The focus of the welfare debate has changed dramatically since the 1980s. During the early 1980s President Ronald Reagan attacked waste, fraud, and abuse in the welfare system, the conventional attack upon public welfare at the time. Since the late 1980s, however, the issue of welfare reform has focused on work programs as a means of getting people off welfare and keeping them off. Both among Repu…
In 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the nation's first federal welfare program. At that time, 88 percent of welfare families received assistance because the father of the family had died. Since the nation had a surplus of workers and a shortage of work, keeping widows at home allowed mothers to care for their children and also …
The purpose of the TANF provisions differs significantly from that of the JOBS program. The stated purpose of JOBS was to ensure that needy families with children "obtain the education, training and employment that will help them avoid long-term welfare dependence." The purpose of the TANF is to "end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job prepa…
Job availability is one of the most difficult challenges facing states in moving recipients to work from welfare. This challenge includes both the location of job opportunities and the suitability of jobs for the skill levels and past work experience of most welfare recipients. If suitable jobs cannot be found, states must create work-activity placements. The challenge of appropriate job opportuni…
The offer of affordable child care is one critical element in encouraging low-income mothers to seek and keep jobs. A recent U.S. General Accounting Office report noted that "any effort to move more low-income mothers from welfare to work will need to take into account the importance of child-care subsidies to the likelihood of success." A study in Minneapolis discovered that about o…
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