Essay On Welfare In America

Welfare in America is not even a 100 years old, but it is still a very controversial subject. Everyone you meet can tell you a story about a people that have welfare and how it can work for a good cause or bad. Welfare in its most basic meaning is assistance to meet individual’s basic needs whether it is food, housing, or medical needs.

American government had a hands off approach to welfare until the Great Depression caused so much suffering for thousands and thousands of people. It wasn’t just a few people in this town or that town that were suffering, it was most of the people in most cities and towns in the country. During the Great Depression, America had never seen as much unemployment, poverty, homelessness and

Herbert Hoover was President when the Great Depression ripped through the country and he believed like the old guard that the government should not be in the business of giving monetary or other assistance, to people when businesses, churches and civic organizations could do that. The problem was that there were so many people in need that businesses, churches and civic organizations quickly became Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was governor of New York at the time, was quicker than president Hoover to see that the crisis of the Great Depression demanded some form of government intervention. Roosevelt called his plan the New Deal and it consisted of relaxation to help the approximately third of the population that was suffering the most from the worst experience of the Great Depression. Welfare as we know it was created in the form of aid to dependent children and to also help poor unhealthy families with children, and to help women keep their living households when their husbands were off looking for work. Welfare went virtually unchanged for many years except for a name change to aid to lots of families with Dependent children (AFDC).one way it affected millions of people is that for some it encouraged bring up