What Is the Evidence of Welfare State Retrenchment ?

The idea of the welfare state can mean something different in each and every country. There is an ideal model of the welfare state which is where society accepts the responsibility for things such as the ground work and the provision of wide ranging and

Welfare has been an arguable topic throughout United States history (“Brief”). Some people agree with it and others do not like it at all. Welfare did not exist until the 1930s during The Great Depression (“Brief”). With millions of people unemployed, Franklin D. Roosevelt developed the welfare system to help these people during the Great Depression (“Brief”). After the Great Depression was over,, the government came up with new programs to help assist the welfare program and help more people in poverty (“Brief”). Some of those programs were Medicaid, public housing, food stamps, and Supplemental Security programs (“Brief”). Theses programs helped and hurt the country at the same time (“Brief”). By having these programs, many people would not look for jobs because they knew they were better off living on welfare (“Brief”).

However, US citizen begun to be uncomfortable with the old welfare system by the 1990’s because it did not offer incentive for the beneficiaries to seek for employment. The welfare became both rewarding and perpetuating even though it did not reduce the level of poverty in the United States.

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.

Welfare started as a temporary response to the economic crash in the 1930s. Its primary goal was to provide cushioning to the families who lost the ability to be self-sufficient during the Great Depression. Yet, as America slowly rose back to becoming prosperous and wealthy, a significant chunk of America's population stayed below in the transitioning social system. The welfare system started to become counterproductive to the government so that, in the 1990s, Clinton hastily came up with legislation to end welfare, more famously known as the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. This road that Clinton led ended in a downfall as more people than ever before are now dependent on the federal government for food, housing, and income. Our current welfare reform may need another reform before welfare can truly end.

Welfare, enacted by one of the greatest presidents of the United States’s existence, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt, is an effective and useful means to assist American families in need. Throughout history, welfare has proven to help people get back on their feet and into society. Despite the system’s many useful benefits, like most attributes in this world, welfare has kinks in the system. In fact, welfare has yet to be perfected, even though it was established in the year of 1935 and is still in use today. The system may never be perfected, but it can be improved. There are many different thoughts and ideas pertaining to how welfare should change. Some believe it should be eliminated entirely. In doing so, many people all across the nation would be harmed in financial and mental manners. How can welfare be reformed? Is it even possible? The answer is absolutely. It must be reformed, and many would agree on the matter. It is, however, a sensitive and controversial topic to most. Political parties tend to take interest in the discussion of welfare reform, as well. The typical, left-wing Democrat wishes to give more to welfare users, while the standard right-wing Republican would like to decrease what is given to Americans. If everything has its imperfections, why should welfare be reformed? Why not leave it the way it is and let the government figure out the fine print? There are those that take this sort of stance on welfare reform, and there are some that believe differently.

In conclusion the Welfare State was created on the principle that the state accepted a responsibility to protect and promote the welfare of all citizens. It must be noted that the system was designed to provide a national minimum, not reduce inequalities. I have looked in detail at all aspects to combat the “five giants “and the popular support when the Beveridge report was introduced. I have also looked at flaws in the system, however the cornerstone of the Beveridgian welfare system, was left almost untouched until the 1980’s.

As Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist once famously said, “It’s about the economy stupid!” This world is run by money, and inevitably there are the haves and the have-nots. The welfare state is a system which offers a grouping of benefits geared towards helping all members of society achieve prosperity and be successful members of society, however it is often criticized and debated in the US. The welfare state is not obsolete, as it fosters educational development to help solidify the future, and keeps from creating a reliance on welfare, all without excessively depleting the US of its monetary funds.

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).

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.

And as a result, income redistribution restrains the enthusiasm of the society to constantly create wealth and thus it is not beneficial to the prosperity of the society. However, for the social class with higher incomes, the redistributed part is relatively tiny to their whole income and wealth, and in a highly unequal society, enthusiasm is not the only factor to motivate the pursuit to wealth, but also the resources, and thus it would be a factor to lower their motivation. Moreover, some sociologists believed the fact that income redistribution could cause laziness among the poor who rely on the income redistributed by the society, which is indeed possible and realistic. However, some policies have been carried out to make sure the poor cannot totally rely on the redistributed income. In Germany, the pensions are based on a three-pillar system, including mandatory state pension insurance, voluntary occupational pension insurance and private insurance, and the mandatory insurance constitutes the largest proportion in the incomes of aging population, which approximately equals to only 40% to 45% of the average monthly salaries earned during the lifetime. In spite of the fact that every old folk in Germany could receive a pension of €1263.15 per month averagely, a small part of aging population only have a monthly pension lower than €150. Therefore, a grown-up person still

Demographic transition is the process by which a nation/country moves from high birth rate and high death rates to low birth and low death rates as the growth population in the interim (Weeks, 2005). Some of the nations that have gone through this transitions are; Canada, Germany, United States and England. The demographic transition to an industrialized society is harmful to the environment. Industrialized countries also have the largest ecological and carbon footprint comparative to developing/non-industrialized nations. Nevertheless, demographic transitions have some notable advantages. Countries that have gone through demographic transitions have low birth and death rates. Citizens in

The aim of this essay is to discuss and compare the British Welfare system with Germany and Sweden’s welfare systems. A welfare system is the structure of welfare provisions and services that provide a specific social need, but it is not only provided or organised solely by the government (Blakemore, 2001). It is a view that is rooted in individual exchanges between five organisations (State/Government, Market/Private Sector, Family/Kin networks, Local Communities and Civil Society). It reflects the history and cultures of different countries around the world (Haralambos, 2012). It is these providers that assume principal

Esping-Anderson (1990) describes different kinds of welfare state regime types in his book “three worlds of the welfare capitalism”. His book is one of the most cited books in welfare state literature. This is because of all the good things Esping-Anderson states in his book, but also because of some arguments which are considered controversial according to some authors (see Bambra, 2007 for detailed critique). Before elaborating on the critique on Esping-Anderson, his welfare state regime types will be further elaborated on.