The welfare system and its social impacts

¶ … Welfare System

Welfare programs are designed to help individuals who are unable to support themselves financially, and generally include the elderly, people with mental or physical disabilities, and those with dependent children (Welfare pp).

The term "welfare" is used to refer to government funded programs that provide economic support, goods and services to the unemployed or underemployed, while professionals in the field of public policy and social work use the term "social welfare" in a broader sense to refer to any program, either privately or publicly funded, that aids people to function more fully in society (Welfare pp).

All developed nations maintain a variety of social welfare programs, most often as rights of citizenship, to provide a so-called safety net to prevent people from suffering the effects of poverty (Welfare pp). However, critics believe that these programs simply encourage its recipients to become dependent of government support and remain unemployed, thus welfare programs have always been an issue of heated public debate (Welfare pp).

In a free-market economy, such as that of the United States and most other nations, a certain percentage of capable, working-age adults will always be unemployed, and unemployment rates vary from region to region and from season to season, as technology and desirable job skills change, and workforces grow and diminish (Welfare pp). Moreover, unemployment rates vary from country to country, for example, in 2002, the unemployment rate in Japan was 5.3%, while in France, it was 8.8% (Welfare pp).

Until the nineteenth century, many people lived in large extended families, including grandparents, cousins, and other relatives, that worked together for generations of family farms, however, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, countries around the world shifted from primarily agrarian to primarily industrial economies, and during the late twentieth century, some of these nations shifted again and became primarily postindustrial, or service and information based, economies (Welfare pp). The tradition of large families living together began to disappear, and many began living in smaller families, consisting of only married couples and their children (Welfare pp). Moreover, the industrial and postindustrial jobs often depend on flexible and mobile workers, thus many people have to commute long distances from home to work, and may even have to relocate (Welfare pp). The majority of people in developed nations today have completely separate family and work lives because small, flexible families are better suited to these types of work patterns, however, small families do not provide the kind of social support that extended families do, and in addition, single-parent households provide even less support than the typical nuclear families (Welfare pp).

Fundamental changes in the global economy also create welfare needs, such as in the second half of the twentieth century, when capital, expertise, and trade moved across national boundaries with increasing ease, creating both opportunities and risks (Welfare pp). Businesses began to out-source low-skill jobs to countries that provided cheap labor, and at the same time created many new, higher-skill jobs, such as those in technological and scientific research and computer programming (Welfare pp). These changes have affected both developed and developing nations, and often require people to move, learn new skills, or dramatically alter their living arrangements for work, leaving many people in situations where a safety net is needed (Welfare pp).

The American colonists basically imported the framework of the British Poor Laws, and by the early nineteenth century, states required that counties and municipalities provide for the poor and needy (Welfare pp). This was done in one of four ways, by auctioning off the poor to bidders who used them as workers, or contracting with wealthier families as free labor, or placing them in public institutions, such as workhouses, or giving them cash or goods (Welfare pp).

Throughout the 1800's, welfare programs went through a number of reforms, and by the early 1900's Congress began sponsoring various programs that expanded public provision for the poor (Welfare pp). In 1862, a Civil War Pension Program was passed for veterans and their families, and by 1921, forty states had established mothers' pensions for poor and/or widowed mothers (Welfare pp).

The modern U.S. welfare system dates to the Great Depression years of the 1930's, during which time, approximately one-fourth of the labor force was without work (Welfare pp). With a majority of the able-bodied adult population experiencing severe financial distress, Americans could no longer view poverty simply as a personal failing (Welfare pp). The Social Security Act, was enacted by Congress in 1935 as part of the New Deal program, and established, together with its 1939 amendments, a number of social welfare programs, each designed to provide support for different segments of the population, such as the Old-Age and Survivors' Insurance for retired people, to which disability insurance was added in 1954, Unemployment Compensation for those temporarily without work, Aid to Dependent Children, known today as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and grants to states to provide medical care (Welfare pp). In 1946, the Social Security Administration was created to oversee the provisions of the act (Welfare pp). In 1953, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was established, in 1980, the Department of Health and Human Services was created, and in 1965, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was established (Welfare pp). The U.S. Department of Labor and its Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration manages workers' benefits programs, while its Employment and Training Administration manages some welfare-to-work programs and job training and placement programs (Welfare pp). Other federal agencies, including the Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of the Treasury, also administer welfare programs (Welfare pp).

During recent decades, funding for these programs has increased significantly, especially for working families who remain poor (Welfare pp). For example, in 1999, the U.S. government spent $52 billion on a range of supports for low-income working families through tax credits, help with childcare, and other assistance, yet in 1984, the government spent only $6 billion on comparable programs, even after accounting for inflation (Welfare pp).

In 1996, Congress reformed a welfare system that was deeply unpopular with the American public, and although Republicans pushed hard for reform, many Democrats, led by former President Bill Clinton, went along, and in the end both parties took credit for the new law (Sawhill pp). The system was transformed from one that handed out cash to one that required work and penalized with a loss of benefits those who failed to comply with the requirement (Sawhill pp). What had been called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) became Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and the use of the word 'temporary' was noteworthy (Sawhill pp). The intent was to make welfare a 'way-station,' not a way of life (Sawhill pp). Although most politicians supported these changes, many scholars and advocates for the poor complained that the new law was a voyage into uncharted waters (Sawhill pp). They felt that the government experimenting with the lives of some of the nation's most vulnerable citizens and their children (Sawhill pp). Moreover, noncitizens who were legal residents of the United States were dealt an even larger blow, as they and their children lost many benefits previously available to them (Sawhill pp).