The History of Welfare in America Essays

The welfare system has been controversial throughout U.S. history. It is constantly under attack and is often the chosen topic of political debates. In 2015, 35.4% of Americans were on welfare (Boyd). Welfare is a government ran program, where the government gives benefits to people who cannot afford to take care of themselves or their family (“Brief”). The benefits that the government gives to the people are money and the necessities they need to live a normal life (“Welfare” 825). The welfare system is an interesting topic and has many layers. Although it is necessary, at the same time it is frustrating for many politicians and U.S. citizens. Numerous people abuse the welfare system everyday. People have found many ways to take

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.

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?

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

Today our welfare programs give out too much money and the systems need to be reformed again. In 1996 The Welfare Reform Act was enacted and it changed the entire program for the better. However, since then, the programs have become abused and need to be reformed again. Many of the people that receive state or federal funding have more luxury items than the average middle class family. The government should check-in on the families that are receiving assistance to make sure they actually need the assistance. The government should also place more stipulations on the various welfare programs in the state. There are several people all across the country that are abusing the system that was put in place to help get people survive in a time of

In Leslie Reynolds’ “Misuse of Welfare in American Low Class Citizens,” she employs various logical methods to support her argument that welfare in the United States is being misused by our citizens and something must be done to prevent the welfare misuse. Reynolds relies on definition, facts, statistics, personal and public experience, and also tries to find different solutions for this heavily impacted issue. Reynolds believes something should be done to prevent the many low class recipients from abusing and misusing the welfare system. For example, Reynolds suggests the government could restart the welfare system, have stricter guidelines, and have more monitoring of the system itself to prevent our money being misled. Reynolds blends her

The misuse of welfare is slowly increasing and it’s very harmful to our economy and society. It effects not only the working people who fund government assistance, but the user (or mis-user) as well. There is a general feeling that welfare misuse has skyrocketing rates, but according to advocates for welfare programs, the fraud rate is only about 2-3%. According to the 2010 US Census Bureau findings, there are 114.8 Million families in the US. With just over 34% of those US families “on welfare”, this means that approximately 39 Million homes receive monthly welfare benefits. 39 Million. Wow. The Federal government expects to spend about $430 Billion in 2013 on welfare expenditures. This averages out to roughly $11,025 annually per family or $945 per family per month. So if the fraud rate is only a tiny 2-3%, how much money could it really be costing us? Well…these seemingly low rates would mean that roughly 785,000 to 1.2 Million families are illegally receiving welfare benefits. At the average rate of $11,025 per year, this is costing the tax payers between $9.0 - $13.5 Billion dollars every year. Yikes. Welfare fraudulence can have a very negative effect on its recipients as well. Although the assistance may be very much needed and may help a lot, many people on welfare are beginning to see welfare as its own social class, a lifestyle. It can potentially eliminate work ethic and motivation. Fraudulent

Most of the lower classes, people who can’t attain a job because they don’t have enough requirements to work or who live in the projects, have to relay on welfare checks to be able to feed and provide for their families. Welfare checks come from taxes that we all pay, and sometimes that isn’t enough for them to live on. A young single mother named Suzie Smith is a single mother of two. She makes $25,000 a year, in her situation welfare could help her to provide more basic needs for her and her children but she is not a “welfare – cheater”. She really does want to work and has applied to multiple places. But she seems to hit a block in road because for almost every job she has applied to they want her to have extra job training at a local college

Individuals receiving welfare services will be enticed by the opportunity to get ahead financially, so they will use the system properly to reap the benefits. Failure to use the system properly will result in the individual no longer being able to receive welfare services. Similar legislation was signed into federal law during 1996 and “The law worked as intended, for the most part . . .” (Hill 1). The laws focus was to encourage Americans to work low income jobs, but a major side effect of the legislation was an “incentive for employers to pay less, especially for workers who have few skills and little education” (1). However, the low-income jobs are giving people on the job training, so they can advance and receive higher paying jobs; this is why case managers are in charge of ensuring that welfare recipients are continuing to prove that they are working to receive raises or other higher waged

Many working families find themselves struggling to make a decent living as jobs and resources are becoming more difficult to find. In 2011, close to 46 million people were receiving food stamps and federal spending on temporary assistance was $17.1 billion. This statistic sky rocketed from 2007, when only 26.3 million people were on this program. With this statistic alone, it is apparent that this policy is failing our system. When the War on Poverty began in the 1960’s, the aim of this program was “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” These days, many people on welfare are less capable of self-sufficiency than they were when these services began. This creates a cycle within families and does not allow children to develop successfully if they are not taught how to be

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

Welfare has been a controversial topic for a long while now, some say its good, and others say “It's a waste of time and money” (Donald R. Richberg). Welfare started in 1935 to help the U.S citizens get financially stable while out of work. Since then people have used it two ways, for the good and the bad. Hilary Hilton reported that a lady who wanted to be called “ Mis. Ortiz claimed that “I'm looking for a little help for me and my four children, we are living month to month.” While others show how the system is being abused, according to Whitman D, ”A few years back we sent out 100,000 letters to welfare recipients in New York for voluntary work, only one percent of the recipients signed up for the job offers.” Either way People have a very

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.

Several people felt as though receivers were abusing the program by staying unmarried and unemployed to remain eligible for the program and some were having more children to become qualified for a greater amount of benefits.6 Others felt as though the AFDC program had made welfare a way of life rather than a short-term assistance mechanism to help individuals get back on their feet.7 The public at large grew frustrated with the system for the lack of evidence provided that the system actually achieved any of its goals towards reducing poverty. Needless to say the issue of welfare reform became a recurrent topic.