Opposition to welfare

This student has written a paper about the opposition to welfare.

In today’s society, we have many programs that citizens use for receiving assistance. One major assistance program is public assistance, such as: Medicaid, supplemental nutrition program (SNAP and NSLP and WIC), and cash assistance (TANF, EITC, General Relief). There is a current proposal out that attempts to get rid of public assistance for citizens. This proposal to eliminate public assistance could affect families and people in need. According to the policy proposal, the federal government uses a lot of money to fund these programs, and it should not. For example, public housing received $15.8 billion dollars from the U.S federal government in order to fund rental assistance and public housing. Such expenditure seems like a waste of taxpayer money to those who want to get rid of public assitance.  Rather than taking money from everyone through taxes and using billions of dollars to help poor persons, these opponants of the welfare system would prefer to abolish all the welfare policies, and let people stand on their own; if they are too poor to afford housing or food, well then, they had better find a job and work hard to keep that job and earn the money they need. If they are too sick or disabled or impaired to find and hold a job, they must rely on family and private charities, but not on tax dollars taken from “hard working taxpayers” to support their lives.   However, most people support some form of welfare, and defend the public assistance programs, pointing out how these programs give families hope for food, health, and even living. Without such policies, we would be a society with greater illness, greater hunger, more homelessness, and people would even die from exposure or malnutrition or desperation.

Not only is spending all this money on funding these public assistance programs an issue for people who support the proposed policy, but some also feel that people who rely on these public assistance programs become lazy and they get comfortable with being provided for. Therefore, one believes that taking away these assistance programs will drive people to actually learn to provide for themselves. Conversely, people who are in favor of assistance programs claim that the difficulty of finding work and the difficulty of paying medical bills (since the bills can be extremely high at times) require a safety net of public programs to protect peopl from extreme economic hardship.  In particular, costs for low-income persons who have many people depending on their care (perhaps young children, elderly parents, or disabled persons living in their households) need help, since the economic system we have may not provide them with enough resources to survive, even if they do work for wages.  Some people with so many caregiving duties don’t even have time to work for money, since they must care for many children or other persons dependant upon their care.

A possible solution to benefit both sides might be to reduce the spending cost of the public assistance. This would allow the low income and others who are currently on public assistance to still receive help, but at a minimum level, and for some services a co-pay would be in effect. This is the compromise that opponants of the welfare system seek.  They want to lower the costs of Medicaid, TANF, SNAP, Rental Assistance, Public Housing, LIHEAP, SSI, and the EITC.  They know that they cannot abolish these programs, but at least they can cut budgets or change laws to reduce spending or increase fees and co-pays.  Those who defend the welfare state reject the idea that benefits for the poor turn people who are otherwise capable of independence into dependent welfare moochers. These defenders of welfare often want to increase the availability of services and programs, and claim that we need to spend more on programs that support people in poverty.  Such people may want to spend more on welfaer so that our country eliminates hunger and homelessness, and gives people an equal chance to participate in civic and cultural life. The debate between those who want to eliminate welfare and those who want to increase it will continue into the foreseeable future, because the people who support these two opposing sides are both motivated by visions of an ideal society and questions of morality and common sense.  Each side sees that they are right and the other side is wrong.