Welfare Reform Essay

The United States welfare system was created to assist those in situations where they couldn’t work or were in bad financial situation. The aid offered can be received through multiple different federally funded programs. This has helped many of those kinds of people who couldn’t help themselves get out of financial crisis. However, the system has been abused by those who are too lazy to work. Plenty of people use welfare to gain an income while avoiding work or looking for it. Some say we need a reform, while some say it’s fine as it is. The idea of welfare first came to America back when the US was still a group of British colonies. The British Poor Laws were created to assist those unable to work due to poor health and provided jobs for those unemployed but without a job by offering work in workhouses. After the United States was founded as its own nation, we had to think of a solution for dealing with the poor of the country. Programs were created to provide work and lessons in work ethic. These were meant to give

The system can be abused and sometimes makes people lose motivation in trying to find work for themselves. Benjamin Franklin worded it like this, “I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” This exact thing that he talks about can be seen in the welfare system today, one may say. If you give someone too much of something without allowing them to get it on their own, they may find themselves completely reliant on whatever is providing for