Welfare Reform Affects Us All - Essay Example

Welfare Reform Affects Us All Welfare programs, no matter how one looks at the situation, adversely affect us all. Throughout modern history there have been many social programs aimed at helping poor people, especially in difficult times. After the Great Depression in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act. This provided for many social programs aimed at helping people recover and get back on their feet. Within this legislation was provision for the unemployed, affordable housing, medical insurance, food assistance, as well as Aid to Families with Dependent Children. There were also many management agencies created to monitor the situation and ensure that the benefits were actually performing to their maximum potential; however, somewhere along the way, something went terribly wrong. What started out as a stopgap measure to help the nation get back on its feet again quickly blossomed into an aid-dependency mentality that has spanned three generations. It’s a well known fact that anytime a person is given rights without being held accountable for those rights, respect for those rights falls. This is part of what has happened in our country with regards to social programs. Many people have developed not only a dependency, but also an entitlement concept that produces antisocial behavior and beliefs. So much so that in 1994, the Welfare, Food Stamps, and Medicaid programs comprised 20% of the national budget. On August 22, 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Initially many politicians were afraid that there would be horrible results with families and children going hungry and becoming homeless. They felt that forcing Welfare recipients to go to work would jeopardize their children who would be left at home to fend for themselves while their primary care taker was at work. Seriously ill people, especially children, would not be able to receive treatment for their conditions and could possibly die. The Leftists Liberals painted a stunning picture of how America would become the scene of another Third World country with abject poverty and lack of basic human needs being met. Parents would be forced to get a divorce in order to get the amount of money needed by a family to actually survive on government assistance. Actually, it was never intended that a family could live happily ever after on government assistance with no need to do anything more than stand in line and reproduce yearly. What actually happened during the Welfare reform was simply amazing. Not only did the doomsday prophets prove to be totally incorrect, but also there was not part of the system that didn’t flourish under the new rules. It was discovered that the main contributors to a badly flawed system were intergenerational poverty, out-of-wedlock births, and system dependency. The very problems that the social programs had sought to eradicate were actually made larger through the programs. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act had these components that made it one of the strongest pieces of legislation aimed at fighting poverty in the late 20th century. It’s goals were to:1) end Welfare as an entitlement program, 2) require recipients to secure employment after two years on the system, 3) place a lifetime limit of five years on government assistance programs, 4) support two-parent families and discourage illegitimate births, and 5) enhance child support enforcement. The actual strength of this legislation was the back-to-work ethic for everyone to increase their self-esteem and confidence and decrease their dependency on handouts. People learned that they could become productive members of society again and become part of the solution not only for the economy, but also for their own families. Through increased child support enforcement, fathers could once again take pride in providing for their offspring. Back-to-work training programs gave people the necessary skills needed to enter the workplace, and provided encouragement to complete or further their education. These programs also provided a trained source of ready employees to fill entry level jobs that had previously been vacant. It was a win-win situation. These workers began to boost the economy by spending their money for their basic needs, and most people were happy. Was it a comfortable fit? Initially, no; many people had to move outside their comfort zone to want more for themselves and their families. It also sent a powerful message to system dependent people; you don’t have to do without a thing as long as you are willing to work for whatever it is that you want. Once again, the “right” was accompanied by a “responsibility” for making it available; no one was owed anything. The 4,408,508 people on welfare in America in 1994 had dropped to 1,870,039 in 2005; a whopping 57.6% reduction in payouts, not to mention the economic boost that resulted from these people stimulating the economy. An added benefit was that the requirement for work helped people to straighten out their priorities better in order to be fit for work; resulting in less risky behaviors. This revealed a reduction in treatment for drug and alcohol dependency issues, as well as a decrease in child abuse and neglect. Children were left in the care of licensed sitters or healthy child programs during the day while mothers went back to work. These children learned healthy socialization skills and academic preparedness to help them navigate the responsibilities of education. The most significant discovery was the drop in child abuse and neglect for ethnic minorities. Another significant factor in the reform was more support for the institution of marriage and two parent families. This is a critical factor in that with social organizations educating people with regards to relationships and healthy partnering skills, the children benefitted too. Not only was marriage touted as a way for two incomes to provide for the families, but children had the support they needed to succeed