The establishment of work–welfare programs in the United States and Britain: Politics, ideas, and institutions

1992 ◽  
pp. 217-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond S. King
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Ideas And Institutions

Government Programs Can Reduce Poverty

2021 ◽  
pp. 114-123
Author(s):  
Mark Robert Rank ◽  
Lawrence M. Eppard ◽  
Heather E. Bullock
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
The United States ◽  
Poverty Rate ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Government Programs ◽  
Transfer Rates ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
The Social

Chapter 15 provides an analysis of the effectiveness of social welfare programs in reducing poverty. Comparing pretransfer with post-transfer rates of poverty across a range of OECD countries demonstrates that poverty can be substantially reduced. The myth that government programs do not work in addressing poverty is simply incorrect. A number of European countries are able to cut their rates of poverty by up to 80 percent as a result of robust social policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality. In the United States, the Social Security and Medicare programs have been particularly effective in reducing the poverty rate among the elderly population.

scholarly journals Tribal child welfare practice in the United States

Social Work ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Byers ◽  
Dallas Pettigrew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Federal Policies ◽  
State Compliance ◽  
Tribal Nations

Tribal child welfare in what is now the United States encompasses hundreds of tribal nations engaged in a government-to-government relationship with the United States. Please note that tribal, native, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native American are used interchangeably. Each tribe has distinct languages and customs. Within this diversity the factors that bind tribal nations to make a discussion of tribal child welfare meaningful are communal childrearing, colonization, trauma, contemporary disparities, sovereign status, and detrimental federal policies. Communal cultures provide children with multiple caregivers that assure the youngest are cared for daily. This web of relations combined with high levels of respect for children within the life cycle guarded against abuse and neglect prior to colonization. The establishment of the United States, and federal-level assimilation policies created immense trauma and cultural disruption for tribal nations and child welfare. Government-funded boarding schools and the practice of placing tribal children in non-native homes are two specific assimilation practices that explicitly targeted children. The ability of tribal nations to protect their children and maintain their cultures has been strengthened by a federal law designed to give tribal nation’s a stake in child welfare proceedings. Many tribes now have their own child welfare programs, courts, and other services. State compliance with the law is an ongoing issue. Increased collaboration, respect for the sovereign status of tribes, and evaluation with clear implications for noncompliance needs to ensue are necessary to fully empower tribal child welfare. In addition, truth and reconciliation related to the separation of children from family and culture based on past federal policy practices is necessary to foster communal and generational healing for American Indian and Alaska Native peoples.

Cash Assistance

Getting By ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-102
Author(s):  
Helen Hershkoff ◽  
Stephen Loffredo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Work Requirements ◽  
Assistance Programs ◽  
Cash Assistance ◽  
General Assistance ◽  
Low Income Families ◽  
Eligibility Requirements

This chapter discusses the public provision of cash assistance to needy families and individuals in the United States. The chapter briefly surveys the constitutional and international law status of a right to subsistence, then focuses on the three main cash relief programs in the United States: the state-federal co-operative Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), which generally serves very low-income families with minor children; the federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which serves low-income elderly, blind, or disabled people; and residual, “general assistance” programs, operated by some states to provide small cash grants to destitute families and individuals that do not qualify for other income support. The chapter provides a detailed account of the financial, categorical, and immigration-related eligibility requirements for these programs, the conditions attached to receipt of assistance (such as work requirements), and the processes for application and appeal of agency decisions. The chapter also examines the history, evolution, and social impacts of welfare programs for families in the United States and offers some critical perspectives on relief policies.

Evil Abroad and at Home

2021 ◽  
pp. 247-268
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
World Government ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Christian Conservatives ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Actions

This chapter revisits the Cold War world, divided between capitalists and communists, a conflict that these curricula cast as a good-versus-evil morality play. American evangelicals allied with the Republican Party. They connected religion and corporate capitalism and rejected Democrats as New Deal socialists. These curricula praise Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to root out communism in the United States and condemn internationalism, especially the United Nations, as fostering a totalitarian, one-world government. They see the United States’ wars in Korea and Vietnam as insufficiently committed to the fight against communism. These textbooks weigh whether other nations developed collective political actions or social welfare programs; they deplore both as socialism or incipient communism. Decolonization made new parts of the world ripe for American capitalism or Soviet communism. They and their leaders were good or evil depending on whether they subscribed to the agenda of Christian conservatives.

scholarly journals Layering, Kludgeocracy and Disability Rights: The Limited Influence of the Social Model in American Disability Policy

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Burke ◽  
Jeb Barnes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Disability Policy ◽  
Disability Rights ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Disability Rights Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range

