Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 Essay

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Introduction

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (PRWORA) was a federal law of the United States enacted on 22nd August 1996. The bill was introduced by the Republicans as a strategy to ensure federal cash could be easily accessed by the poor. President Bill Clinton signed the new bill into law as a way of ensuring that he would fulfill the strategies he had used in the campaigns of 1992. The bill introduced several reforms to achieve its predetermined goals. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was one of the major reforms instituted. Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), a program introduced in the late 1980s was also supplanted so as to introduce reforms to the welfare of the people of America. This paper will discuss the problems that are faced by the people of America and how these reforms would help address such problems.

Discussion

Poverty had been a major obstacle to the people of America in the early 1920s. Poor families during that time consisted of single parent families and those families that are headed by mothers. As a result of the increasing trends of poverty, the government adopted a program called the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1935. The program had been placed under the Social Security Act of 1935 and its main aim was to assist the poverty stricken families by providing them with federal cash (Ehrenreich, 2003). However, these funds were not adequate and catered for the relief costs only. Therefore, the general welfare of the people was not adequately addressed. This led to the people migrating form the South to the North during the period between 1940 and 1970 (Ehrenreich, 2003). This migration was made possible during this migration period since the Northern laws were made soft allow people to migrate form the south regions which were mainly used for agricultural purposes to the northern regions which were mainly used for industrial purposes. Aid to Families with Dependent Children had made several restrictions on who were supposed to receive aids form the government. Key among the restrictions as noted by Midgley (2001) was “all able-bodied adults without children as well as two-parent families were originally disqualified from obtaining AFDC funds”. However, even after majority of these restrictions being removed, poverty was still DORMINA and the democrats continually criticized this program.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was proposed by PRWORA as a better replacement for AFDC. According to Sawicky (2002) “the Congressional findings in PRWORA highlighted dependency, out-of-wedlock birth, and intergenerational poverty as the main contributors to a faulty system”. Through the introduction of this reform program, PRWORA ensured that states were offered an opportunity of designing their systems of operation, provided that the states would comply to the basic federal requirements. Some of the requirements noted by Sawicky (2002) were “requiring recipients to begin working after two years of receiving benefits and placing a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds”. States have so far decided to place additional requirements to those people intending to receive aids. However, there are exemptions of not punishing children for their parents exceeding the time limit set for them to receive aids.

In order to help address the problem of dependency and unemployment, PRWORA introduced a reform program referred to as Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) in 1988 (Midgley, 2001). The US Chamber of Commerce considered the PRWORA as an important component of the workfare. The reform program was introduced to majorly train the people who received federal aids so that they could acquire basic work skills and be dependent on themselves. In addition, those people who received work skills could also be employed thereby, reducing the number of the people who depended on relief.

Conclusion

This paper has considered poverty and unemployment as the major problems that were affecting the people of America. Through the enactment of the PRWORA, reform programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) respectively were introduced to address these programs. These reform programs were improvements on earlier programs and were therefore effective in addressing the problems.

References

Ehrenreich, B. (2003). A Step Back to the Workhouse. New York: New York University Press.

Midgley, J. (2001). “The United States: Welfare, Work, and Development”. International Journal of Social Welfare 10 (4): 284–293.

Sawicky, M. (2002). “The Mirage of Welfare Reform”. Working USA 6 (3): 55–69.

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IvyPanda. 2021. "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996." December 30, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personal-responsibility-and-work-opportunity-reconciliation-act-of-1996/.

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