Our social safety net has a hole in it. The fibers of the net are decaying; the hole is getting bigger. More people are falling through, and the people with the least strength are holding the most of the weight. Three to four million Americans are homeless according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 5.5% cannot find jobs according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and the figure is over twice that in the 20-24 year old age group, according to the Department of Education. A very slim minority of these people are sucking off the system, but the vast majority just had a bad break. Such is the story of Peter and Megan, as told by author Jonathan Kozol in his Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award winner Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. Peter was a carpenter and she was a homemaker who raised their five children. They lived in a neat, working class apartment building in New York City. Peter did construction for public housing projects, and had a vast array of technical skills and tools: “I did carpentry. I painted. I could do wallpapering. I earned a living. We spent Sundays walking with our children on the beach.” It may sound like this was a happy family, living the American Dream. Perhaps they were -- they were self sufficient for all of the 12 years that they had been married, they had a steady income, a close and loving family, a home, and a chance for their children to do even better than they had done. Then the fire struck. They came racing home after hearing the news, only to find that everything had been destroyed. The children lost their pet dog and cat, Megan lost her grandmother’s china, but Peter perhaps lost the most: his tools. Since the fire, he has not had a job, because a carpenter without tools might as well not have eyes. He explained that for every job he had, he would add a new tool to his collection. But they all went up in the blaze. When Kozol first met them, they were living in a welfare hotel in New York, where they had been living for two years. They can’t get out because federal assistance programs (better known as welfare) tell them that their family limit for an apartment is $366 a month -- this with seven family members living in New York City. (In comparison, that’s about the rock bottom price for a week in a New York City one room motel.) In their two room “apartment”, the entire place is falling
We are all putting money into a pot, and some of us aren’t using the money or the resources that we end up helping out. There are a lot of programs that are out there to help support lower waged workers or people that can’t find jobs. Some of these programs are food stamps, medicare, and lower income housing. Everyone helps pay for these things, but there are only a certain amount of people that can use them. If you make a certain amount of money and it is too high, then you don’t qualify for them, even though maybe it isn’t high enough to live comfortably. Retirement may not come as easy for the younger generation because of the fact that people are using the social security, and we may not have the amount that we need when we retire. How our society is set up, you almost get more taken away the harder you work, and for the ones that don’t make as much, get all of the
The article “Back At Square One’: As States Repurpose Welfare Funds, More Families Fall Through Safety Net” was written by Peter S. Goodman. The article is about the struggle that people have all over the United States. Many of these individuals struggle to provide food, a decent place to live, and other common standards of living to their families. Goodman writes of a few women but mainly focuses on a woman named Brianna Butler who is struggling. In the reading there are many struggles she faces such as getting funding and getting help. Her major dilemma is that in order to receive financial assistance she needs to attend a four-week class, but no one will watch her child so she cannot go to the classes, so she does not receive the money. According to the article There are thousands of people who experience daily strife and when the United States economy experienced trouble many businesses had to lay people off and this created an even
...le for a "net" that would not allow any individual to lapse into abject poverty, homelessness on a wide scale, hunger or destitution. However, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was elected on a platform which declared that New Deal policies were responsible for poverty, crime, and all other social problems. Government, Reagan kept on repeating, was not any part of a solution to the problem. Government was the problem. Therefore, a good many policies based upon the "net" concept were weakened or simply eliminated.
There are many social welfare programs designed to provide income support for Canadians, mostly for those with little to no income. Some may criticize these programs as too generous or an incentive to be lazy, however, welfare rates are below the poverty line, and most of the people receiving benefits cannot find permanent employment or are disabled. In fact, 68% of food bank users receive some form of social assistance. Studies done at the University of Manitoba have shown that guaranteed income programs reduce hospital visits caused by work injuries, domestic violence, and mental health issues, which would save billions of dollars in healthcare and prison costs annually. Extending welfare to the bottom 10% of Canadian would cost approximately $10,000 per person (not taking into account savings in the healthcare system a...
It serves to save Americans when they fall on hard times and need a little extra support. Everyone at one time or another faces obstacles; the safety net makes these times a little easier. The safety net consists of programs such as WIC, Medicare, the Federal Pell Grant Program, Unemployment Insurance, and more; these are only some of the major ones. Though some may think these programs are useless and unhelpful, according to americanprogress.org, 70 percent of Americans have benefitted from them at some point in their lives. Cleary, our safety net is making a positive impact; the website also states, “the War on Poverty succeeded in reducing the poverty rate by one-third, from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012.” It’s harder for a person to make it out of poverty when there is no help or support. An individual born into poverty in America can take the assistance of these programs to help them “move up” in today’s economy, whereas in some other countries this may not be an option. However, one should not depend or try to live off of America’s safety net; they should continue to work hard so that aid is no longer
It is a commonly known fact that a large percentage of Americans are living on and relying on welfare, which is a government program that provides financial aid to individuals or groups of people who cannot support themselves. Welfare began in the 1930’s during the Great Depression. There are several types of assistance offered by the government, which include healthcare, food stamps, child care assistance, unemployment, cash aid, and housing assistance. The type of welfare and amounts given depend on the individual, and how many children they have. There are many people who honestly need the government assistance, but there are also many who abuse the privilege.
