WELFARE REFORM ACT

Welfare Reform Act and How AFDC Was Better Then TANF

I. Welfare Reform Act

The reform affects that has become the largest program of public assistance: Aid to Families with dependent children (AFDC). Established in 1935, AFDC was intended for exceptional situations. But from of the 70 has grown rapidly by the explosion of-wedlock births. Today it is 14.2 million beneficiaries, which means that one in seven American children depend on this subsidy. The AFDC is mainly concentrated where the more pronounced the decline of marriage in depressed neighborhoods large cities, particularly among minorities, primarily blacks. It has been thus form what they call an underclass, a "fourth world" where most children grow up without the presence of father, school failure is high, few adults get jobs and are increasing crime and drugs. Mothers without husbands The correlation between this phenomenon and the family crisis is clear. The vast expansion of the AFDC-1965 in adelantecoincide with the period that has doubled the number of single parent families.

In fact, in thirty years proportion of births outside marriage has increased threefold in the total population, reaching 29.5%; among blacks this phenomenon has become mainstream, with 68% (see service 147/93). Thus, 48% of subsidies of AFDC are single mothers, and 40%, mothers abandoned by their husbands. For these situations create need states. The poverty rate for single parents (55%) is four times that present intact families. The AFDC costs around 73,000 million dollars annually. This large expenditure would be more tolerable if they serve to draw people in a hurry. But what was intended as a cure of urgency has become, in many cases, a prolonged treatment. The average duration of the grant over two years, and 30% of beneficiaries would receive for eight years or more.

Today there is general agreement: the AFDC produce side effects that tend to perpetuate situations dependence. It argues that since 1984 the sociologist Charles Murray, American Enterprise Institute, at that year he published his thesis in the book Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. Murray said the central fact has given rise to the underclass is the increase in births outside marriage. Single parent families not involve only the immediate appearance of necessity, but keep them long term. New generations, deprived of a stable, easily fail in school and then reproduce the behavior of their parents. The problems are inherited and expanded, the result is the environment of the ghettos (1).

Murray concludes that the remedy is that marriage and the family once again become the norm. This requires a change in behavior, but social assistance to survive without adopting it. Therefore concludes Murray, it would be better to delete. Although Murray clarified that this, rather than a firm proposal was a "thought experiment" at first his ideas considered too radical. However, after the years have finally been accepted in substance. No match the background somewhat Hobbesian Murray, sometimes close to social Darwinism, other teachers more liberal persuasion have recognized that public assistance, such as ...