Welfare Reform Affects Us All Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Welfare Reform Affects Us All - Essay Example Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act. This provided for many social programs aimed at helping people recover and get back on their feet. Within this legislation was provision for the unemployed, affordable housing, medical insurance, food assistance, as well as Aid to Families with Dependent Children. There were also many management agencies created to monitor the situation and ensure that the benefits were actually performing to their maximum potential; however, somewhere along the way, something went terribly wrong. What started out as a stopgap measure to help the nation get back on its feet again quickly blossomed into an aid-dependency mentality that has spanned three generations. It’s a well known fact that anytime a person is given rights without being held accountable for those rights, respect for those rights falls. This is part of what has happened in our country with regards to social programs. Many people have developed not only a dependency, but also an entitlement concept that produces antisocial behavior and beliefs. So much so that in 1994, the Welfare, Food Stamps, and Medicaid programs comprised 20% of the national budget. On August 22, 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Initially many politicians were afraid that there would be horrible results with families and children going hungry and becoming homeless. They felt that forcing Welfare recipients to go to work would jeopardize their children who would be left at home to fend for themselves while their primary care taker was at work. Seriously ill people, especially children, would not be able to receive treatment for their conditions and could possibly die. The Leftists Liberals painted a stunning picture of how America would become the scene of another Third World country with abject poverty and lack of basic human needs being met. Parents would be forced to get a divorce in order to get the amount of money needed by a family to actually survive on government assistance. Actually, it was never intended that a family could live happily ever after on government assistance with no need to do anything more than stand in line and reproduce yearly. What actually happened during the Welfare reform was simply amazing. Not only did the doomsday prophets prove to be totally incorrect, but also there was not part of the system that didn’t flourish under the new rules. It was discovered that the main contributors to a badly flawed system were intergenerational poverty, out-of-wedlock births, and system dependency. The very problems that the social programs had sought to eradicate were actually made larger through the programs. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act had these components that made it one of the strongest pieces of legislation aimed at fighting poverty in the late 20th century. It’s goals were to:1) end Welfare as an entitlement pr ogram, 2) require recipients to secure employment after two years on the system, 3) place a lifetime limit of five years on government assistance programs, 4) support two-parent families and discourage illegitimate births, and 5) enhance child support enforcement. The actual strength of this legislation was the back-to-work ethic for everyone to increase their self-esteem and confidence and decrease their dependency on handouts. People learned that they could become productive members of society again and become part of the solution not only for the economy, but also for their own families. Through increased child support enforcement, fathers could once again take pride in providing for their offspring. Back-to-work training programs gave people the necessary skills needed to enter the