This Week We Offered A Plan To End Welfare As We Know It

This week we offered a plan to end welfare as we know ita plan that will encourage personality and help strengthen our families through tougher child support, more education and training, and an absolute requirement to go to work after a period of time. -Bill Clinton, radio address, 6/18/94 The welfare system is in deep distress. From the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the current reigning of Bill Clinton, many a bills have been brought for to reform it. Originally, Roosevelt established the system as a type of government stripend to financially challenged individuals; however, it was not intended to act as a dependent income for them (Tucker 45). Even though many changes have been made over the past three years, it has not made much of an impact on the problems at hand (Pear). Officials discovered that many welfare recipients misuse the benefits. Studies have shown that the welfare system should begin by providing job placement, ending benefits for illegitimacy, and educating the young. First, the aspect of job placement is directly related to the misuse of welfare. In order to succeed at rising employment rates, current wages have to increase dramatically. A welfare check ranges form $5.53 to $17.50 an hour; in a like manner, minimum wage is less than an hourly welfare check (Tilly 8). People desire the higher money of a welfare check to that of a low-paying job (Tweedie 117; Tanner 18). This dependency on receiving the check causes many problems not just with the current generation, but future generations will also be similarly affected. These children are acquiring the habits of their parent or parents, thus creating a permanent underclass (Tucker 45). Economic incentives for staying on welfare should be abolished. People should no longer be allowed to remain on the system for extended periods of time. In accordance with the lesser incentives, the government should place more emphasis on raising the current hourly wage (Haskins 126). Most importantly, the government needs to portray a working world in which job training is not only the standard, but also the required (Tanner 17). Providing jobs with training not only educates the person, but also supplies him or her with opportunities to acquire a better paying job with a future (Willis 4). This training would not just teach skills, but it would make job development workers move more people into the mainstream (Garr 193). In Wisconsin, Republican legislators have devised a method of reform called W-2 Wisconsin Works. W-2 is a work program that would require all recipients over eighteen to work for cash assistance (Tweedie 117). Many welfare recipients are often stereotyped as lazy; moreover, these recipients need to take charge of their lives (Leavitt 22). They need to realize that they are capable of doing competent work. They hav e to compete to prosper. Second, illegitimacy needs to be curbed by stopping aid to promiscuous mothers who continue to have out-of-wedlock pregnancies. The establishment of anti-illegitimacy policies is imperative. These policies should propose to stop payment to unwed others (Haskins 126). The government should not reward for illegitimacy. According to Ron Haskins, Trying to help poor children by giving their underage mothers cash will often simply produce more poor children, reformers argued. Wise societies don't reward births outside of marriage in this way (Haskins 126). If a young woman becomes pregnant again, she does not have to make a choice between living at home with her parents or finding a husband. She simply can continue to produce more illegitimate children. This reoccurrence of illegitimacy is exactly one of the reasons that a stopping of incentives is needed (Tucker 45). In a like manner, the most effective way to reduce births is with a family cap. The family cap is a provision that denies greater cash to women who continue to have births while receiving welfare (Donovan 73). It is designed to discourage out-of-wedlock births (Sollom 41). The government needs to include a child exclusion provision like both China and Japan currently have (Donovan 73). Disincentives are required to act as the primary strategy for regulating poor women's reproductive behaviors (Sollom 41). This unorthodox behavior causes much strain on the welfare system, since the state rewards extra money for additional children. Third,