History Of Welfare Reform

Before 1935, welfare was not a very widespread or prominent movement, largely due to the lack of an extreme economic depression leading up to 1929. Government involvement in poverty outreach was present, but very minimal. For the most part, the government left churches and volunteer agencies as the primary source of aid to the poor. Congress did contribute to several programs to help those in need, and many states had already generated their own welfare programs, but there were no programs that the federal government itself had initiated at this point. One example of these programs was called the Civil War Pension Program, and it provided aid to Civil War veterans and their families (“History of Welfare”). Another aspect of welfare leading …show more content…
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” (“Respectfully”). This is a popular Chinese proverb by Lao Tzu that relates to the topic of welfare because it is saying that there are countless more benefits to helping someone in long term ways, such as finding a job, than in short fixes, which is what welfare often does. Welfare also raised taxes to extraordinary rates (Smiley). When employers were forced to pay more taxes, they had less money to hire new people. This was one of the reasons that unemployment during the Great Depression reached an all-time high of 25 percent. One popular opinion about the New Deal was that the government enacted it as a means to please the people who felt that the government should be more involved. Richard Lamm, the former Governor of Colorado, said, “America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford… The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children” (“Richard Lamm”). This means that even though it seemed like a good idea to try to sharply swing the economy back in place, the real risks and repercussions were not fully considered, particularly concerning taxes. The New Deal was a well-meaning plan, but its lack of educated foresight provided many negative consequences for the American people for decades to …show more content…
James Madison wrote in a letter to Edmund Pendleton, “If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands;… in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress…and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America” (Barton). In this powerful statement, Madison is saying that if Congress takes over the responsibility for the welfare of American citizens, there will then be no end to the control that it could place over America. Thomas Jefferson shared these same views, and he stated in a letter to Joseph Milligan in 1816 that “to take from one…in order to spare others…is to violate…the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it” (“Founders”). Jefferson means that it is unconstitutional to take resources from a prosperous man and give them to someone who has not reached the same level of industry because it would be interfering with the American right to receive the fruits of one’s own labor. The idea of the government taking over the system of welfare was rejected by several of America’s founders, but their warnings were not heeded when the New Deal