The Problem

As of August 2015, 35.4% of the US population is on welfare programs such as low income housing, food stamps, the Women, Infants and Children program, Medicare and Medicaid, and cash assistance. 277 billion dollars are spent on welfare for family and children, not including health insurance which is 5.1 billion. Our unemployment is at 41 billion dollars. Those numbers are high and telling us that our welfare system isn’t working as well as it should (Chantrill, 2015).  With President Obama’s health care plan, costs are only going to rise as more people qualify for state paid medical care. Changes in mandatory requirements to be approved for such programs will help people improve their situation and get off of government assistance and save taxpayers millions, if not billions of dollars each year. 

Our problem today is that US citizens have become dependent on welfare, have entitlement issues, and a lazy work ethic. People are comfortable living on welfare and some say they get more from welfare checks than working a minimum wage job. Then we have a government who says it is cheaper to cut a welfare check than to educate people and set up community services for the unemployed. That thinking causes continued dependency on welfare and doesn’t improve our country. While being on welfare is not living in the lap of luxury, because many of the programs work independently of each other, it can be a comfortable life. The American Dream has evolved into a sense of entitlement where the rich are judged and told they should share the riches they have worked for with the poor (Clouse, et al. 2013).

Studies show that the best way to teach your children about education, is to be educated yourself. “The education that children receive is very much dependent on the education that their parents received when they were children. Research shows that the literacy of their parents strongly affects the education of their children” (Gratz, 2006). Children who are raised in low income or poverty are likely to stay there as adults. Ron Haskins, Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families (2015) explains, “Adult children from the bottom quintile have a 43 percent chance of winding up in the bottom themselves and only 4 percent of them wind up in the top quintile.”  Further adverse impacts that are associated with children whose families are on government assistance include, “fewer years of schooling completed, lower academic test scores, difficulties in the labor market as an adult, and greater risk of welfare receipt as an adult.” (Child Trends, 2013).

Many middle-class working individuals don’t earn enough to live without welfare assistance; however, earning a raise at work would cost them more in benefits than the raise would net them (Johnson, 2015). When the middle-class can’t afford to survive on what they earn, but are penalized for earning more, what do we expect will happen? More and more people will be on assistance, the drain on the government and taxpayers will become so burdensome that the middle class will continue to dwindle, while the division between upper and lower classes becomes more and more pronounced. The US Government has tried different options for the unemployed and middle-class to become self-reliant, but nothing seems to work for long.