Argumentation on TANF a form of Medicaid
North Carolina’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program is one of the primary forms of Medicaid. TANF is also called Work First, which is based on the premise that parents have a responsibility to support themselves and their children. Through Work First, parents can get short-term training and other services to help them become employed and self-sufficient later on, but the responsibility is theirs to find the actual job. Most families have two years or less to move off Work First Family Assistance and after that they are completely on their own. According to a document found on Civic Report, the sixty percent of the rise employment among single mothers is due to the fact the money they are given is not enough to support their families.
I don’t agree with this policy implemented by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. The government fails to realize they are misleading the household and the mind set of the family members living in the household. This realization leads me to ask the question, does welfare have a color? Has the welfare line become the modern day Mason Dixon line? I believe that welfare was promoted as a way to help families in crisis, but the true purpose was to destroy African American families.
The welfare system appears to have been designed to keep the male breadwinner out of the home. If the goal had been to help keep families together, then checks would have been disbursed whether or not the father was still at home. By the government helping out a house hold, the right thing to do is have the people in the house help out financially as well. Welfare can not pay all the bills, and people who are on welfare are prohibited from workin...
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...ot fulfill their financial needs as well as continuing to supply households who may be finding other means of financial stability, at least for a set amount of time. This extra means of financial resources for just a short amount of time would actually benefit the American government in the long run. Once those families become stable, the government can tax them.
Works Cited
• Unknown. “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.” Wikipedia. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Assitance_for_Needy_familes
• Wiener Malcolm. “The Real Welfare Problem.” The American Prospect. www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article-the_real_welfare_problem. 2009
• Snyder Travis. “Welfare; History; Results and Reform.” www.neoperspectives.com/welfae. 2004
• Unknown. “US Department of Health and Human Services: Administration for children’s & families. www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/ 2009
Linda Gordon's article is thoughtful, insightful and highly relevant. As governments slash poverty relief programs at all levels and as welfare-bashing reaches an all-time high, it is instructive to take a step back and look at how the current system developed.
It seems like the Welfare system treats its recipients with disrespect and shame to discourage them from joining the system. The people who made and run Welfare in the 1990s made Welfare into a blame game and forces recipients to solely blame themselves for their poverty. The moral prescriptions in individually getting rid of poverty according to TANF are the Work Plan/Family Plan. The focuses on work and family are contradictory because of how little time there is to get both goals done and each goal perpetuates the idea that it is the most important part of ending poverty. It seems like Welfare is more about getting people off of Welfare than eradicating poverty. There is a difference in the goals and that is reflected in how the recipients are treated and how Welfare is run.
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...
In the summer of 1996, Congress finally passed and the President signed the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996", transforming the nation's welfare system. The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act sets the stage for ongoing reconstruction of welfare systems on a state-by-state basis. The combined programs will increase from nearly $100 billion this year to $130 billion per year in 6 years. Programs included are for food stamps, SSI, child nutrition, foster care, the bloss grant program for child- care, and the new block grant to take the place of AFDC. All of those programs will seek $700 billion over the next 6 years, from the taxpayers of America. This program in its reformed mode will cost $55 billion less than it was assumed to cost if there were no changes and the entitlements were left alone. The current welfare system has failed the very families it was intended to serve. If the present welfare system was working so well we would not be here today.
Welfare is a federally funded program that provides health care, food stamps, child care assistance, unemployment, cash aid, and housing that is under the umbrella of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). Per Welfare Information, eligibility is determined by net income, family size, and any crisis situation such as: pregnancy, homelessness, and unemployment. TANF also requires the recipient to obtain employment within two years of receiving help (2014). A majority of the monies that support Welfare come from taxes paid by the working class and donations from private companie...
