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.
I think the government made welfare harder to receive so there are less people on welfare, but there are still as many people poor. That didnt fix the problem, jsut made it look better on paper, which I think all our government ever does is try to make things look better on paper and not really care about people. This also makes me wonder if the right people are receiving welfare and what they are doing with that money.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Aerielle! The process of applying for assistance has become very hard. Many of these programs have waiting periods and allot of the people that need the assistance feel that the process if too cumbersome. Whenever the funding becomes scarce the process gets harder for the people in need.
ReplyDeleteI would like to point out that during the mid nineties when welfare reform was past funding was not particularly scarce, in fact according to the CBO in 1996 the federal deficit was at its lowest point in over a decade. I agree with your point about reducing the perception of poverty. Until the issue of the existing skills mismatch is addressed I don't know that there will be meaningful change. But that's just my opinion.
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