Essay on The Welfare Reform Law

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.

The purpose of my research is to discern how welfare spending, healthcare spending, defence spending, and pension spending impacted vote choice in the 2013 Australian election in comparison to the 2012 United States election, 2013 German election, and 2012 France election. I expect that as support for welfare spending, pension spending, and healthcare spending, decreases, support for right wing parties will increase. I expect that there will be a positive effect on voting for right wing parties as support for defence spending increases. I expect that of these issues, welfare spending will have the largest magnitude and that pension spending will have the lowest magnitude. I do not believe there will be an additional effect in Australia and that the impact will be similar to that of other industrial democracies.

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

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 ended America’s largest cash assistance program, which was the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). It was replaced with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which emphasized work, personal responsibility, economic self-sufficiency and strong families. This was created in an effort to help minimized the use of welfare by low income mothers. As a result, these low income mothers could no longer receive cash aid until further notice,

Sharon Hays argues that welfare reform policymakers were legislating moral prescriptions for women in poverty who were to take on Welfare aid. I think it could be argued that moral prescriptions on the lives of Welfare recipients was purposeful. Politicians felt Welfare needed to change and help recipients become more self-sufficient over time. This would save money as time went on but would also be a measure of success if less people were on Welfare as time went on. To make Welfare more temporary, inefficiencies had to be addressed and solved. Welfare legislators decided to put the inefficiencies and prescriptions on the recipients themselves and not take into account any other barriers that could be preventing poor individuals and

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.

The welfare systems are based on the principle of public responsibility on equitable wealth distribution and equality of opportunities to citizens who are unable to afford minimal levels of quality and good life, through provision of universal education programs, health care and subsidised housing. In most of the states, welfare systems are not used in the right manner they are intended to. Although the systems are meant to reduce the poverty level and at least assists individuals to get decent jobs, many recipients develops news ways every year to prolong their dependency in the system. Statistics show that women easily abuse the welfare system by simply having more children each year since this means that more money will come in their mails. Most of the recipients on welfare are able 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.

Welfare reform sparked a great deal of interest in the 1990’s when President Clinton called together a speech calling for dramatic changes to the welfare policy. In his speech he stated “No one who works full-time and has children at home should be poor anymore. No one who can work should

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).

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

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.

Someone, in state and congress has tried to reform welfare; the continuing growth of welfare systems has not been corrected, to stop young girls from receiving welfare benefits. Any, American taxpayer’s has seemed that welfare systems go for a long-term life span, instead of a short term to get young women off welfare. There, has been more welfare giving to younger women who have more kids out of wedlock. Everybody, often hear it said, the more generous the government is the more, welfare, instead of finding a job to take care of their family.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) created new policies, programs and time-constraints concerning the services welfare-reliant women received. The intent was to decrease the population of welfare-reliant women by offering services that focus on employment training and entering the workforce within a specified timeframe. There is an underlying assumption that it is of public opinion that individuals have a personal responsibility to work and should not receive welfare benefits over an unrestricted amount of time even if their economic conditions do not provide stable living conditions and qualify for state program assistance. Unfortunately, current welfare services do not facilitate or increase economic independence among welfare-reliant women and have left many women and children of poverty without having a safety net to ensure their livelihood and wellbeing since the PRWORA has went into effect.

payments, rather than an undetermined amount of federal funds given to the states. The states are also given the responsibility of deciding who is eligible for welfare and for what amount of time, though federal funds can only be provided for five years of benefits over the lifetime of the recipient. Women currently have very few options when it comes to working and caring for their children. The next section of this paper will discuss the welfare policies aimed at alleviating the struggle of women to care provide for themselves and their children.