Kyle Erickson 12/01/2008 N. McCarty RVC English 101 *Welfare and Social* Responsibility “Welfare. Read word to yourself and ask what images surround it. The first thing is probably women and children. 97% of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the federal welfare program) is made up of women and children. Young women? Not really, the average age of a mother receiving welfare is 29, and only 7.6% are under the age of 20. Is she black? Possibly, because the composition of the welfare class is about the same percentage of black and white. Lots of kids? The average welfare family has 2.9 members. That means a single mom would have 1.9 children. Forever "dependent?” the average length of a stay on welfare is 22 months. We certainly think that they don't work. Do we think of welfare as expensive? AFDC represents just over 1% of the national budget. If welfare is not about young women having lots of babies and living their life off the generosity of the state, and if it's a minuscule part of the federal budget, why have Republicans chosen it as their pilot issue? Why, when our Federal Reserve is raising interest rates and attempting to maintain an unemployment rate of 6.2%, and when a job at minimum wage would still leave a mother with two children 23% below the poverty line, is entrance into the paid workforce being pushed as the solution for poverty?” (According to Ralph Nader in: Cutting Corporate Welfare)
If we are serious about getting people to work, we need relevant training programs, child care provisions, and efforts at job creation. These at least were discussed during the Clinton presidency, if the plan was in many other ways as punitive and insubstantial as the Republican plan. The Republican ideology is particularly clever because it shifts the entire frame of debate from the structural to the moral. It implies, that if those people would just clean up their morals and stop being so lazy that they could have a place in the American...