America's Welfare System

"

Many minorities, have accpepted welfare in some way or form. The ablitity for the state to provide reseources for people in great need is compassionate and noble.I myslef have benefited from such.At the same time these services when not checked or monitored can cause more harm than good. Republicans have come up with new ways to deal with Welfare through welfare reform and other initiatives, the main thought is on Program Evalutation. Contunie reading my blog for futher information about Welfare Reform, and welfare in general.

Welfare has four main meanings.

In general terms, the term welfare refers simply to well-being , the Human condition whereby people are faring well, that is: prosperous, in good health and at peace.
In economics, welfare is associated with material benefit or preferred outcomes. Welfare has a specific meaning in formal or technical economics (see welfare economics), as in the term social welfare function. In this context it refers to utility or well-offness, either for an individual, or aggregated for a group.
In social policy, social welfare refers to the range of services intended to meet people's needs. This is the use of the term in the idea of the welfare state.
In the United States, welfare refers more specifically to money paid by the government to persons who are in need of financial assistance, but who are unable to work, or whose circumstances mean the income they require for basic needs is in excess of their salary (e.g. tax credits for working mothers). The sum paid usually gives an income well below the poverty line, and it usually also has conditions attached, such as the need to prove one is searching for work or that there is some condition, such as a disability or obligation to care for children, that prevents them from working. In some cases recipients are even forced to do work, and this is often known as workfare. Some kind of safety net provision of this kind is made in almost all developed countries.

In the United States, assistance of this type has now been largely restricted to households where children are included (usually headed by single mothers) and even these households have only been able to access benefits for a maximum of five years per lifetime of the adult recipient since 1996. Before that, most American states had been providing welfare benefits to single adults and childless married couples as well since the Great Depression, but the number of states doing so declined steeply during the 1990s, and many of the states still doling out such benefits use methods other than cash payments to render the assistance; indeed, today only two states - New Jersey and Utah - still give out cash to poverty-stricken adults who do not have child dependents. These programs were often known officially by such names as Home Relief and General Assistance. The federal welfare program for households with children was originally named Aid to Dependent Children; this was later changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (often referred to by the acronym AFDC), and since 1996 has been officially known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (or TANF).

The Welfare Trap

The welfare trap is a name for the phenomenon by which taxation and welfare systems jointly contribute to keep people on social insurance. (This is also known as the poverty trap in the UK, sometimes referring a little more generally to the loss of means-tested benefit payments as income rises.)

The welfare trap is said to work as follows: A person on welfare finds a part time job that will pay them a minimum wage of five dollars per hour, eight hours per week (for example). The forty dollars they earn will be deducted from their welfare payments leaving them with no net gain. There is often even a net loss as the government will tax that forty dollars, leaving the person worse off. There may also be extra child-care and commuting costs. For doing eight hours of work productive to society the person is now worse off than they were before. Since entering the work force often begins with jobs such as these, the welfare trap contributes to permanently excluding a section of the population from the work force.

There have been a number of solutions proposed to this problem. Typically, they involve lowering taxes on the poor, and/or not deducting small wages from welfare checks, thus allowing a person on welfare who finds a part-time minimum wage job to make a net gain.

More radical solutions have also been proposed. Some people advocate dramatically cutting welfare payments or eliminating them entirely, but this would leave the very poor no protection from starvation and death, therefore it arguably creates a bigger problem than it solves. Other schemes are the guaranteed minimum income and a negative income tax.



Program evaluation
The field of welfare often also involves program evaluation to determine if the welfare programs are working, how well they are working, and how they could be improved.
Program evaluation is essentially a set of philosophies and techniques to determine if a program 'works'. It is a practice field that has emerged, particularly in the USA, as a disciplined way of assessing the merit, value, and worth of projects and programs. Evaluation became particularly relevant in the 1960s during the period of the Great Society social programs associated with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Extraordinary sums were invested in social programs, but the means of knowing what happened, and why were not available.

Behind the seemingly simple question of whether the program works are a host of other more complex questions. For example, the first question is, what is a program supposed to do? It is often difficult to define what a program is supposed to do, so indirect indicators may be used instead. For example schools are supposed to 'educate' people. But what does 'educate' mean? Give knowledge? Teach how to think? Give specific skills? If the exact goal cannot be defined well, it is difficult to indicate whether the program 'works'.

Another question about programs is, what else do they do? There may be unintended or unforeseen consequences of a program. Some consequences may be positive and some may be negative. These unintended consequences may be as important as the intended consequences. So evaluations should measure not just whether the program does what it should be doing, but what else it may be doing.

Perhaps the most difficult part of evaluation is determining whether it is the program itself that is doing something. There may be other events or processes that are really causing the outcome, or preventing the hoped for outcome. However, due to the nature of the program, many evaluations cannot determine whether it is the program itself, or something else, is the 'cause'.

One main reason that evaluations cannot determine causation involves self selection. That is, people select themselves to participate in a program. For example, in a jobs training program, some people decide to participate, and others, for whatever reason, do not participate. It may be that those who do participate are those who are most determined to find a job, or who have the best support resources, thus allowing them to participate and allowing them to find a job. The people who participate are somehow different from those who don't participate, and it may be the difference, not the program, that leads to a successful outcome for the participants, that is, finding a job.

If programs could, somehow, use random selection, then they could determine causation. That is, if a program could randomly assign people to participate or to not participate in the program, then, theoretically, the group of people who participate would be the same as the group who did not participate, and an evaluation could 'rule out' other causes.

However, since most programs cannot use random assignment, causation cannot be determined. Evaluations can still provide useful information. For example, the outcomes of the program can be described. Thus the evaluation can say something like, "People who participate in program xyz were more likely to find a job, while people who did not participate were less likely to find a job."

If the program is fairly large, and there are many participants, and there is enough data, statistical analysis can be used sometimes to make a 'reasonable' case for the program by showing, for example, that other causes are unlikely.

Another approach is to use the evaluation to analyze the program process. So instead of focusing on the outcome (for example, did people in a jobs training program get jobs), the evaluation would focus on what the program was doing. For example, did people seem to learn the skills being taught? Did people stay in the program or did they drop out part way through? Were the teachers teaching appropriate skills? And so forth. This information could help how the program was operating.

People who do program evaluation can come from many different backgrounds, such as sociology, psychology, economics, social work or many other areas. Some graduate schools also have specific training programs for program evaluation.

Program evaluations can involve quantitative methods of social research or qualitative methods or both.