Imagine you are standing in a grocery line, waiting patiently for your turn, watching the lady in front of you put her cart-full of name brand food on the counter. You are thinking, "How is she going to pay for all this stuff?" Right then, she pulls out a book of stamps (not postage, either) and pays the cashier one hundred and fifty dollars. With the fifty dollar bill she has stashed away in her wallet, the lady then proceeds to buy two cartons of cigarettes and a magazine. Has this ever happened to you? Does it anger you to know that your taxes are going to a welfare recipient who has more cash than you have even seen in the past two weeks? If it does, then you are not alone.
Many people want the old system for welfare changed and the new system enforced. Welfare has been pushed to the limit, forcing hard working people to pay more taxes, and leaving the government no choice but to make tougher laws to decrease the number of citizens on welfare. At one time a good plan for underprivileged Americans, welfare was constantly misused, forcing the new reforms and much debate.
The new reforms, put into action by President Bill Clinton, have succeeded in dropping the recipients off the rolls. Dan Froomkin, of The Washington Post, says that under the old system, welfare was handed out to anyone for any number of years. The new system, however, requires most recipients to work within two years of receiving assistance, and limits most assistance to five years total (internet). Welfare was also misused by allowing mothers to keep having children, enabling them to receive additional benefits. Froomkin reports that the new reform allows states to establish a policy where welfare families are allowed no added i...
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...al treatment, exceptions, to normally strict regulations, could be made in extreme circumstances for needy people. Having one rule, with no exceptions, can only add argument and debate. Welfare is definitely a good program if truly needed, but if misused, can only punish the ones that need it. I guarantee, though, that if you look around, you will find some form of abuse of the government, whether it be through welfare, workman's compensation, or many other types of government aide.
Works Cited
Froomkin, Dan. "Welfare's Changing Face." Washington Post 13 July 1998.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Long, Robert Emmet, ed. The Welfare Debate. New York: HW Wilson Company, 1989.
Marks, Alexandra. "Less Welfare, Same Poverty in Heart of Appalachia." Christian Science Monitor. 6 May 1998:1
"Not So Welfare." New Republic 13 Apr 1998:7
Hays found that initially most welfare workers were optimistic and even excited about the changes. Most workers felt that the Act represented real progress and allowed for positive changes which would positively impact the lives of their clients. Hays spoke to one welfare who said that welfare reform “offered the training and services necessary to 'make our clients' lives better, to make them better mothers, to make them more productive.'” But as she was soon to find out, welfare reform, while it did have a positive impact on the lives of some welfare clients, made the lives of most clients more difficult, not to mention the stress that it caused for the welfare workers who had to deal with the often confusing and illogical new rules.
Despite Hasselstrom’s personal characteristics of being a peace-loving, caring woman, the distance that she lived from town, being alone, and a series of unfortunate dangerous situations caused her to feel the need to protect herself. She states in the ar...
Appalachia is no longer the land of severe poverty that it was three decades ago, now the poverty rate of one in 15 is close to the national average. The number of adults who have received a high school diploma has also jumped from one out of three to two out of three; and the infant death rate has been cut in half. Comparing the 391 counties in the Appalachian Regional Commission with counties outside the region that were similar to Appalachian counties in the 1960s, researchers found that Appalachian counties grew significantly faster than their counterparts. Specifically, overall income in Appalachia grew 48 percent faster; per capita income grew 17 percent faster; and population grew five percent faster.
There have been numerous debates within the last decade over what needs to be done about welfare and what is the best welfare reform plan. In the mid-1990s the TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Act was proposed under the Clinton administration. This plan was not received well since it had put a five year lifetime limit on receiving welfare and did not supply the necessary accommodations to help people in poverty follow this guideline. Under the impression that people could easily have found a job and worked their way out of poverty in five years, the plan was passed in 1996 and people in poverty were immediately forced to start looking for jobs. When the TANF Act was up for renewal earlier this year, the Bush administration carefully looked at what the TANF Act had done for the poverty stricken. Bush realized that, in his opinion, the plan had been successful and should stay in effect with some minor tweaking. Bush proposed a similar plan which kept the five year welfare restriction in place but did raise the budgeted amount of money to be placed towards childcare and food stamps. Both the TANF Act and Bush's revised bill have caused a huge controversy between liberal and conservative activists. The liberals feel that it is cruel to put people in a situation where they can no longer receive help from the government since so many people can not simply go out and get a job and work their way out of poverty. They feel if finding a job was that easy, most people would have already worked their way out of poverty. The conservatives feel that the plans, such as the TANF Act, are a surefire way to lower poverty levels and unemployment rates as well as decrease the amount o...
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The House of the Seven Gables is often characterized as a horror story, because of the presence of the family curse. The mysterious family deaths, the misfortune and decline of the Pyncheon name are attributed to the dying man’s words. Even so, the disastrous streak is broken, by a few who were willing to face adversity with faith, love and joy. A few occurrences, such as Alice Pyncheon’s plague, cannot be explained as the result of her own avarice. However, while the author makes several hypothetical references to the supernatural, we are inclined to believe that the “curse” of the Pyncheons is not paranormal but a result of the wickedness of human nature that characterizes each and every man on earth.
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My reaction to people who want to remain on welfare is, striving to look for a better future not for themselves but for their families too. They want to change their life and they don’t want to wait for the opportunity to come to their feet. They want to change however they can feel embarrass and ashamed that they have reached to that point however welfare gives them another opportunity within the community to stand on their own two feet. Its okay to receive welfare because there here to help those, who lack motivation in
Welfare in America is a social issue spiraling out of control. This issue is a national epidemic, with no solution seen in the near future. Unfortunately abuse of the system has become a norm in our society. Governmental officials acknowledge the issue, but lack the effort to make major ramifications. Taxpaying citizens now reap the heavy burden of incompetent political officials and major abuse of the system.
History indeed does seem to repeat itself in The House of the Seven Gables, and the sins of one generation tended to visit the next generations. This theme could also be the “moral” of The House of the Seven Gables, and Nathaniel Hawthorne does, on lots of occasions, connect the sins of Colonel Pyncheon to the consecutive misfortunes of the Pyncheon family. With plenty of pages about sins and how they were getting passes on, I can indeed say that the sins of one generation impose on the next
Welfare helps a lot of people and I’m all for helping the ones that actually need help. It’s the groups that abuse welfare that ruin the system and something needs to be done to cut off those groups of people from receiving our tax payers’ hard earned money. What this system needs is something that will separate those who can’t work from those who won’t work to make a living. Unemployment benefits are a privilege not a right. It’s a privilege because hard working tax payers give up part of their income to make sure their neighbor who can’t take care of themselves or their family has something to live off of. It is not supposed to be for those who don’t want to work or abuse it and go about buying nonessential, luxury, products and accessories (iPhone’s, TV’s, cable, expensive jewelry, etc.)