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Social Justice for all. So why is there Poverty? Welfare" isn't just about the provision of income to the poor; it's about class, sex, race, and myths of the national identity. Poverty in a land of universal opportunity has to be the result of features outside the realm of the normal. Accordingly, poverty is seen as something concerning nonwhite urban single mother families, hotbeds of social pathology spawned by 1960 s libertinism, drug culture, and feminism.
These pathologies are then socially transmitted across generations, creating a habit of dependency. Do the poor resemble the cliche? No, as an hour spent with the Census Bureau's recently published annual poverty report reveals. While almost two thirds (62. 5 %) of poor adults are women -- nonwhite urban single-mother families constitute a fraction of the American impoverished, 15. 4 %. Rural whites of all family types, account for 19. 5 % of the poor -- well above urban single moms.
White suburbanites of all family types -- and they do come in all types -- account for an even larger share (24. 1 %), though you don't hear much about them. (Quelette 56 - 59) This is not to deny the existence of a cohort of urban teenage mothers with glum prospects; though they may account for only a fraction of the poor, their poverty rate is a scandalously high 45. 8 % overall -- 37. 3 % for whites, 54. 5 % for blacks, and 56. 8 % for Hispanics. (Begley 62) But centering discussions of poverty on city dwelling nonwhite unmarried mothers disguises the fact that American society produces an enormous number of poor people, urban, suburban, and rural; working and unemployed; abled and disabled; young and old; and of every ethnic group. Any serious analysis of social hierarchies is quashed by the yahoo's model. It's often said the poor don't work, but 40 % of poor adults do work, though few of them do full time. But that doesn't mean the balance is leading lives of unearned idleness. Of the poor who can't work, 22 % are disabled, 21 % are retired (despite the alleged profligacy of Social Security), 31 % (almost all women) have family responsibilities, 17 % are in school, and 10 % can't find work. The picture hardly comports with moral decay as the source of poverty; it points instead to scarce and crummy jobs, lousy income supports and education benefits, and the impossibility of child care.
By the official definition of poverty, 14. 5 % of the population is poor. But what about this official line? Conservatives have long objected to both the official measure and relative measures. They argue that today's poor enjoy a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of 18 th century aristocrats, with TV and convenience foods that no courtesan or prince could imagine. They also argue that the official measure, which is based only on cash incomes, ignores the value of noncash benefits like Food Stamps, rent subsidies, and Medicaid, and also ignores the value of "housing services" consumed by poor people who own the houses they live in. Responding to this pressure, the Census Bureau has been publishing for the last several years 14 experimental redefinitions of income and poverty.
The right-pleasing ones that throw in every last benefit that this stingy welfare state offers manage to redefine poverty downward by almost a third -- from 14. 5 % to 10. 4 %. (Quelette 92) This is done by counting Medicaid, Medicare, and the value of owner-occupied housing as the equivalent of cash income. But medical insurance, nice as it is, is of no use to someone who can't make the rent, and figuring the value of owner-occupied housing involves all kinds of estimates and imputations. Here's the Census Bureau's explanation of the latter: it "applies a rate of return to home equity to obtain an estimate of the income that the household would receive if it chose to shift the amount held as home equity into an annuity paying income to the household. " (Begley 111) The interest rate used to compute this is "the average rate of return on high-grade municipal bonds. " Poor folks who own their place would be comforted to learn they " re enjoying such complex pleasures. Policies to promote health and welfare have its origin at the beginning of the 20 th century, since even then people recognized the need for those policies and their importance. As it is known that mental distress is associated with material deprivation, governments and countrys leaders started to initiate health and welfare programs aimed at helping people of all ages. Within the course of this paper, we will examine those social policies as well as their implications.
In the early 1900 s attitudes were changing and people were becoming more aware of social conditions within the country. The Boer War and the two World Wars had shown politicians that the country was poor, unfit and extremely unhealthy. Unemployment was rising and more and more people were becoming dependant on help from the state. Social democratic ideals concerning health care were that care should be available on a needs basis rather than for those who could afford it and should be provided by the state. They believed that all people should be free from poverty. The social democrats thought that its people were the governments responsibility to look after.
This ideology led to Labor exchanges and National Insurance being set up in 1911 to help those who were sick and out of work. (Richardson 133) Women were given the vote and they helped to highlight social conditions of the nation. Poverty was rife and was a drain on the economy, and was one of the main reasons the population was so unfit and unhealthy as we will see later. One of the topics in Social Welfare Policies today is income security. What income security programs do is protect the people against loss of income due to retirement, disability, unemployment, or death or absence of the family income maker. Studies in 1998 showed that a family of four with a gross yearly income of $ 13, 656 or less was recognized as falling below the federal poverty line. (Quelette 123) There are two general categories for income security.
There are non-means-based programs that are programs such as social security where benefits are provided irrespective of the income or means of recipients. And there are means-tested programs that require that people must have incomes below specified levels to be eligible for benefits such as food stamps. In the non-means-based program there is a program called Social Security. The way Social Security works is that workers pay taxes that go directly to providing benefits for retirees. A payroll tax of 7. 65 percent on the first $ 62, 700 of wages or salaries is paid by the worker and another 7. 65 percent is paid by the employer onto the Social Security trust fund. (Quelette 138) People are eligible to receive retirement benefits at age sixty-five. If you retire earlier at age sixty-two you will receive a reduced benefit.
Expenditures for Social Security have greatly increased during the last couple of decades, because the number of beneficiaries is growing and they are living longer. More than 40 million people, including some 3 million workers with disabilities, currently receive benefits. This is what makes Social Security the national governments largest entitlement program. In 1993 the fund had a $ 46. 8 billion surplus.
But its expected to be broke by 2032 because the ratio of workers to retirees will decline as baby boomers hit retirement age. (Owen 73) There goes my Social Security. In 1998 senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York proposed that workers should have the option of depositing up to 2 percent of their wages on a personal retirement account which would complement but not replace the existing Social Security system. He called for other changes as well like increasing retirement age to sixty-eight by 2023, and to age seventy by 2073. (Richardson 180) In my concluding thoughts I think we have major problem with Social Security because if by the year 2032 its going to be all gone then we are all going to get into major problems because there wont be any money left for when we retire, and what are we suppose to live off of. Words Count: 1, 346. Bibliography Begley, J. Health and Welfare Policies.
New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Owen, K. Fighting Poverty. New York: Random House, 1998. Quelette, J. On Poverty.
London: Pluto Press, 2003. Richardson, A. The Evolving Social Policies. Michigan: Zondervan Publishers, 2001.
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