Response # 2

Alan Wood

Mr. Benton

ENG 102

8/24/11

Government Aid: Response # 2

            Government assistance was a great idea to help Americans in need of money. But like most things today, it is taken for granted quite often by a majority of those who use government aid. Most people can’t even tell you if they are on any type of government aid because they don’t even know they are on it or they don’t know what constitutes as government aid. Despite the few though that try and cheat and abuse the system, the majority do not. For those people government assistance is the deciding factor between life and death.

            Government aid first started in the late 1800's. The U.S. government was very important in the development of business in America. The government worked with the concept of Laissez Faire, this concept meant that the government wouldn't control business. During the Civil War, the government still followed this approach Laissez Faire but they were starting to be more involved in business. The U.S. government in the post-Civil War period both aided business as well as attempted to regulate it (Rolfe).

When you think of government aid today you generally think of welfare. The United States did not have an organized welfare system until the Great Depression, when emergency relief plans were introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even then, Roosevelt's New Deal focused mainly on a program of providing work and stimulating the economy through public spending, rather than on cash payment (Schram).

The purpose of welfare was to assist people in need. The ultimate goal of welfare is to lift welfare recipients out of poverty and make them able to take care of themselves without any help from the government.  Welfare is a form of social protection, because it deals with overcoming adverse situations that affect people who are needy. Although social protection was made to assist the working classes and to address the poverty problems in America, it has ended up involving a much larger variety of issues surrounding poverty.

A recent study shows the majority of Welfare recipients are white and live in suburbs or rural areas. The findings are contrary to the popular belief that most welfare recipients are unemployed, inner-city minorities whose families have gotten public assistance for generations. Because TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, gave individual states flexibility in making time-limited welfare policies, the new reforms vary from state to state. Under TANF, people were required to actively seek employment while receiving aid and they could only receive aid for a limited amount of time. However, states can choose the amount of resources they will devote to the program. Some people believe this is how we should reform every form of government aid such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Recent studies have found a relationship between the racial makeup of a state’s welfare population and whether the state has strict welfare policies. Essentially, as the percentage of whites and other ethnicities in the welfare population rises, the probability that the state will adopt full-family sanctions increases from 54 to 97 percent; the probability that the state will adopt a family cap increases from 5 percent to 96 percent; and the probability that the state will adopt a shorter time limit than five years increases from 10 to 88 percent (Schram).

Many people believe that government assistance is a bad thing. Those people think that it is just another excuse for the unemployed and the lazy to not work. Though that is partially true because some people do attempt to abuse the system, a majority of people who are on welfare and other government aid programs do not choose to be on them. It is usually just due to a series of unfortunate events and the majority of government aid recipients try to get off of the government aid programs. It has become a common stereotype today that those who are on welfare and other forms of government aid, that they are lazy bums who do not want to work. This stereotype however is not true, more often than not; recipients of government aid are very hard working.

Welfare is provided directly by the government. Welfare is funded by governments out of general revenue, generally through redistributive taxation, or in other words, our taxes pay for their welfare (Schram). Because of this it usually turns people away from the idea of welfare because people don’t want to pay for someone, especially when half the population believes that welfare recipients are lazy. Some opponents of welfare argue that welfare affects work incentives as well as the taxes given to welfare recipients. They also think that their incentives to work decrease because for every dollar the recipient earns, the monthly amount of welfare given is decreased by an equivalent amount (Schram).

Half of the people getting government aid don't think they've ever been a part of any type of government aid. Most people who receive some type of government assistance can’t even tell you what kind of assistance they are receiving, if they even know that they are receiving it. Half of the population couldn’t even tell you what the different forms of government aid are. But forty percent of Medicare recipients have no idea their health insurance is funded by the state. Given the fact that one in six Americans use anti-poverty programs alone, there are a lot of people who don’t even know how much the government helps them out (Arnowitz).

Government assistance is a great idea to help American citizens in need of government assistance. Throughout history government aid programs have always been taken for granted. Half of the time government aid goes to waste on people who do not even know that they are on it. Some people believe that because of these reasons government aid is a bad thing, and that it is just raising our population to be lazy. On the contrary, it is raising our population to be hard working and self-sufficient. Because no one really wants to be on government aid, it is not the kind of thing that people brag about. But no one sees the truth in this, all that people see is what they want to see, which is just something else that they can put the blame on. Once you can work past the overlapping lies surrounding government aid programs, you will see that it is a good thing.

Works Cited

Arnowitz, Nona. "Half of Americans Getting Government Aid Swear               They've Never Used It." 09-12-2011. Web. 23 Aug 2011.    <http://www.good.is/post/half-of-americans-getting-government-aid- swear-they-ve-never-used-government-programs/>.

Rolfe, Andrew. "Homework Help: Social Studies: U.S. History:    Governmental Aid to Businesses in the Late 1800's." 22-8-2011. Web. 23  Aug 2011. <http://www.good.is/post/half-of-americans-getting-government-aid-swear-they-ve-never-used-government-programs/>.

Schram, Sanford. Contextualizing Racial Disparities in American Welfare Reform: Toward a New Poverty Research. (2005). 253-268. Print.