Welfare Reform Vs. Employment: A Permanent Solution or A Temporary Band-Aid?

Welfare Reform vs. Employment: A Permanent Solution or a Temporary Band-Aid?

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? Directly correlated with welfare is work. Welfare reform would not be complete without work options and job training programs in place so that recipients may eventually get off of welfare and support themselves and their family independently. Isn't that the purpose of welfare? To give the poor and underserved an opportunity to have government subsidizing only to boost them into the world of the working class in a reasonable amount of time? There have been many changes that have come with welfare reform, along with the many adverse opinions, publicity, and stereotypes that have come with it.

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 Dependent Children (AFDC), a program which provided 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 were often eligible for many other programs, including Medicare, food stamps, Aid to Women with Infant children (WIC) and subsidized housing. While not all AFDC recipients received all of these benefits, enough did so that they are considered part of the welfare equation. 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 to which members were required to contribute. 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 during hard economic times. Even critics of the Act never imagined how far-reaching its programs 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. 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.

Despite the change in views of welfare, welfare itself 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. 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