Run Welfare free essay sample

The current use of government-run welfare systems is an ineffective and inefficient way to help solve poverty and unemployment in urban areas. Flawed in almost every way, it requires immediate improvement and attention, and could be improved with privatization of many welfare programs, including prisons, charity and housing. Welfare can be improved in more ways than one, and one of the biggest problems in need of a fix is the government’s attitude toward the programs they run. Welfare may have been created with good intentions, but it has failed to meet its stated goal of reducing poverty. Many critics of the welfare system charge that providing a steady income to the needy encourages idleness, resulting in very little improvement in the employment rate of those receiving benefits from the government. Not only that, but the recipients don’t receive any special attention from the government, or incentives to become employed, resulting in a downward spiral of problems too big for money alone to solve. We will write a custom essay sample on Run Welfare or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Private efforts have been much more successful than the federal governments failed attempt at charity. America is the most generous nation on earth. Americans already contribute more than $125 billion annually to charity. Private charities have been more successful than government welfare for several reasons. First, private charities are able to individualize their approach to the circumstances of poor people in ways that governments can never do. Government regulations must be designed to treat all similarly situated recipients alike. Glenn C. Loury of Boston University explains the difference between welfare and private charities on that point. Because citizens have due process rights which cannot be fully abrogated . . . public judgments must be made in a manner that can be defended after the fact, sometimes even in court. The result is that most government programs rely on the simple provision of cash or other goods and services without any attempt to differentiate between the needs of recipients. For example, if you needed something very important for a job interview, a governme nt welfare program can only tell you to wait for your next welfare check, which will probably arrive long after the interview is over. However, a private charity can look into its own funds and get you what you need on the same day. The sheer size of government programs works against individualization. For example, in the book, There Are No Children Here, LaJoe, the mother of the children in the story always applied to the government for a better place to live. However, with so many cases that the government welfare workers have to go through, it becomes hard to remember that each case belongs to another human being. Some workers even admitted the recipients were only a â€Å"number† that either did or did not qualify for benefits. In her another book, Tyranny of Kindness, by Theresa Funiciello, who was a former welfare mother, Theresa described the dehumanizing world of the government welfare system- a system in which regulations and bureaucracy rule all else. It is a system in which illiterate homeless people with mental illnesses are handed 17-page forms to fill out, women nine months pregnant are told to verify their pregnancies, a woman who was raped is told she is ineligible for benefits because she cant list the babys father on the required form. It is a world where the government is totally not communicating nor helping those in poverty, while just making things worse and more complicated. Private charities are not bound by such bureaucratic restrictions. In addition to being better able to target individual needs, private charities are much better able to target assistance to those who really need help. Because eligibility requirements for government welfare programs are arbitrary and cannot be changed to fit individual circumstances, many people in genuine need do not receive assistance, while benefits often go to people who do not really need them. Private charity also has a better record of actually delivering aid to recipients. Surprisingly little of the money being spent on federal and state social welfare programs actually reaches recipients. According to the CATO institute Policy report of 1996, in 1965, 70 cents of every dollar spent by the government to fight poverty went directly to poor people. Today, 70 cents of every dollar goes, not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor. Few private charities have the bureaucratic overhead and inefficiency of government programs. In general, a private charity is much more likely to be targeted to short-term emergency assistance than to long-term dependence. Thus, private charity provides a safety net, not a way of life. This is because private charities may demand that the poor change their behavior in exchange for assistance. For example, someone might be asked to not do drugs in order to receive aid. Private charities are much more likely than government programs to offer counseling and one-on-one follow-up rather than simply provide a check. Private charity requires a different attitude on the part of both recipients and donors. For recipients, private charity is not an entitlement but a gift carrying reciprocal obligations. As Father Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute describes it, An impersonal check given without any expectations for responsible behavior leads to a damaged sense of self-worth. The beauty of local [private charitable] efforts to help the needy is that . . . they make the individual receiving the aid realize that he must work to live up to the expectations of those helping him out. Private charity is based on having individuals vote with their own time, money, and energy. There is no compassion in spending someone elses moneyeven for a good cause. True compassion means the â€Å"giving of yourself†. Welfare allows individuals to escape their obligation to be truly