The Anthropology Of Welfare And Social Protection

In our society today, we face many problems such as racism, police brutality, and government issues. One problem that I feel is being over looked is the abuse of the welfare system. Coming from a very low income county, I see how the system is abused, and I also see how it helps those in need. People who are capable of working and supporting their family on their own take advantage of the system to get free money. In 2013, the Census Bureau said that there were fewer full time working Americans than were on welfare. It is absolutely astonishing that there are more people on welfare, who supposedly are unable to work, than capable working people. Americans who truly are unable to work or support their family should have every right to be on

Changes within the welfare system as a result of policy shifts and by new thinking, more generally in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have had many methods, but the one that seemed most important, was that welfare recipients were required to do much more to justify their income support payments than before. The foundation of this new idea is that income support programs should allow individuals to maximise their participation in work. Due to the general shift in welfare administration, the number of activity test requirements an individual in Australia must meet in order to receive unemployment benefits, has expanded significantly since the early 1990s. This complex, overly bureaucratic process means that disadvantaged individuals cannot access the income support payments they require.

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

In America today, just over ten million people are on unemployment insurance, one hundred and ten million people are on welfare, and the total government spending annually is around one hundred and thirty billion dollars (Welfare Statistics). The welfare state is a political system based on the proposition that the government has the individual responsibility to ensure that the minimum standard of living is met for all citizens. Specifically, in the matters of health care, public education, employment, and social security, the welfare state assumes all responsibility. According to John Rawls, “In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice“(Rawls). In the 1840s, Otto Von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, was the father of the modern welfare state. He built the program to win over the support of the working middle class in Germany and ultimately reduce the outflow of immigrants to the U.S., where welfare did not exist (Welfare State). In the United States, not all companies provided workers with benefits, thus the workers appealed to the government, giving rise to the first form of welfare capitalism.

All throughout history welfare services have been available to the general public. While these benefits have changed over time, the basic intentions of the welfare system has stayed the same. The welfare system provides benefits and monetary assistance to those who qualify. Different acts over the past two hundred years have been amended in order to try to help the poor, and while not all have been practical and successful, many programs have indeed done an outstanding job in aiding those in need. But, just like with all good things, there is a negative side. Even with all the reforms to try perfect the welfare system there are still some holes in it. Not only is the welfare system easy to manipulate, according to usgovernmentspending.com, eleven percent of the federal budget is spent on welfare, leaving tax payers livid. (usgovspending.com) It 's obvious there is a need for a welfare system in the United States, but with the abuse the welfare system has endured a major change needs to be seen in order to ensure the welfare system be used as efficiently as possible.

What would happen if the government made changes to the welfare system? There are approximately 110,489,000 of Americans on welfare. Many people benefit from what the system has to offer: food stamps, housing, health insurance, day care, and unemployment. Taxpayers often argue that the individuals who benefit from the system, abuse the system; however, this is not entirely true. Many of the people who receive benefits really and truly need the help. Even though some people believe welfare should be reformed, welfare should not be reformed because 40% of single mothers are poor, some elderly people do not have a support system, and college students can not afford to take extra loans.

Families receiving welfare are required to find a job in an allotted amount of time, which means they are on welfare a shorter amount of time, making the tax payers’ dollars last longer. The idea of a family cap has also sparked some controversy; some say it is unfair to restrict the

The welfare system is run by the government that runs different programs that was originally intended to help the unemployed or underemployed (Welfare Info, n.d.). It went from just helping those two groups and branched significantly into helping low income families, disabled, and single parent families be able to live the best life possible. Some of the programs include "Medicaid, Food Stamps, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Head Start, Work Study, and Medicare" (Welfare Info, n.d.). Another very commonly known one is Social Security which is mainly for seniors when they retire.

According to Ronald Reagan, “Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for it’s own existence.” Welfare was originally created to provide help for struggling Americans that need food, healthcare, and education (Calonia). Over the years, welfare has become a dream come true for the people who “need assistance”, and a nightmare for taxpayers. Lethargic citizens of this country have found new ways to abuse welfare by taking advantage of federal student aid, food stamps, and even emergency room care. What happened to having a work ethic? Our generation wants everything handed to them on a silver platter. Americans need to understand that welfare has been abused for far too long and freeloaders need to stop treating

Several states have recently begun to enact legislation that requires welfare recipients to submit to drug tests before they are eligible to receive any public assistance. The purpose of mandatory drug testing is to prevent the potential abuse of taxpayer money, help individuals with drug problems, and ensure that public money is not subsidizing drug habits (Wincup, 2014). While these are noble intentions, current programs are not meeting these standards.

Interventionist agree with the traditional welfare programs being an income maintenance. Some people cannot obtain a job because they simply have barriers such as physical illness, lack of transportation, mental illness, or substance abuse, so they believe that welfare can help to assist these individuals. With new workfare programs like TANF it leaves individuals unavailable to get assistance, so they then branch out to relatives, friends, or anyone else for this help they need that they can no longer obtain from the government. Getting rid of, or changing traditional welfare only move/shifts the poverty elsewhere, it doesn’t eliminate the problem. The workfare programs show little success with the group of disadvantaged who have a great deal

In today’s modern society, the United States faces many public policy issues, whether those issues include social welfare, immigration or even environmental issues. Congress receives numerous issues on public polices every day, but they cannot handle and solve every issues that comes across their daily agenda, nor can they satisfy every person in this country. Congress prioritizes on those issues that are more important and relevant to find a probable solution too. A growing issue we see that in today’s society are issues in the social welfare system. Social Welfare has so many issues within some of those issues include the food stamps, and even in the healthcare system. The matters in social welfare requires every individuals help to resolve, not just congress. The second major public policy issue we face in American today are within the Public Assistance Programs. Those programs include the SNAP, SSI, and even the TANF program.

In this essay, I aim to only discuss what I have been taught and to see how I have assimilated ‘professional jargon' terms and the range of teaching tools into my consciousness; to see how I can address different styles of

From the colonialization of America to the present, social welfare has evolved tremendously. American values during each era helped determine how the poor were to be treated. Values such as Puritan work ethic, felt that if you were not working then you were immoral. Two other values that were prominent in American’s history are individualism and capitalism. Individualism is the belief that one can succeed without the help of others while the capitalistic view felt that a free market system would help create jobs. The Judeo-Christian value comes up in our history as well and says that those who are deemed worthy morally deserve the help of others. These values shaped perspectives on social welfare. One perspective called the problem centered approach feels that it is the individual’s actions are to blame for their poverty. The other perspective is the conflict approach where it is believed that things out of our control cause poverty. This could be an economic downturn or policies that affect individuals financially.

The institutional approach to social welfare is proactive. It addresses needs and problems that may arise before the need is seen/developed in individuals. Examples of this include social security, public education, and tax exemptions for the number of children in a household (Segal, Gerdes, Steiner, p.40). The institutional approach tends to be broader and less detailed in terms of resources, money, and the size of the population in need.