The Significance of Welfare in the United States

The Significance of Welfare in the United States

Welfare is very important in the lives of many children and parents in the United States. Without welfare, many families would not mentally survive and the poverty rate would surely increase. A person's life at home, school, and the area they are living in is crucial for the future of the child. Government funding for all three of these are important in many lower class areas in the United States to help people in poverty get back on their feet. I understand how other people feel that are against welfare and I feel the system can be changed to make it better. Getting rid of welfare completely is not the right thing to do for our country. We are the richest country in the world and I think that we can afford to pay taxes on it.

Many people feel welfare is not fair for the taxpayers in our country. They believe the middle and upper class Americans worked hard to get in their position. For example, some people have finished high school, graduated college, and worked up the ranks to provide their family with food, shelter, and clothes. They do not feel they should pay for the poorer people to survive, who have possibly made mistakes in their life to get them in the position they are in. It is usually the high class citizen who feel stronger about this subject, but there are a lot of people who have opinions that are similar to this one.

Without welfare, some people feel the people relying on it will get jobs and the poverty rate will decrease. One of the problems are that jobs are scarce and it is hard to raise a child and have a job at the same time. They may also feel teen pregnancies will go down and that the government will have more tax money to spend on other things. What if it does not work out like this? I think that the poverty rate and especially the crime rate would increase do to the changes and many people would panic and have nobody to turn to for help. If it were as easy as cutting welfare off completely to help people in poverty, then I would be in favor of eliminating the welfare system in our country, but it is more complicated than that. It is an interesting topic and it difficult to make a system that works. It is not that easy to get rid of the poverty in the United States and some people have to look beyond themselves and help the people in need.

A children's home life is important for building a positive future for the child. Children need their parents to help them learn the right way, so they do not get trapped by their negative surroundings outside of their home (McTeer, 3). Without welfare, parents spend less time with their children because they are working multiple low-paying jobs to support the family (Eckstrom, 2). Raising their kids is very hard when working all day to make ends meet. They need to learn to go to school, not to do drugs, and to stay away from guns. If the children do not learn the right things to do they, most likely, would end up like their parents and there will be a never-ending cycle of poverty going through their family tree. If the parents do not teach the children, then it is up to the school. If the schools are not good then the chances are that the children's future would be similar to their parents.

The school systems need to be cleaned up in a lot of cities. Education is one of the most important things to have in life. The children in lower class communities need to learn and graduate high school and possibly go to college so they can get a good job. With the problems at home and with the poor school system, it is hard to focus on grades. If the government spent more money on schools and education, welfare may not be needed much in the future. The kids would grow up with a good education and that can go a long way. The government needs to spend money on schools and education if they want to lower the poverty rate. Instead, the national spending on education in the United States got cut to help pay for the war in Iraq. In my opinion, the distribution of the tax money in our country is not very good.

The neighborhoods and cities many welfare recipients are living in are not very attractive. With negative surroundings, schools, and homes it would be surprising to see if the child living in these conditions ever got out of poverty. In 1996, Bill Clinton cut welfare taxes and the poverty rate went down. People in poverty were now living in worse conditions than ever. This is not a good trade off because if someone is not in poverty it does not mean that they are living in good conditions. They still may live in roach infested homes without air conditioning or in poor neighborhoods where kids grow up in bad atmospheres without a good chance to succeed in life. I do not think that cutting welfare is the right answer to help the majority of the people, but a lot of the tax payers like it, so president after president continues to do it.

Welfare reform is not a solution to poverty. Welfare has been recently cut in 1996 and in 2002. In 1996, Bill Clinton cut welfare taxes lowering the poverty rate by 2.3 percent, but making the people still in poverty live in "extreme poverty" (Delong, 1). It was not really worth it because the average salary did not go up and we were basically in the same situation we were in before the reform. In 2002, President Bush decided to do a similar reform as Clinton did, but the results are not as good. The new poverty population grew by 1.3 million to 32.9 million in less than one year (Eskstrom, 2). The average income fell 2.2 % to 42,228 dollars per year (Buckley

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