Welfare programs are an important part of American society. Without any type of American welfare, people will starve, children will not receive the proper education, and people will not receive any medical help simply because they do not have the resources available to them. Each of the three aspects of the American welfare system are unique in their own ways because they are funded differently and the benefits are given to different people. While support for these welfare systems has declined in the more recent years, the support for it when it was created was strong.
The morality of social welfare systems, or the morality of crafting laws to aid American citizens in poverty, is a subject that (like myriad ethical issues) is hotly debated to say the least. For example, some opponents of social welfare institutions maintain the view that such programs "increase the reward or reduce the penalties" of poverty; thereby ostensibly making an impoverished state appealing even to people who might initially have been motivated to earn a living by conventional means. In other words, welfare programs (according to opponents) encourage otherwise productive individuals to embrace laziness, for basic human needs would be met by such institutions, eliminating the need to work at all. Those opposed to social welfare plans have also been known to claim that an "unfair burden is placed upon workers who must pay for the system." When one considers the above opposing views, it would then stand to reason that proponents of social welfare programs might maintain that it is the moral responsibility of working citizens to provide assistance and funding for programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the Food Stamp program, or the like. This supposition is confirmed upon examination of the notion that, when basic human needs such as "food, housing, and medical care" are not met, one is consequently rendered unable to uphold any level of social freedom. Given the above information, one can safely deduce that modern supporters of social welfare organizations are under the impression that such programs provide the impoverished masses with the means by which to obtain the level of general well-being vital to acquiring work in the first place.
Living in the United States most people rely on the government to construct our society to better the people. The gap between rich and poor in our society significantly varies. In America, the government offers special programs to help those who fall below the poverty line. This is well known as welfare. The word welfare comes from a positive definition known as “well-being”, but most Americans would debate that welfare has become a disaster to our society as they increased welfare dependency, illegitimate babies, and family break-ups. In fact I agree with these clams, poverty programs have been abused by many Americans, causing more pressures and strains to American welfare.
...ican welfare system has many flaws and I have identified major problems and possible solutions/policy recommendations. We can’t completely dismiss government assistance because we are a land of the equality of all and should be proud to have services that help the less fortunate. However, we must identify people who misuse and people who become too comfortable. We can’t continue to fall deeper into debt by supporting people who are not making an effort to support themselves. Nonetheless, we should help and assist those who are constantly trying to become educated, skilled, and experienced enough to become self-sufficient. I will close with a quote from the article about welfare helping a lady survive while she was studying. Currently she has a degree and a job as a manager. “I had clear goals,” “I wasn’t raised to sit at home expecting a check to come in the mail.”
A single divorcee’ mother of two is working a minimum waged job that doesn’t pay life’s cost of survival. Not only does this mother have to take care of herself, she has children that need shelter, nourishment, and stability. In order for that to be possible, help is needed. Most people, majority is fathers, have too much pride to ask for help because of the image. Being on social welfare promotes the ego dropping image that one cannot provide for themselves or their family. But is image more important than the life itself? Children are dying of hunger or dehydration because their parents cannot afford decent meals or purified water. Children are dying from sickness because their parents cannot afford a home that protects them from the cold. Some of these parents are working forty hours a week or more for minimum wage and still cannot afford the necessities to live healthy. Some parents cannot find a job due to lack of qualification. The government has provided resources for people who are disadvantaged; however, there are still problems that need to be addressed. Social welfare isn’t a discouragement, it is a helping hand. There is no reason why lives should be shortened because of the inability to access governmental assistance. Social welfare benefits America as a whole because it serves as a crutch for the financially handicapped and provides motivation to work harder for a better lifestyle.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Frances Fox Piven. ?Without a Safety Net.? Mother Jones. 27.3 (May-June2002):1?4. Online. Information Access Expanded Academic ASAP. Article A86047838.
“Welfare Can Not End Cycle Of Poverty In U.S.” UWIRE Text 13 Nov. 2014: 1. General Onefile. Web. 25 Sept.
Other solutions that we have is to reform the whole welfare act or even get rid of it and create a new one. David Ellwood has been working on something like this “to replace welfare by expanding a tiny refundable tax credit” (172 Edin) by doing this Ellwood is actually having success of getting the poor back into society. Everyone goes through hard times and we never know when those times may come for us. As we look into all of our solutions we see that what Ellwood is doing is working but one thing we have not fixed is how hard it is to receive the welfare and help without using all of your time to do
...hose that need them it is impossible. If the government is going to provide things it needs money to do so, and where does that money come from, taxes. Therefore the medication, housing, food and other benefits allotted to those on the welfare system are paid for by masses who actually do work and make something of themselves. Those receiving those benefits either don’t see or don’t care about the cost it puts on the rest of society, and fall into the hole of letting life come to you on the silver platter at the cost of someone else. Hard work is something considered antique, a thing of our grandparents with too many willing to forsake it for a life that isn’t of the highest quality but is of the lowest effort. The rise of the welfare state spells the end of America as we know it, the end of the “land of opportunity” and the beginning of the land of poverty.