The United States has been a leader in the creation of disability rights law, providing a policy template for other nations. Yet the social model, the animating philosophy behind the disability rights movement, has had little effect on the wide range of welfare programs that serve people with disabilities. These programs, whose creation preceded the modern disability rights movement, reflect a medical model of disability that is at odds with the social model. Analysing the Americans with Disabilities Act (which embodies the social model) and Social Security Disability Insurance (the largest welfare program for people with disabilities), we explore how and why this layering of contradictory disability rights and welfare programs developed and how it has been maintained. We argue that the tension between these policies engendered a series of patches, or ‘kludges’, that allow the policies to coexist without meaningful synthesis. We contend that the United States is particularly prone to this layering of ‘tense policies’, but that it is likely characteristic of disability policy in many nations. Finally we argue that accurate benchmarking of disability rights regimes across nations requires analysts to dig through all the layers of disability policy.

Impairment and Disability Compensation Systems in the United States

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Mohammed I. Ranavaya ◽  
James B. Talmage
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fault System ◽  
Workers Compensation ◽  
Department Of Veterans Affairs ◽  
Federal Employees ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Compensation Systems ◽  
The Right

Abstract Although several states use the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (AMA Guides) when they evaluate individuals with impairments and disabilities, various disability systems exist in the United States. Disability and compensation systems have arisen to ensure that disadvantaged members of society with a medically determinable impairment, which may lead to a disability, have recourse to compensation from various sources, including state and federal workers’ compensation laws, veterans’ benefits, social welfare programs, and legal avenues. Each of these has differing definitions of disability, entitlement, benefits, procedures of claims application, adjudication, and the roles and relative weights assigned to medical vs administrative deliberations. Workers’ compensation statutes were enacted because of inadequacies of recovery from claims for injured workers under common law. Workers’ compensation is a no-fault system adopted to resolve the dilemmas of tort claims by providing automatic coverage to employees injured during the course of employment; in exchange for coverage, employees forego the right to sue the employer except for wanton neglect. Other workers’ compensation programs in the United States include the Federal Employees Compensation Act; the Federal Employers Liability Act (railroads); the Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act); the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act; the Department of Veterans Affairs; Social Security; and private, long-term disability insurance.

Gender

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Reese ◽  
Stephanie D'Auria ◽  
Sandra Loughrin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Maternal Employment ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Lone Mothers ◽  
And Gender

Reconceptualizing welfare-state regimes in terms of the interactions between markets, states, and gender and family relations, cross-national feminist scholarship reveals that the United States is relatively more "market-based" in its approach to both employment and care work than other wealthy democracies. Consequently female poverty, especially of lone mothers, is far higher in the United States compared to other wealthy democracies. Feminist scholarship also highlights the ways in which U.S. welfare programs are deeply gendered in terms of their underlying philosophies, recipient populations, and distribution of benefits. Feminist scholars have reconceptualized the origins and development of the U.S. welfare state in terms of a "two-track" system that has reinforced both gender and racial inequalities. Programs serving mostly men, such as veterans' benefits or unemployment insurance, provided relatively generous benefits and portrayed recipients as deserving. In contrast, programs serving mostly women, such as mothers' pensions, were relatively stingy, restrictive, and stigmatizing. At the beginning of the 20th century, reformers justified welfare for lone mothers in maternalist terms, emphasizing the value of full-time motherhood for child development. Support for maternalist welfare policies, although never strong, was further weakened as maternal employment grew and as more women of color and unwed mothers gained access to welfare. Since the late 1960s, efforts to reform the welfare system led to the expansion of federal welfare-to-work programs, which have largely tracked participants into low-wage jobs. Child-care subsidies also expanded in this period, but have remained relatively minimal and distributed in ways that reinforced class divisions among working families.

Poverty and Social Policy in the United States

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Ziliak
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cash Income ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Transfer Programs ◽  
Income Transfers

The interaction between poverty and social policy is an issue of longstanding interest in academic and policy circles. There are active debates on how to measure poverty, including where to draw the threshold determining whether a family is deemed to be living in poverty and how to measure resources available. These decisions have profound impacts on our understanding of the anti-poverty effectiveness of social welfare programs. In the context of the United States, focusing solely on cash income transfers shows little progress against poverty over the past 50 years, but substantive gains are obtained if the resource concept is expanded to include in-kind transfers and refundable tax credits. Beyond poverty, the research literature has examined the effects of social welfare policy on a host of outcomes such as labor supply, consumption, health, wealth, fertility, and marriage. Most of this work finds the disincentive effects of welfare programs on work, saving, and family structure to be small, but the income and consumption smoothing benefits to be sizable, and some recent work has found positive long-term effects of transfer programs on the health and education of children. More research is needed, however, on how to measure poverty, especially in the face of deteriorating quality of household surveys, on the long-term consequences of transfer programs, and on alternative designs of the welfare state.

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