charitable. Another aspect of the government that could be improved if managed in better hands includes federal prisons. For example, the case of British prisons in the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, there was a rapid rise in the prison population and the directly related escalation of running costs and difficulties of running a consistently efficient service, making living conditions for many prisoners highly unpleasant. Privatization was seen by many policy-makers as providing an important step forward towards improving conditions, bringing about change and innovation, and improving the overall quality of the British prison system. The private sector was believed to be capable of delivering a better standard of service with greater efficiency and a higher degree of accountability. Subsequently, the last decade has seen a steady growth of private sector involvement in the British prison system. Added to this, staff morale has also fallen and widespread scepticism of the value and objective of prisoner programmes has grown. It has been clear for some time that widespread changes and new strategies are needed in order to tackle the problems within the prison system. It is important to now look at how it is proposed that privatizing Britains prisons will lead to such improvements in standards. Supporters of the privatization of Britains prisons argue that there are a number of potential benefits directly associated with the commercial competition that rivatization would produce. For example, through the creation of a market force private organizations would be encouraged to maintain and indeed improve upon high standards of cost effectiveness and efficiency in order to achieve the successful renewal of current government contracts and to compete for new service contracts. As the private sector is motivated by competition and profit it is dedicated to providing maximum satisfac tion to its clients and customers at a minimum cost. Alternatively, in the public sector; bureaucrats are rewarded not according to the performance of their organization but according to the size and budget of their agencies, thus they are more interested in just getting the job done than in increasing their efficiency. It is stated that private correctional services can operate more efficiently, because of less bureaucratic red tape and a higher motivation to control costs. Privatization, many claim leads to heightened accountability within the prison system. It is argued that the government is in an ideal position to impose strict guidelines and include detailed service standards within contracts, making companies readily accountable and putting them at risk of financial penalties for failure to fulfil them. As the government no longer have to defend its own shortcomings it can be more active in challenging private companies for failing to meet contractual obligations. Most private contractors accept and appreciate the value of full time independent monitors who are present within private prisons acting as an additional guarantee of contract compliance. This situation applies to almost everything managed by the government, and although everything it runs isn’t always bad, there are many advantages that privatization hold over the government. Just like in the previous two situations of federal prisons and government charities, the same thing can be applied to subsidized housing. Workers managing the subsidized housing that welfare recipients are living in have no incentive to control costs, and workers in the buildings have no incentive to provide good services. In this situation, the people living in poverty have very few chances to get out, and are usually stuck living in their shoddy apartments for their entire lives. There will also be few positive role models within the community, since everyone poor is living together. Government workers rarely get fired for failing to do their job properly, especially in places of poverty, because there aren’t many people to properly manage them. Although in most cases these people can be responsible, dependable and caring, there is little consequence for not doing their job right. A report on this was done on 20/20 in an ABC report with John Stossel. In the report, he compared a government run housing project to the same building it once was after it was sold and renovated by private investors. The residents of the original building complained about how little attention they were given. The hallway lights were always broken, the plumbing never worked properly, and when maintenance decided to show up to fix one of the many things that never work, they always left and did a poor job. In the novel, There are no Children here, LaJoe is caught in a similar situation, when she discovers in the basement of her apartment brand new stoves. These stoves have just been sitting in the rotting basement for years, and it angered LaJoe that they were neglected for so long, since she was waiting to replace her broken stove. In Stossel’s report, the overall efficiency of every worker improved once a private company took over. They immediately fixed what was never done for the residents, not because they were more competent, but they were serious about their job, and had incentive to do it right. Welfare may have started with the best of intentions, but at its current state is need of improvement. Welfare has torn apart the social fabric of our society. Everyone is worse off. The poor are dehumanized, seduced into a system from which it is terribly difficult to escape. The work ethic is eroded. Such is the legacy of welfare. If welfare recipients realize their benefits are going to stop, it will cause them to search much harder for alternatives. Due to its current ineffectiveness and inefficiency, the current use of government-run welfare on prisons, charities and even housing should be replaced with a privatized system. By doing this, it can improve almost every aspect of its program, creating more opportunities and a better environment for everyone to live in.