Welfare Reform and Poverty

My main question is: has the governments' welfare reform of 1996 truly helped the fight with poverty. Honestly,
I do not know. How can poverty increase and decrease at the same time. Meaning there are now less people who are on welfare than before the reform, but now the people who are on welfare, are even more impoverished than before. Single-mothers with children has risen in the poverty line, in addition to child poverty itself. The child poverty rate in the United States has been steadily rising.

So do I think the welfare reform helped poverty. NO by my standards, but YES by the governments' standards. The government is based off of numbers. They did the reform in order to "weed out" those who were not in a dire need of assistance. They wanted to help the extremely poor and not necessarily the moderately poor. With their reform, they were able to reduce the look of poverty through numbers, by setting different criteria, but did they really address the problem? I don't think so.

Wages and Poverty

Wages plays a major part in individuals flight with poverty. If an family is working full time, and the wages are still not enough to sustain life, then they have any choice but to be impoverished. I think our government has to start regulating what corporations are doing and realize that it is not fair nor productive for the success of its citizens if corporations continue to outsource or offer minimal wages. Even though it may not seem fair to the corporations, there has to be some rules when it comes to the success to the country as a whole, and that usually weighs more in the governments' eye than in the corporations point of view.

I believe outsourcing greatly dwindles the Unites States population to succeed to the best of its ability. Don't get me wrong, I think that it is good for corporations to look towards third world counrties for employees, if they are trying to help the flight of poor within that country, but I don't believe this is the corporations main objective when outsourcing. I believe they mainly do it for the profit, instead of helping the community of that country.

Also, I believe that wages need to be increased. The minimum wage is exactly what it is minimal. Based off of our budget project, our mother was working a $10.00 per hour job, full time and she still did not have the ability to "make ends meets". It is clear that the minimum wages needs to increase, but from my research $10.00 per hour, clearly would not do, let alone the national average of $7.25. It would have to be substantially more in order for a single mother with children to have a living, but I truly believe that the government or corporations are not willing to allow such a raise in the wage because they would lose in profit. In order to give in one area, something has to be taken away in another or at least that is what they would want you to think.