Media for Charity

Why we need welfare reform By Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D. February 24, 2014 Excerpt: 

"Why the need for welfare reform? Consider what five decades of big-government “solutions” have brought us. President Lyndon Johnson vowed “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” Today, Washington runs more than 80 means-tested aid programs providing cash, food, housing, medical care, and social services to the poor and near-poor, and we’ve spent close to $20 trillion. Yet the poverty rate remains nearly as high as it was in the mid-1960s.

This is hardly surprising, given the fact that government programs tend to provide the wrong incentives. An example is President Obama’s recent proposal to increase the refundable earned-income tax credit for adults who don’t support children.

As poverty expert Robert Rector points out, this tax credit won’t encourage work. It simply discourages marriage by rewarding fathers who don’t marry or support their children. If they marry, after all, the subsidy is eliminated.

This is unacceptable. The way our welfare programs are currently run is a huge and irresponsible waste of money, of course, but more than that, it’s not working. It’s ill serving the very people it’s supposed to help, and wrecking lives in the process. We need to require that all able-bodied adults who receive government aid either work, prepare for work or at least be looking for a job.

We also need to rebuild marriage in low-income communities. More than 40 percent of children are born outside marriage, and much of their lives will be spent on welfare and in poverty. “Even worse,” Mr. Rector adds, “their chance of success in adult life will be significantly impaired by the absence of a father in the home.” We have to break this cycle."