Poverty Public Assistance Programs
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President Lyndon B. Johnson initiated the countryÆs ôWar on Povertyö in his State of the Union address in 1964, with the statement ôThis administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in Americaö (ôWar on Povertyö). The War on Poverty was intended to be a campaign of social and economic development to alleviate the poverty that affected the over 35 million Americans in poverty that year (ôWar on Povertyö). Three years later, in 1967, Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta and was deeply touched by the plight of the poor there; ôchildren with bloated bellies who lived in dirt-floor shacksö painted a picture to Kennedy of the most abject poverty amidst a land of wealth and plenty (Cain 4). As civil rights leader Charles Evers later recalled, Kennedy was literally reduced to tears, asking ôHow can a country like this allow it? Maybe they just donÆt knowö (Cain 4). KennedyÆs trip received heavy coverage by network news on television and became the catalyst for profound and rapid changes in the countryÆs federal poverty programs. The subsequent rapid and extensive development of government public-assistance programs to relieve poverty resulted in what is today a welfare system designed to assist the poor. Welfare, Medicaid, and panoply government assistance programs are available to help the disadvantaged, whatever the cause of their poverty may be. Yet many question the efficacy of
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ould be ended without throwing any more money into the bottomless pit. The welfare system is unfair to everyone: to taxpayers, who must pick up the bill for failed programs; to society, whose mediating institutions of community, church, and family increasingly are pushed aside; and, most of all, to the poor themselves, who are trapped in a system that destroys opportunity for them and hope for their children. It is time to recognize that welfare can not be reformed. It should be ended. There may be relatively little that can be done for people already on welfare. The key issue is to avoid bringing more people into the cycle of welfare, illegitimacy, fatherlessness, crime, more illegitimacy, and more welfare. The only way to prevent new people from entering the failed system is to abolish programs that insulate individuals from the consequences of their actions (16).
According to Tanner, there are over 100 overlapping Federal anti-poverty programs that provide some of the same thingsù12 programs that provide food, seven different housing programs, and other similar overlaps (16). This public assistance approach is:
piecemeal-fragmented, uncoordinated, and opportunistic...this unbudgeted and unconsolidated approach to public ass
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2412
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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