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For two years, Ashley Murphy was raising two children while making $9 an hour at a retail job and receiving welfare.
Murphy said it was not possible to support a family on that income. She quit her job to enter a career-training program, hoping to get off welfare. "I feel like they kind of look down on you in a way," she said.
Her story is not uncommon among welfare recipients, who have come into the spotlight as states try to regain control of how welfare money can be spent. Often, the resources available to people on welfare are not adequate, with few training programs or jobs available to help them gain a steady income.
Welfare began in its current form in 1935 under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Social Security Act, the aid to dependent children program to help subsidize families that had lost an income-producing father.
In the late 1970s, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan criticized the program as "a poverty trap, a creator and reinforcer of dependency."
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a law aimed at bringing welfare recipients into the workforce. Clinton said the law would "end welfare as we have come to know it."
The initiative helped lower the number of families on welfare; 20 years ago, 12 million families used the program, and today that number has dropped to 3.5 million.
But now, federal investment in welfare programs like job training has decreased, making it difficult for people on welfare to find alternatives, said Neil Sullivan, who works in job placement in Boston.
"The result is, welfare recipients languish in the system, and many others are rejected from the system and left to make it on their own. And, quite frankly, they don’t," he said.
And with an increasing income gap, it is difficult now to move from low-paying jobs to higher-paying ones, job counselor Alina Gardner said.
Warm up questions
- What kinds of social programs were created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s?
- What is welfare? How does it work?
Critical thinking questions
- Who does welfare help? Without welfare, how would those people gain the resources that they need?
- What interest do state governments have in controlling how welfare is spent?
- Is the welfare system helpful to society? Why or why not?
