US Welfare System - Essay Example

Its objectives were to provide monetary aid to impoverished families; end the generation to generation cycle of welfare dependency by encouraging marriage, job training and employment; reducing the number of children who are born out-of-wedlock while encouraging family units that contain two parents. TANF “tightens benefit eligibility criteria by implementing a five-year lifetime limit on receiving benefits, invoking stricter work and education requirements to qualify for benefits and strengthening the enforcement of child support obligations” (Keng, Garasky & Jensen, 2000).

TANF and the welfare system as a whole has been the subject of much debate for many years regarding not only how, but if, it should be implemented. This discussion examines the U.S. welfare system including its history, the issues surrounding it, documents the failures and successes which have resulted and attempts to appreciate the cultural aspects regarding the reasons ethnic groups are more likely to receive welfare benefits. Additionally, the U.S. welfare system is compared to those of other developed countries in an effort to contextualize the subject. The U.S.

welfare system was, from early on, derived from the concepts of the ‘poor laws’ of sixteenth century Europe. Welfare policies have been begrudgingly sanctioned so as to give aid to those deemed ‘worthy’ of public assistance. Its intimidating guidelines are widely thought to be based upon racial and gender connotations to distinguish those that are not ‘worthy’ of such assistance. The U.S. welfare system is “designed to teach a broader lesson to all who observed [its] rituals [and] a lesson about the moral imperative of work and the fate that would befall those who shirked” (Piven, 1998, p. 74). The welfare system in the U.S. has developed in three stages.

The first resemblance of welfare models were created from the