many think that everything is great and nothing will happen to their good life, but in some cases they are fired out of the blue and don’t have anything to fall back on. It is for instances such as these that welfare needs to be available to people who genuinely need help from the government. Some believe that the government should become more selective in choosing recipients of welfare in order to prevent people from taking advantage of the programs, but the government should remember that many citizens (about 35.4% of the population) depend on government aid such as Medicaid, SNAP, food stamps, etc.
The government should try to find a better way to detect fraud and start preventing it, especially since it has
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In his article Welfare Recipients Take EBT to Disney World and Vegas, Daniel Greenfield wrote that,
“On Aug. 1, 2011, one or more EBT cards were used within a three-minute time frame to access nearly $500 in welfare cash at an ATM in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. That particular ATM happens to be located almost on top of the campus of Disney World Resorts. The list goes on to include Las Vegas, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and Four Seasons Resort Aviara in California.”
People are withdrawing welfare money in places that are some of the top vacation spots in the country with Las Vegas being the worst. These withdrawals aren’t being made by wealthy people; they are being made by people who claim that they are poor and really need government aid when in reality they are using it to take vacations. It’s even worse that these people are basically using their fellow citizens’ money to pay for trips. People work very hard to earn their paycheck, so for recipients to take vacations with this money is just awful. It’s people like this that give welfare a bad reputation when it isn’t even that many people who are doing it, but it only takes a few to ruin something for many.
While setting
The article "Flat Broke with Children" Sharon Hays gave a lot of insight about what people think of welfare. She took the opinions of people using welfare and also the people not using welfare. Welfare has helped many in the united states. Most that are on welfare think of it as a security blanket. Times do get rough and life does happen.
This article provides the argument that the Governor of Louisiana, Governor Jindhal, plans to charge the recipients of food stamp benefits in his county with fraud is justified if they abused the system during a mechanical shut down. Apparently when the food stamp system shut down, it no longer recognized the available balance on benefit cards. As a result, active participants were not only allowed to use their cards for an unrestricted amount well beyond their available limit, but those who were no longer active participants were allowed to use their cards for an unrestricted amount as well.
Maybe by providing stricter guidelines, such as job search requirements, along with proof of the job search, welfare would not be as attractive and recipients will be more likely to get a job. Newt Gringrich, a Former speaker of the House of Representatives, wrote an essay titled “Renewing America” “The welfare system has sapped the spirit of the poor and made it harder to climb the first rung of the economic ladder.” (usnews.com). Sucha system has placed an unfair burden on the hard workers who are forced to pay for these programs. Gringrich states, “Why should taxpayers be forced to take fiscal responsibility for those who do not take responsibility for themselves? He continues to say “As individuals,we are responsible for our own actions and their consequences.” If people do notcare about their own well being then why should I be forced to care? As Gringrich sees it, “If society is responsible for everything, then no one is personally responsible for anything. With that said, without responsibility, are we truly free? Welfare should be used for the right purposes; to help those who are truly in need get on their feet and become successful. But because of the excessive misuse, welfare has now developed a stigma, and should be reformed to its original notion, and that is for its help and not
These programs may include Welfare, food stamps (SNAP), and government housing projects. According to the authors, the results showed from the analysis of how many families are on food stamps is, in 2011 over 1.5 million households with about 3 million children were surviving on less than $2.00 a day, including a family member in the work force (Edin, Shaefer, 2016). It is amazing that these families are living on so little when on when many people spend more than that before they go to school, or work. For example, grabbing a quick breakfast before work can cost almost $7.00. The authors noted that they researched about a total of 18 families, but only 8 total are featured in the book.
