The Disadvantages of Welfare

By Alex Molling
The topic of welfare is very controversial in the society we are currently living in and
experience every day. There are many individuals who believe that the current economic system
in America today is not capable of supporting those who struggle with poverty and cant afford
the costs of living, but at the same time they cannot dismiss the moral conundrum they are faced
with by not helping their fellow men in their time of need. With this being said, the topic of
welfare is placed before us and we must decide as a collective society whether or not we will
provide this support to those who need it within our society, or if we must fend for ourselves and
only let the strong and successful thrive and survive in the competitive society which we are
bound to within the United States.
Since we do not want to conform to a communist society, but at the same time want to
help other Americans in their times of need, we consequently attempted to adapt a culture of
collectively giving portions of our own individual income to help those in need, all while having
the freedom of attempting to earn as much as we can with a hope of becoming wealthier than
others within our society. This has resulted in welfare programs to help those in need with
benefits such as free healthcare, food stamps, housing assistance, and cash assistance in the form
of earned income tax credit and supplemental security income, just to name a few. The United
States has seen a long history of welfare with many revisions and reforms of these policies which
are still occurring today.
The American Spectator
reported that today we are spending
more than we ever have on welfare
programs for the poor in our country
with a total cost of nearly $1 trillion
annually on these programs.
Americans have spent nearly $20
trillion total on this so-called war on
poverty, which is more than the
combined amount spent on all of
Americas wars. In addition, we spend
13 times more on welfare today than
what we spent in the 1960s. With this
being said, it can easily be concluded
that these programs are fiscally
unsustainable for todays society.
According to the Senate Budget Committee, if you break down welfare spending per
household in poverty, recipients are making $30 per hour which is higher than the United States
median income of $25 per hour. Because these recipients receive more in benefits than most
working Americans, it would be very ineffective for them to start working a job that pays less
than the amount they are receiving in benefits through the government in the form of healthcare,
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food stamps, cash assistance, and other types of assistance all for them to completely lose these
benefits and in turn be making less due to them making too much to qualify for welfare, and
thus having to pay out of pocket for those benefits that would otherwise be free to them. Because
of this, most people who receive these benefits from the government tend to remain dependent
upon the system which creates behavioral poverty and thus people start relying on the work of
others which leads to a change in character both individually among citizens and that of the
nation as a whole. President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, Continued dependence upon relief
induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To
dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. This
shows us that welfare was not created for long term purposes, but rather for short term relief
from lack of resources for which a person can be nursed back to the point in which the individual
is then capable of providing for themselves again and their families and thus contribute again to
society.
I believe that there still must be some form of assistance to those in need, but also believe
that the current welfare system in place in America is not working to the advantage of the
majority of taxpaying citizens within this country. As a result of this, there is the option of
reforming the system to benefit more people by making it so people cant rely on the system for
long periods of time, and instead are helped back into a position where they can successfully
support themselves and contribute to society. There are methods of doing so such as help with
creating resumes and providing necessary job skills to those who are on welfare that arent
disabled and can work normal jobs. These are the people that reform is focused around because
they are able bodied citizens who can work jobs necessary to support themselves and their
families. As stated before, there have been many reforms and revisions to these programs that
have shown some amount of success for a period of time until society changed, along with these
programs.
In order to fully understand the full extension of welfare we must look at the
demographics of who exactly is receiving these handouts and where the money is really going.
According to the U.S. Departure of Agriculture, 44.8% of the households receiving assistance
through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) had children, 20.3% of the
recipients were disabled nonelderly individuals, and 17.4% of those receiving assistance were
elderly individuals. This information shows us that even though disabled and elderly people are
those who have the hardest time functioning normally in society, they arent necessarily the ones
receiving the most assistance. Its in fact normal white households with children that receive the
greatest amount of assistance with food stamps, which can be surprising.

There are many different ways in which the current welfare system in place can be
revised or reformed to arguably make it better, and some of those could be things such as
bringing back personal responsibility for nondisabled individuals who are able to work. These
policies make it so if a person were to need some type of welfare assistance, theyd have to give
back their time to the community in order to receive those benefits. It should be reformed to give
to those who need the help most, such as disabled, mentally ill, and homeless people who are in
positions where it is very hard to bounce back and to become a contributor to society. With these
people getting the most help, second should be those who need to support a family who are better
off than those without a home or with disabilities that render their ability to work.
The second part of the reform would mainly affect the people who are on the edge of the
poverty line and better off than most people obtaining assistance, and in order for them to obtain
assistance, they must do their part to society and their communities by giving from themselves
their time and effort to better the community. This wont only help the community, but will give
the individuals skills necessary to obtain adequate resources in order for them to provide for
themselves and for their families. This would help prevent long term dependency on these
assistance programs and will get them to where they need to be quicker and more efficiently.
In conclusion, we need some type of reform within this system because as you can see,
the current situation is not holding up for todays society. Only with the combined consensus of
the need for change can we truly move forward. We must escape the trend that we can depend on
our governments resources to fulfill all our needs and must take responsibility in changing bout
our individual and national behavior of dependency. Two experts on welfare policy named
Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshal wrote that Material poverty has been replaced by a fare
deeper behavioral poverty-a vicious cycle of unwed childbearing, social dysfunction, and
welfare dependency in poor communities. Even as the welfare state has improved the material
comfort of low-income Americans by transferring enormous financial resources to them, it has
exacerbated these behavioral problems. The result has been the disintegration of the work ethic,
family structure, and social fabric of large segments of the American population, which has in
turn created a new dependency class.

Sources
Abdul-Hamid, Walid Khalid, and Kamaldeep Bhui. "Psychiatry, Homeless Patients And Welfare
Reforms: Historical Links And Chains." International Journal Of Social Psychiatry60.1
(2014): 71-74. PsycINFO. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.
Five Reasons to Reform WelfareAgain; Written by T. Elliot Gaiser; Published on March 29,
2013
Moosa-Mitha, Mehmoona. "Geography Of Care: Syrian Refugees And The Welfare
State." Affilia: Journal Of Women & Social Work 31.3 (2016): 281-284. PsycINFO. Web.
20 Oct. 2016.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/28/food-stamp-demographics_n_6771938.html