The Education Of The Welfare System

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.

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.

If eligible, families receive services such as x-rays, doctor visits, diagnostic testing, and etc, for free or may be required to pay a reduced amount of the bill. The welfare system has changed over the year from a long-term to short-term assistance in order to encourage independency. Not only does the tax funded welfare programs provide a means of distributing the wealth across the country, but also control poverty in America and improve the standard of living for low-income families.

Most of these families and individuals now are in programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as welfare(National Coalition,2009), Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. These programs provide cash, health care benefits and food for these families and most individuals helping the individuals or families to get back on their feet although some will get denied for such help.

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.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, welfare is defined as “a government program for poor or unemployed people that helps pay for their food, housing, medical costs, etc.” (Dictionary) Some of these programs include; Food Stamps, Medicaid, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Head Start, Medicare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Work Study.

I found that after reading this article that a lot of different reasons why the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Post-Secondary Reform movements have been so successful. We always hear about students dropping out of college or not going to college because they can’t afford the tuition. The two case studies that we will talk about are Kentucky and Maine and how they succeeded in getting this reform to work.

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.

This paper is a group assignment that looks at the different viewpoints for this topic which is Was the welfare reform the right approach to poverty and my view is yes it was because something needed to be done. In addition, policy analyst “Charles Murray wrote a book called

In 1935, President Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act, sending the United States onto the historically unprecedented path of the welfare of the welfare state. In the wake of his footsteps, aggressive expansion has grown welfare programs to include everything from Medicare to food stamps. Many would say that the US government is not only obligated morally to provide welfare but also that it provides extensive societal economic windfalls. However, critics of welfare argue that the flaws of the US welfare system and its runaway nature outweigh the potential benefits.

For centuries, nations, cities, and individual families have dealt with the problem of poverty; how to remedy current situations and how to prevent future ones. For most of history, there have been no government controlled poverty assistance programs. The poor simply relied on the goodness of their families or, if they did not have a family, on the generosity of the public at large. In the United States, this situation changed in 1935 with the passage of the Social Security Act. The Social Security Act has seen many successes, but it also faces many critiques of its structure and function. In the past, most governments did little to actively aid their poor population. This duty was

Welfare has been a safety net for many Americans, when the alternative for them is going without food and shelter. Over the years, the government has provided income for the unemployed, food assistance for the hungry, and health care for the poor. The federal government in the nineteenth century started to provide minimal benefits for the poor. During the twentieth century the United States federal government established a more substantial welfare system to help Americans when they most needed it. In 1996, welfare reform occurred under President Bill Clinton and it significantly changed the structure of welfare. Social Security has gone through significant change from FDR’s signing of the program into law to President George W. Bush’s

109,631,000, that is the number of Americans that lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded "means-tested programs" — also known as welfare — as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released by the Census Bureau.( Jeffrey 1) This is my objective to tell the history and statistics of the welfare system in the U.S. There is no lack of information on the topic of welfare due to it being a topic of politics in the nation. Accordingly most information I have is from databases and news reports or speeches over it. However a lot of these areas of information can be biased which is something to avoid. To evenly space the information I will supply you with I am going to split it up into two halves. The first half will be the history of welfare and how it affects the country. The second half will be over the statistics and who all is eligible for welfare.

… Even though it is easy to be added into the welfare system, there is a fine line for eligibility; the government considered numerous factors in determining your ability to work, household to provide for, and social problems. In order to acquire welfare, a person’s income, family size, medical situations such as emergencies or pregnancies, and personal situations including being homeless or unemployed must first be taken into consideration ("US Welfare System - Help for US Citizens"). Requirements are held to an applicant when applying, however, some states are looser than others. Each individual state is given the authority to direct their own welfare program. It is their duty to establish an appropriate amount of money needed to keep citizens functioning below the Federal Poverty Line (FPL). This authority is granted by the government from a national plan known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TAFT ("US Welfare System - Help for US Citizens"). The TAFT program is used for the sole purpose of rescuing people from poverty. Given this extraordinary approach, states are required to provide certain options for their citizens at the minimum. Types of services included are: basic welfare aid, child protection and child care assistance, financial aid for those unemployment, and housing assistance. In the state of Connecticut alone, there are approximately over 44,000 forms of welfare aid that are currently being issued statewide. ("US Welfare System - Help for

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.