Welfare in America: Good or Bad?

From the Red Scare of the early 1900’s to the Era of McCarthyism during the 50’s and even today, communism and socialism have always been characteristically un-American ideas. However, ever since the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, people have become so accustomed to the welfare state that they do not even realize it is there. Taking the form of subsidies, social security, Medicaid and much more, policies that could be characterized as more socialist than capitalist can be seen throughout American society. While some of these policies go unquestioned and to an extent unnoticed, the validity of social welfare and whether or not poverty relief is effective is a widely debated issue.
Opponents of welfare argue that by making people ineligible for welfare benefits it forces them to go out and find work, ultimately making them better off than if they had been on welfare. A study done by Harvard professor, George J. Borjas, found that welfare reform under President Clinton in 1996 actually reduced poverty levels among immigrant families by taking them off of welfare. Further, critics of welfare argue that not only does welfare not reduce poverty, but it creates what is called an intergenerational transfer of dependency on welfare. Meaning that kids growing up in a family that receives welfare are more likely to grow up to use welfare themselves. This is supported by a limited study done by John J. Antel, in which he argues that children become accustomed to being on welfare and are therefore insusceptible to the stigma associated with being on welfare that might have encouraged them to not receive it. He also argues that the children can even learn how to extract the most benefit from the system because they are so used to it.
Proponents of welfare, on the other hand, like to point out that very often when people discuss the poverty levels in America they do not take into account all the benefits that people receive from the government. Tim Worstall, argues that the American welfare system is actually fairly effective at relieving poverty, but you have to include the welfare benefits people receive when determining how well poverty rates are doing because that is what the benefits are for. Beyond this, people will also point to the fact that welfare definitively helps those in extreme poverty, people living on less than two dollars a day. Since the reform in the 90's took lots of people off of welfare extreme poverty in America has doubled, showing how welfare is truly beneficial to those people.
In the end, there is no definitive answer as to which side of the argument is right. Depending on how data is analyzed different results can be determined, and it is clear that further research needs to be done to truly understand the issue. Until then however, each of us individually will have to decide what we believe.

Bibliography:

http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=941bc5a1-4938-4cfb-89c6-4c5cf9a1fdf2%40sessionmgr4007

https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/journal/RE2016.pdf

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/08/americas-surprisingly-efficient-and-effective-welfare-benefits-system/#21a360bd4cb5

www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/22/the-enduring-legacy-of-welfare-reform-20-years-later/?utm_term=.91709c7ccd67x