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Welfare: handouts to the lazy, or a helping hand to those facing hard times? The debate continues, even in the face of sweeping welfare reform, which, for all of its sound and fury, has not helped or changed much. What's wrong with welfare and how can we fix it? This is not a simple question, and there is no simple answer. However, one thing remains eminently clear.
Welfare desperately needs to change. But where are we now? Are we headed backward or forward? Does anybody even care? To answer these questions, we must catch a glimpse of the world of welfare. It is not a pretty sight.
Welfare is Odessa, a grandmother in her seventies, who digs through other people's trash to find suitable clothes for her grandchildren. Welfare is Mariluz, who lived in a tent with two children below the age of five, because her welfare check would not pay the rent of even the most squalid apartments in North Philadelphia. Welfare is Destiny, a five year old who cried in class, because when asked to recite her address, she realized that because of the numerous evictions she had been through she could not remember it. Welfare is Cheri, who after being cut off of welfare for missing a meeting, worked as a topless dancer to avoid being out on the street with her teenage son. Welfare is a Virginia family of four living on $ 347 a month.
Welfare is waiting years to be placed on the waiting list for a job training program. Welfare is run down neighborhoods, inferior schools, and dilapidated housing. Welfare is not a picnic. Of course, from a less human standpoint, welfare is a group of entitlement programs aimed at helping the poor. What most people are referring to when they say 'welfare' is Aid to Families With Dependant Children (AFDC), a program which provides monthly checks to families in which all adults in the household are unemployed.
Most, but not all, of the recipients are single mothers. AFDC recipients are often eligible for many other programs, including Medicare, food stamps, Aid to We with Infant children (WIC) and subsidized housing. While not all AFDC recipients receive all of these benefits, enough do that they are considered part of the welfare equation. The majority of these programs have come to be resented by middle America. The resounding echo of the middle class has been 'welfare's a mess, let's go back to the way things were. ' Actually, it would be difficult to find a time in America when welfare was not a part of society. In colonial times, towns or churches often took responsibility for their poor.
Some towns required residents to house the homeless, most towns and churches had charity programs which members were required to contribute to. While community support of the poor was a concept as old as time, welfare as we are familiar with it did not begin into 1935, when Roosevelt incorporated it into his New Deal legislature. It began as a small part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Social Security Act. In addition to AFDC, the Act consisted of the programs we now call medicaid, medicare and social security.
It originally included several other programs, which have been incorporated into the others over time. The Social Security act was meant to help Americans who had been hurt by the Great Depression get back on their feet as the economy picked up. Even critics of the Act never imagined how far-reaching the programs in it would become. Critics did, however, say that the entire act was a breeding ground for waste, fraud, and misuse.
Roosevelt answered them by saying, 'Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in the spirit of charity, then the constant omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. ' Indeed, the Social Security Act was originally created in the spirit of charity. For quite some time, AFDC accomplished its mission -- to allow single mothers who had been widowed or deserted by their husbands to stay at home and raise their children. However, much has changed since 1935. In fact, society's view of women and motherhood is one of the areas that has come the farthest. No longer are single mothers pitied for their predicament. Instead they are blamed for getting pregnant too soon and for having babies that they knew they could not afford.
No longer are women expected to stay home with their children. Instead they are urged to go to work in order to provide for their children and become better role models. Those women who claim that it is too hard to work and raise children are often scorned by the many single professional mothers in America, most of whom are products of the country's increasing divorce rate. Unfortunately, while society may have come a long way since 1935, until last year, welfare had barely changed at all. How long could a program aimed at keeping women at home survive in a society that was pushing women out of the house?
The answer was not very long. Other than a few minor changes in the early sixties, (Among them were provisions which allowed poor two-parent families too receive aid, and the establishment of the food stamp program) welfare was still the same as it had always been. However what had formerly been viewed as a charity program aimed at supporting helpless females, was now seen as a waste of money aimed at giving able-bodied women an excuse not to work. The new view of the stay at home single mother, coupled with America's increasing diversity, caused great resentment toward welfare programs and their recipients.
White middle class America did not like the idea of their tax money going to poor minority women, especially once many of 'their' women had full time jobs. A few sensationalized reports of welfare fraud was all it took to convince the middle class that all welfare mothers were lying, cheating, lazy women. Americans who felt overtaxed had a new culprit to blame. Forget the fact that they received all kinds of tax breaks for owning property and having children, that their tax money paid for well-maintained schools and communities. That money must have come from somewhere else, because suddenly, all of their tax money was going to support welfare mothers.
The more welfare mothers were resented, the worse the stereotype became...
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Research essay sample on Social Security Act Stay At Home
