Welfare—A Complicated Issue
Poverty is an issue in the United States that has many people concerned. In the richest nation in the world, most believe that it is unacceptable that anyone should lack the basic necessities of life. Although most agree that it a problem, there are many disagreements about what can or should be done about it. The government supports a large number of families, especially women and children, with tax dollars collected from citizens. Not surprisingly, there is much controversy surrounding the spending of public funds on people who are not working to support themselves. In her essay titled, “Welfare Is Still Necessary for Women and Children in the U.S.”, Chrystal Sabatke endeavors to point out flaws in some of the arguments posed by opponents of government funded welfare programs. She believes that it is “necessary for the government to maintain a supportive welfare system for the women and children of our country” until systems are set in place that provide for an adequate education, quality childcare, and a livable minimum wage. (Sabatke, pg. 588)
Those who oppose welfare often claim that the main cause of poverty is laziness, citing shocking stories of women purposely having babies out of wedlock in order to qualify for more benefits. Sabatke disagrees with this assessment. She asserts that the main cause of poverty, especially among women, is lack of education. She gives us examples of girls from troubled homes dropping out of high school with low grades, often pregnant, who start out life on a path of poverty. She claims that the public school system in America only meets the needs of the successful student and believes that they need to provide also “for the students that are not doing well.” (Sabatke, pg 588) She also believes that they should be educated in the use of birth control and on the economic disadvantages of having children at an early age.
Although Sabatke is partially correct, her theory concerning the cause of poverty is oversimplified. The government has already spent billions of dollars on educating children. Every child in this country has equal access to a free, taxpayer funded education, but students aren’t taking advantage of the opportunities that are available. Some children come from bad situations, and some will make destructive choices that the schools can do little about. There are many teachers who really do care about the children they teach and do what they can to help troubled students, but there is only so much they can reasonably do. Public schools are not designed to be able to counter the effects of a bad family life. Even free college is available to the poor, through Pell Grants and other assistance. Sabatke’s claims that the government isn’t doing enough to provide education to the poor are simply untrue.
As for birth control, teaching students the use of birth control does not lower the teenage birth rate. The teen pregnancy rate has risen in the past couple of years after a fourteen year decline. Some have wrongly attributed this decline to teaching kids about birth control in school. However, a study comparing the teen pregnancy rate between 1991 and 1996, when the teen pregnancy dropped to the lowest rate since the 70’s, shows us a different picture. Karl Zinzmeister and Eli Lehrer report the following in The American Enterprise. “A new study in the Journal of Adolescent and Family Health, however, shows that relatively little in the reduction of the pregnancy rate of unmarried teens can be attributed to contraception among the sexually active. Instead, fully two-thirds of the drop was caused by higher levels of teenage sexual abstinence.”(Zinzmeister, Lehrer) It goes on to say that “birth rates among unwed teenagers…actually increased among the sexually active.”(Zinzmeister, Lehrer)
The causes of poverty are very complex and can’t be narrowed down to one or even two or three causes. Some people, admittedly, are poor because they are lazy. Some of the horror stories are true, and unfortunately, many abuses of the system exist. Destructive choices exacerbated by the breakdown of families and the destruction of the moral fiber in our country cause many to end up in poverty. But not everyone who is poor is necessarily lacking in character or motivation. Many people are poor because they were raised in a poor family themselves. Although people “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and work their way out of poverty all the time, it can be a difficult and long process. It is especially difficult among those who do not understand what it takes to get out of poverty and lack a good role model to show them the way. Lack of motivation can be fixed. Poor choices and family backgrounds of poverty can be overcome. But these are not the only causes of poverty either--there are still other issues to consider, such as health problems and mental disabilities. “[A recent study] found a high incidence of mental health problems in poor women, including those on TANF; more than half of the participants (63%) reported concurrent mental and physical health problems in themselves as well as in at least 1 of their children, whereas only 36% of employed women reported these problems.” (Hildebrande and Stevens)
Sabatke’s second point is that the lack of childcare places single women with children at a disadvantage when it comes to escaping poverty. She believes that Welfare to Work programs are not realistic, and that welfare opponents who would force mothers to place their children in daycare in order to work don’t care about children. She argues that if Americans really cared about family values, they would want mothers to stay home and take care of their children.
Eugenie Hildebrandt and Patricia Stevens in American Journal of Public Health quote a Women’s Employment Study report as saying that “when mothers repeatedly moved between working and being on welfare, or were in stable jobs with irregular schedules, their children were more likely to be anxious and depressed. (Hildebrant and Stevens) The article also says that “subsequent research identified more behavior problems in the children of low-income working mothers, suggesting that mothers’ employment may impose risks on development.” (Hildebrant and Stevens)
Sabatke also points out that even when single mothers do find employment, they often continue to struggle to make ends meet due to the difficulties of finding entry-level jobs that pay enough to provide for the needs of them and their children. Women who might desire to provide for themselves may still end up dependent on government assistance. A minimum wage job simply doesn’t generate enough income to pay not only for food, clothing, and shelter, but child care on top of that. Sabatke quotes the Wall Street Journal as calling the Job Training Partnership Act “a sham” for offering minimum wage jobs to poor young women in an effort to remove them from the welfare rolls. (Sabatke, pg 589)
Sabatke is correct that encouraging women to take low-wage jobs accomplishes little to help women get out of poverty. The minimum wage isn’t enough to support families—those kinds of jobs are better suited for teenagers who live at home and are entering the job market for the first time, or maybe retirees who want to do something to fill their days. No one should be expected, nor expect others, to support a household with a minimum wage job. The problem started back in the late 1990’s when the government welfare program, TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), was first implemented. TANF was designed to be a program in which lower income participants would receive cash benefits for a limited amount of time (a total of sixty months one can be on the program in a lifetime) while they worked their way out of poverty. Because of the limited amount of time participants could qualify for this program, social workers strongly encouraged them to enter the labor market as quickly as possible, even if it meant taking a low wage job. At first the employment rate went up, but soon there were so many lower income people applying for the entry level jobs that there weren’t enough to go around. Many on TANF have graduated from the program, but remain in poverty, dependent on government assistance. (Hildebrande and Stevens)
Sabatke concludes that ending poverty among women and children will require education, availability of affordable child care, and a livable minimum wage. Until these things are implemented, she believes that welfare should remain as it is in order to provide for the basic needs of women and children. Even though welfare programs have not succeeded in lifting the poor out of poverty as many had hoped, to eliminate welfare entirely would have disastrous effects among those in poverty and could even negatively affect society. Although this is true, Sabatke’s approach to eliminating poverty is grossly oversimplified. The causes of poverty are extremely complex and cannot be easily or quickly solved. The solutions for poverty are unique for each individual and need to be addressed on an individual, case-by-case basis.
Works Cited
Hildebrandt, E., and P. Stevens. "Impoverished Women With Children and No Welfare Benefits: The Urgency of Researching Failures of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program. " American Journal of Public Health 99.5 (2009): 793-801. Research Library, ProQuest. Web. 24 Sep. 2009
Sabatke, Chrystal. “Welfare Is Still Necessary for Women and Children in the U.S.” The Prentice Hall Guide For College Writers pp. 587-590. Pearson Education Inc., 2008
Zinsmeister, Karl, and Eli Lehrer. "TEEN PREGNANCY SURPRISE. " The American Enterprise 1 Jan. 2004: Research Library, ProQuest. Web. 25 Sep. 2009.
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