Welfare, a Broken System - Essay Example

Welfare, a Broken System The structuring of the current U.S. system of welfare was intended to ease the circumstances of poverty for single-parent households. Though the welfare system does help to provide greatly needed assistance for low-income persons and their children, it also has brought unintended outcomes. If on no other political subject, all seem to be able to agree that the current welfare system is not working as well as it could. The criticisms of the current welfare system are primarily four-fold. States are not given adequate flexibility; the system does little to encourage employment, is the primary cause for the collapse of the traditional two-parent family and has not reduced poverty. Partly in response to widely held concerns that welfare was simply a handout by tax payers to those that refused to work and pays taxes, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) was enacted in 1996. 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 (Keng, Garasky & Jensen, 2000). TANF requires that welfare recipients be employed in order to obtain monetary grants from the federal government. This fundamental feature of the reform legislation is not an innovative concept. The Welfare Incentive Program of 1967 applied the same policy as did the 1988 Family Support Act. However, the funding for sufficient job training and childcare, an essential factor in the program’s success, is woefully inadequate. “Motivational and job-search sessions constituted the extent of training. Childcare funding never matched need and the wages of welfare lagged behind rises in the cost of living” (Boris, 1998, p. 30). TANF, however well-intentioned, increased welfare recipients’ employment obligations but did not provide sufficient federal funding so that the program could be properly implemented. In the city of New York, of the approximate 200,000 persons participating in the welfare program from 1995 to 1998, more than two-thirds have not been able to secure employment. According to an article published in the New York Times, the job training offered to program participants is not only under-funded but the type of training is “so menial that it offers few, if any, skills that employers demand” (Finder, 1998, p. 72). In addition, several programs which had provided those receiving welfare vocational education and training have either been cut dramatically or eliminated altogether. The current welfare system’s insufficient job training programs serves only to further saturate a low-income labor market. This greatly diminishes the earnings thus buying power for many thousands of poverty-stricken women, a considerable sector of the work force. Current federal welfare strategies essentially disregard unemployed men with regard to their needs for vocational education. One of the only federal programs that addressed unemployed family men was the Community Work and Training Program of 1962. Since that time, legislators have not renewed nor considered this type of program. The prison system is one of the only facilities in the U.S. that provides impoverished men employment or counseling for mental health issues, an unfortunate comment on the values of society (Butterfield, 1998). Incarceration in prison and welfare programs which do not adequately address the needs of women and ignore men altogether are interrelated because of these failed federal policies. “Similar to the poor houses of the past, which combined work with imprisonment, today’s welfare and criminal justice policies represent a division of labor between different managerial agencies, with jails and prisons primarily containing unemployed men, and welfare agencies primarily regulating unemployed women and their children” (Butterfield, 2003). Both the welfare and prison systems exploit immigrants, minorities and poor persons of all ethnicities. Of those women on welfare, a disproportionate percentage is African-American. Approximately 12 percent of all African-American males in the 25 to 34 age-range are currently incarcerated. Impoverished women have incurred the added indignity of an increased rate of imprisonment and a decline of welfare benefits over the past two decades, a not so subtle coincidence. Between 1985 and 1997, the number of women in prison has increased three-fold, the vast majority from impoverished backgrounds. The number of women incarcerated in the U.S. exceeds the number in the U.K., Spain, Germany and France combined (Butterfield, 2003). The current welfare system limits a woman’s capacity to obtain federal financial aid for higher education purposes. It also forces many to work many miles away from home and imposes stringent ‘moral’ requirements. Women in the middle and upper classes, however, have the ability to more readily choose to combine family obligations and employment, freely practice their individual sexual orientations and to have an abortion. Impoverished women subsisting on welfare do not have control over these life, or lifestyle issues. “Dependency has come to be associated with the ‘dangerous, pathological behavior’ of poor women who make wrong choices” (Solinger, 1998, p. 2). The policies of the current welfare system are intended to force poor women to adjust their life choices so that they match with the prevailing view of ‘morality’ of those writing the legislation and to force an increasing number of women into low paying, esteem lowering jobs that provide little or usually, no benefits at all. The policy of most states, given their new discretionary powers, is and will continue to be to ‘persuade’ women off welfare roles and to work outside of the home, many times well outside the home, with no regard as to their families’ needs. “Substituting work outside the home for family labor denies the value to the labor that poor single mothers already perform for their families and demands that they leave their children as a condition of welfare” (Boris, 1998, p. 41). Because of federal budgetary constraints, the safety net of welfare benefits and programs such as Medicare that assist impoverished children is expected to diminish. The welfare system as it stands today is lacking in resources and innovative methods by which to alleviate child poverty despite the extensive welfare restructuring in the U.S. and its continued expansion. It would be a gross understatement to declare that the U.S. welfare system does not compare to European countries. Most countries in Europe have opposing views to those in the U.S. regarding the virtues of a comprehensive welfare system. The U.S. version of welfare largely subsists in the temporary benefits provided to a fraction of the most impoverished of families. Other monetary benefits to families are practically nonexistent. By contrast, in Sweden and Germany for example, benefits are made available to all citizens regardless of earnings. It is a cruel irony. The U.S. is the most powerful economic society in the history of the world yet is not willing to ease the miseries of those in desperate poverty residing within its own borders. European countries that have had their economies decimated by two world wars over the last hundred years yet still take care of their own. Works Cited Butterfield, Fox. “Prisons Replace Hospitals for the Nation’s Mentally Ill.” New York Times. (March 5, 1998). Butterfield, Fox. “Prison Rates Among Blacks Reach a Peak, Report Finds.” New York Times. (April 7, 2003). Boris, Eileen. “When Work is Slavery.” Social Justice. Vol. 25, N. 1, (1998). Finder, Alan. “Evidence is Scant that Workfare Leads to Full-Time Jobs.” New York Times. (April 12, 1998). Keng, Shao-Hsun; Garasky, Steven & Jensen, Helen H. “Welfare Dependence, Recidivism, and the Future for Recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.” Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University. (July 2000). November 15, 2007 Solinger, Rickie. “Dependency and Choice.” Social Justice. Vol. 25, N. 1, (1998). November 15, 2007 Read More