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). Administration for children and families: about TANF. Retrieved from http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/tanf/about.html
In today’s America, there are many people who would either be disgusted at the very mention of Welfare or be highly grateful for its existence. I believe that in order for welfare to be more effective in America, there must be reform. From the time of its inceptions in 1935, welfare has lent a helping hand to many in crisis (Constitution Rights Foundation). However, at present many programs within the system are being abused and the people who are in real need are being cheated out of assistance. The year after the creation of welfare unemployment was just about twenty percent (Unemployment Statistics). The need for basic resources to survive was unparallel. Today, many people face the same needs as many did during the 30s. Some issues with
It is well known that the Social Security Act of 1935 created a federally financed and federally administered retirement insurance program for people who had worked in certain sectors of the economy and had paid payroll taxes on their wages. What is less known is that the Act also created a federally financed but state-administered program called Aid to Dependent Children (“ADC,” later to become Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or “AFDC”)? As Sheldon H. Danziger and Jeffrey S. Lehman stated in “Welfare”, “When Americans speak of “welfare” or “relief” they are usually alluding to ADC and its successor programs. From the outset, the design and implementation of ADC highlighted the central conflicts of welfare policy. Issues of race, gender, work, and parenting style were, then as now, matters of great social tension”(Danziger). From 1935 to 1960 the only changes to the welfare structure was the inclusion of widows and disabled people into the social security system.
Welfare assistance itself is provided from monies managed by a federally funded program that provides health care, food stamps, child care assistance, unemployment benefits, cash aid, and housing to citizens in need. It is categorized the governmental umbrella of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). According to Welfare Information, eligibility is determined by net income, family size, and any crisis situation such as: pregnancy, homelessness, or unemployment (2014). TANF also requires the recipient to obtain employment within two years of rec...
...to provide enough incentive to single mothers with only one child to get these women to enter the labor market, which means that the program is failing to draw women away from traditional welfare programs. Failing to draw these women from traditional welfare programs means that the Earned Income Tax Credit is not succeeding in relieving the strain that traditional welfare programs can put on the economy. Due to welfare reform that has taken place in the last decade such as a “decline in cash welfare benefits for non-workers” (Hoynes, 2007) single mothers have far fewer options than they have in the past, and the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit program can be a savior for these single parents in need of assistance, as long as the assistance is enough to cover the costs associated with supplying labor to an economy while still raising a child. (Hoynes, 2007)
The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program was created under the 1996 welfare reform law known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (Falk, 2014). TANF is funded by a $16.5 billion-per-year basic federal block grant. Each state is also required to contribute at least $10.4 billion under a maintenance-of-effort (MOE) requirement (Schott, 2012). TANF’s primary purpose is to fund a wide range of benefits and services for low-income families with children. These services include cash assistance, child care, and services for children who have been or are at risk of being abused or neglected
There are four major purposes of the TANF and they are: 1) To provide assistance to needy families so that their children can be taken care of in their own homes, 2) To reduce the dependency of needy parents by promoting job preparation, work and marriage, 3) To prevent and reduce the frequency of pregnancies that were not from married couples, and 4) To encourage the formation of two-parent families.¹ What the TANF program provides to these needy families are cash benefits to help them through their financial difficulties.
What is TANF? TANF is an acronym for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; it is a program that provides cash assistance and supportive services to assist families with children under the age of eighteen, helping them achieve economic self-sufficiency. TANF began on July 1, 1997, and succeeded the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, providing cash assistance to indigent American families with dependent children through the United States Department of Health and Human Services. This cash benefit is often referred to simply as "welfare" (Wikipedia, 2015).
Downs-Whitelaw, S., Moore, E., &McFadden, E. J. (2009). Child welfare and family services: Policies and practice, USA: Parson Education Inc.
Millions of people in the United States today are on some type of public assistance. Some Americans are on Medicare, which provides to the people who cannot afford private health insurance and for those 65 or older. Another type of public assistance is TANF, which many families are on; an organization that helps needy families with some grants and guidance provided by the government. Some states are taking all obligatory measurements to make sure that the taxpayers’ money for public assistance is being used properly by those people who actually need the help and not to buy drugs and alcohol. These public restrictions are put in place, so the people who actually need the help to survive and who wish to live their lives with the American dream in mind, may have a chance.