in school as well as the mentoring and guidance to lead them through the development years. People began to grow up emotionally and take on their roles as parents. Healthy child programs offered parenting programs for parents during non-working hours and provided healthy modeling of family type behaviors for children during their waking hours. Early intervention was available for families at risk. While these programs were largely free, they were aimed at bridging the gap between ignorance, poverty, and child endangerment. The burden for engineering the success of these work initiatives was left up to the states. However, states were given funding incentives for reducing their assistance rolls and providing initiatives for citizen empowerment to end poverty. Many charitable organizations joined the ranks, making a difference with support and guidance at the local level. In essence, the whole country was largely united in dealing with issues they no longer felt powerless over. Workers were given a tax break for entry level positions and employers were given a tax break for hiring such workers. As people began to work and learn financial management, they began to see how they could help themselves once again. Through federally financed loans, many low income citizens and minorities, in particular, discovered that home ownership was a possible part of their future. There were programs to help mentor and assist with entrepreneurship which also stimulated the nation’s economy as well as self-esteem. People helping people was the slogan of the day. Looking at the situation ten years after the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, we see that the success for the program centered on most states using work incentives as opposed to cutting funding in certain areas. Work incentives reduced the Welfare dependency from approximately 13% nationwide to just between 6-7%. Most importantly it helped empower people into returning to a position of ability versus disability. The old system kept people enslaved by giving them just enough to barely scrape by with penalties for any kind of personal initiative to get off the system. The new system encouraged independence and made possible training and day care packages for people who showed effort at bettering their conditions. As a result of these workers returning to the workforce, there is a higher tax base for funding further incentives to progress from low paying positions to more fulfilling employment. These work supports also targeted at risk youth coming of age in at risk families. There were job corps programs aimed at easing the youth into independence through training, mentorship, and learning about teamwork, survival techniques in the adult world, critical thinking skills, healthy lifestyle choices, and making a difference in the world around them. They learned to speak out against injustice and become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. The human spirit is designed to hold a certain pride of ownership and control over one’s quality of life. The very nature of men is to provide efficiently for their families. The nature of women is to nurture those children to become healthy and successful citizens. The psychological affects of Welfare dependency are far reaching and varied. Welfare, the way it was, prevented any of that from happening. It was a cancer that insidiously ate away at the social fabric of our nation. It promoted hopelessness and helplessness as well as poverty of spirit. The old system destroyed families, some for even more than one generation. It taught entitlement which is very low in the development of the individual. Mostly it taught our nation that there were two groups of people; the haves, and the have nots. It promoted division and discrimination in that those who could afford what they needed were held in much higher esteem than those who couldn’t. It sent the message, loud and clear, that if one doesn’t have money, one really doesn’t deserve to live a quality life. Sure, life was possible, but at the lowest level. It taught people how to be desperate in the wrong ways. The social scientists of the day were constantly reminding people of what they didn’t have and how basic human rights dictate each human has the same rights. The part that was left out was the part about how to get those rights through work, assuming responsibility for personal and professional choices, and perseverance. Welfare programs, no matter how one looks at the situation, adversely affect us all. Just as people who have been institutionalized need to be reprogrammed to get over their fears of not being able to provide and take care of themselves, making responsible choices and decisions in the outside world, Welfare created an institutionalized mindset where people had everything taken care of for them, with nothing required of them except the constant reminder to maintain herd mentality thinking. It took vision and courage to put an end to this situation, but we must never return to that prison cell again; rights equal responsibilities, and healthy decision making at many levels in order to retain the freedom associated with those rights. The lessons of history that aren’t learned must be repeated. In the current financial crisis our nation is facing, we must not return to the recovery system of the Great Depression; long live Welfare Reform! Bibliography Hymowitz, Kay S. How Welfare Reform Worked. City Journal. Spring 2006. Web. March 30,2011. http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_welfare_reform.html On The Issues. Bill Clinton on Welfare and Poverty. Democratic National Convention. 2008. Web. March 30, 2011. http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Bill_Clinton_Welfare_+_Poverty.htm Urban Institute. Welfare Reform: Ten years Later. Urban Institute. 2010. March 30, 2011. http://www.urban.org/toolkit/issues/welfarereform.cfm Welfare Information. The History of Welfare. Welfareinfo.org. 2011. Web. March 30,2011. http://www.welfareinfo.org/history/ Read More