By requiring people on welfare to work, and assisting them to get low-paying jobs if nothing else, the state and local governments give the people incentive to get better paying jobs and keep them. I read an article once that showed the correlation between government-assisted welfare workers and full-time permanent employment of those same workers later. I firmly believe that people will help and support themselves if given a decent chance. This country is founded on the idea of self-sufficiency. We are taught this in the public schools from the first day. We are trained not to cheat, not to steal answers from another person's paper, and not to depend on others to do our work for us. It seems to be an innate human quality that people want to rely on upon themselves and achieve goals on their own. When people who are down on their luck are given a helping hand, often they will move from
To identify the main point, this article displays a headlining quote that plainly states the intended audience. “Are you old enough to remember 1968, when the US was a country of working people, not an example of welfare dependency destroying America? Unemployment was 3.6%. There were almost 200 million Americans back then—and most of them (96%) worked for a living, and paid taxes—and were proud to do so” (Mariotti). Even if you weren’t old enough, the author makes it clear that welfare dependency wasn’t a problem in the past. Mariotti makes the United States sound like a paradise. The unemployment rate was low, Americans were hard workers, and welfare aid was practically non-existent. This was a paradise quite opposite from todays America. The reader can benefit from knowing that “the real unemployment rate is almost 14-15%. We are
The government in the United States needs to realize that the welfare program is only a burden to our country. Welfare is only shown to be fiscally unsustainable the total amount the government spends on welfare comes out to nearly six hundred sixty eight billion dollars per year. That is sixteen times the amount they spent in the 1960’s and yet the poverty rate still remains almost the same. For those people who are using this program or for the people who support it this number may not mean anything but for all the hard working Americans that work hard for a living it must place a lot of pressure and anger on them. To think
Florida's policy of requiring drug testing for welfare applicants appears to have reduced new welfare enrollments by as much as 48 percent. Welfare recipients in Florida now will have to undergo screening for illegal drug use. “Gov. Rick Scott says will ‘increase personal accountability and prevent Florida's tax dollars from subsidizing drug addiction.’”(Florida to drug-test welfare recipients) It starts on July 1, the Florida Department of Children and Family Services is required to conduct the drug tests on adults applying for assistance. The aid recipients would be responsible for the cost of the screening, which they would reimburse in their assistance if they qualify. Parents who fail the drug test may assign another individual to receive the benefits on behalf of the children. Although drug testing in Florida has been shut down because the judge says it goes against Americans rights from unreasonable searches. Some supporters say that you need to be drug free to prepare them for jobs anyways and that business have been requiring these drug test for years. They also say that the government so take these extra precautions to ensure that tax payers money doesn’t
Pretend you are in kindergarten again and you have just won your favorite bag of candy for behaving yourself in class all week, and right when the teacher presents you with your glorious prize a fellow classmate, which had already been to the principals twice that week, comes up and asks for a piece. You do not want to give him a piece because you worked hard for it and he broke the rules so they do not deserve it, but then they go complain to the teacher and she says you have to share with him. Would you be upset if you worked hard to obey the rules to win a bag of candy, and then you find out that you could have gotten a piece anyways? This is exactly how many taxpayers feel about welfare recipients that refuse to take
Kelly, Brian P. “An Inane, Money Eating Sham: Drug Tests for Welfare a Huge Failure.” Salon.com. Salon Media Group. 29 Aug 2013. Web. 25 Oct 2013.
Welfare is made for people who have been hard on there luck. The idea that the government gives assistants in order for recipients to become financially stable in order to improve the economic statis works very well in theory. Welfare can be looked at in two different ways. One of these ways is that welfare should be used as a temporary source in order to supplement an existing paycheck until you can make ends meet. The other way is to completely get a person of out of poverty and to become apart of the working society.
looking for work should not be receiving welfare checks. Critics cite the classic example of
The Welfare Program is another program that is abused, although it has not run out money has created a burden on the American economy. The government is the blame for this by encouraging over use of the system. Instead of funding the entire livelihood of family households, the federal government could better manage this program by subsidizing the monthly incomes, versus taxpayers footing the entire expense. The federal budget is over spent and as a result the legislators are looking for ways to make cuts and that usually comes if the form of having states reducing state workers such as schoolteachers and state road crews. The welfare program could be a more efficient program implementing a workfare program thus increasing the workforce and discouraging abuse by generations of families of a much-needed program that should be used to assist the elderly and mentally challenged. It is no one’s constitutional right to receive charity; society does not owe healthily citizens a dime. It is however, the individual’s constitutional right to prosper and that is not by collecting a free hand out. To achieve success you have to go after it, it is not handed to you. "Ability is what you are capable of doing; Motivation determines what you do; Attitude determines how well you do it". Lou Holtz
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
“Lana M. and her husband collected welfare benefits in 2003, claiming they earned less than $24,000. But authorities say Lana M., the former office manager of a job-training center for immigrant welfare recipients, also owned a liquor store and recycling business. Authorities say, she drove a $76,000 luxury car, shopped at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue and had $147,980 stashed in her bedroom dresser” (“Welfare” 7). This case for instance, how did this couple’s income go undetected by the system? How did their greed get away with thousands of dollars they obviously did not need? Not only did they cheat and scam the welfare system and tax payers, but they took away the assistance from a family or individual that where truly seeking aid. While reading through some articles when researching information on this matter I learned that it is not easy to apply for Welfare Programs. Applicants are required to provide important documentations such as “Source of income, proof of identity, social security cards, proof of residence cost, copy of mortgage payments, pay stubs and applicants are even required to provide saving and checking accounts information and cash on hand” (“Tips” 7). With all these information in our government’s hand, fraud should be the last thing on peoples’ mind. Tax payers should rest assured that the money they have worked so extremely hard