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Joan J Johnson's Children Of Welfare

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What really is welfare? According to Joan J Johnson in her book Children of Welfare, “Welfare is not just one program; it is many. Each of the programs that make up ‘welfare’ is designed to aid a specific aspect of the recipient’s daily life. All are designed to help the poor and/or needy survive” (Johnson 21). This includes popular legislation such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, and food stamps. With more than half of our population dependent on money from Washington (Boyd), it would be safe to say that America has almost become or is a welfare state, or “a country in which the government provides the essential needs and economic security of its citizens” (Allard). Even though this set of programs may seem wonderful …show more content…

One flaw is that welfare is mandated by the federal government. “The current welfare system is a complicated set of federal programs involving the Department of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Treasury, and Education” (Faherty 17). Although this may seem like a good thing from the outside, it isn’t as favorable as it appears. Each community is unique, and therefore has its own individual set of people and needs. There are 50 states in America, 3.797 million square miles, 19,354 cities, and 318.9 million people. How can one governing body located in 68.34 square miles containing only 658,893 people know the circumstances in every state, city, community, and …show more content…

A long history of generous handouts and assistance will breed a generation that only takes and never gives. Today’s programs have taught citizens to “think of payment as a basic right” (“Basically Flawed; Rethinking the Welfare State”). With the administration and the overseers so far away, it’s easy to find loopholes in the system. Police and reporters investigating a suspected drug peddler stumbled onto a filthy apartment filled with welfare children, their parents probably high, drunk, and using their handouts for anything but to care for their kids. “None of the six mothers who lived in this filthy apartment were at home at the time. Yet between them, they were collecting $4500 a month in Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps intended for the support of their children” (Johnson 9). With so many freeriders and takers in today’s world, the working class bears a good portion of the

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In chapter two of Money, Greed, and God, Jay W. Richards says that the federal government doesn 't appropriately distribute welfare to those who need it. In addition, Richards says that the government should simply stay out of matters this small because they could be better handled by smaller more locally run organizations. In essence, the federal government is “too big” to know how to help the needy. I completely disagree with this assertion. Although the federal government is big and oblivious to who exactly needs what, it is still a necessary part of the welfare distribution system because of the money it has and all the power needed to deliver said funds.

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The novel, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky is about how he traveled the United States meeting the poor. The stories he introduces in novel are articles among data-driven studies and critical investigations of government programs. Abramsky has composed an impressive book that both defines and advocates. He reaches across a varied range of concerns, involving education, housing and criminal justice, in a wide-ranging view of poverty 's sections. In considering results, it 's essential to understand how the different problems of poor families intermingle in mutual reinforcement.

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648 Words | 3 Pages

The idea of welfare might represent that there is always a way to make things work, even when times are tough. The idea that we can overcome difficult circumstances and achieve success

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1002 Words | 5 Pages

A lot of people who are critics of the welfare programs argue that people are poor because they are lazy and they live off government handouts but that is not the truth at all. As we can see from the video, most of the

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517 Words | 3 Pages

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was a landmark legislation that drastically altered how the U.S. government approached poverty. Passed during Bill Clinton's presidency, the reform aimed to decrease the dependency on state support by promoting self-reliance and employment among the populace. This initiative gave birth to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. However, despite the seemingly positive intentions, the Act arguably created a plethora of issues. In fact, many have criticized the reform for its unrealistic assumptions about the reality of poverty in America.

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955 Words | 4 Pages

Hanley wrote this article in order to persuade his readers that welfare is a very crucial part of some people’s lives, and Donald Trump should not cut its funding. In order to achieve this, Hanley makes use of statistics and facts throughout the article explaining how beneficial social welfare truly is. He conducted research and credited most of his findings to historian Michael B. Katz of the University of Pennsylvania. In the article, he states that there was a 60% decline of people living in poverty between 1960 and 1980 due to social welfare. He also states that between these

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1265 Words | 6 Pages

Welfare State is a program of government programs that transfer money and services to Canadians. This Welfare State program began in 1938, right before the start of World War 2. This Welfare State program helped millions of Canadians with problems such as poverty, homelessness, unemployment, aging, illness, workplace injury, disability, and the needs of children, women, gay, lesbian, and transgendered people (Moscovitch, 2006). Obviously having all of these problems was not a good thing for Canadians, but the government found a way to help their citizens. The Welfare State program was a significant improvement because many Canadian citizens benefitted from this.

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664 Words | 3 Pages

Welfare America, home of the brave, the free, and the blessed! In this country many programs have been established to help those in need. One of these programs is welfare. Welfare is a public assisting aid, which gives citizens who live in the minimal level of poverty free money. This program is funded from the taxes payed by all working Americans.

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1373 Words | 6 Pages

During Reagan’s Presidency, he reduced many welfare programs that he believed were taken advantage of, such as job training and unemployment insurance benefits (Chidester and Knott). Reagan benefitted modern society through his change in the welfare system by reducing programs that related to careers so that people who were capable of helping themselves but chose not to do so, stopped receiving assistance from the government. This began a trend with following presidents to better the welfare system in order to benefit society. Ronald Reagan pushes the idea to adjust welfare when he says, “The irony is that misguided welfare programs instituted in the name of compassion have actually helped turn a shrinking problem into a national tragedy” (“Welfare Reform”). During Reagan’s radio address on February 15, 1986, he extended his thoughts on how welfare has caused poverty, a problem that was once shrinking, to explode across the United States.

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557 Words | 3 Pages

In the memoir “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls, she, and her siblings live in extreme poverty because of their unfit parents, Rose Mary and Rex, who struggle or lack interest in getting a job. Rose Mary and Rex are unfit to raise four kids because they are both immature and lazy with regard to their parenting. An act of immaturity Rose Mary and Rex shows is when they refuse to receive any forms of federal aid or grants, “Although we were the poorest family on Little Hobart Street, Mom and Dad never applied for welfare or food stamps, and they always refused charity. When teachers gave us bags of clothes from church drives, Mom made us take them back. ‘We can take care of our own,’ Mom and Dad liked to say.

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1317 Words | 6 Pages

This becomes indeed critical that those who choose to receive welfare must pass certain standards. These standard being as simple as a standard drug test. Some people wonder still, what is welfare? Welfare, by definition, is financial support given to people in need. The financial support is brought to these people through the taxpayers money.

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199 Words | 1 Pages

Welfare main goal is to help those in need get over the hump and

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1113 Words | 5 Pages

In the words of welfare policy experts Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshall writing in National Affairs: Material poverty has been replaced by a far deeper “behavioral poverty” — a vicious cycle of unwed childbearing, social dysfunction, and welfare dependency in poor communities. Even as the welfare state has improved the material comfort of low-income Americans by transferring enormous financial resources to them, it has exacerbated these behavioral problems. The result has been the disintegration of the work ethic, family structure, and social fabric of large segments of the American population, which has in turn created a new dependency class. Is this the America we want? It is not compassionate to leave a whole class of people in perpetual dependence.

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1135 Words | 5 Pages

Jamie Moran Social Problems online Professor Branda November 17, 2015 Abuse of the Welfare System Welfare has been an on going problem since we can probably remember and then some, but lately it seems to be a much bigger problem when people go to the grocery store and buy $150 worth of food and see another person have two carters full of food and pay with food stamps and ask themselves, how come I work hard for my money and get so little, while they are on welfare and get more than I do. According to the United States Census Bureau there are 109,631,000 people on welfare today, which is about 35.4 percent of the U.S population, but take into account that everyone some way is receiving governmental help whether it be receiving free lunches for

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835 Words | 4 Pages

McKeen (2006) argues that the conceptual models of the mainstream society and policy community cleverly hold child welfare model with an assumption that the child welfare programs can effectively treat the assumed deficiencies of the

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