Sunday, February 19, 2017

FAMILY COURTS CREATE WELFARE ENVIRONMENT

Ethnic and Racial Differences in Welfare Receipt in the United States Excerpts from: Robert A.Moffitt and Peter T.Gottschalk. First my view: Why is there the concept that Welfare is associated to dependency of minorities and has a racial component. One can readily admit major institutions in America have contributed to social dependency. I am not going to make the distinction by ethnicity, but to regard dependency as being brought about by institutions taking advantage of minority vulnerabilities.

 There always seem to be an institution at one point or another that goes to the extreme at making dependency a part of the social fabric of America. Family courts seem to carve a sector of American society using Minorities and other vulnerable components of society as their source for sustaining dependents on social services in. The court realizes an important number of these dependents are also target by politicians who depend on that sector for maintaining the numbers necessary to win political positions. Family courts seem to recognize this cover and therefore uses its judicial advantage to grow that segment of communities geared at sustaining social dependency on handout welfare services.

 Family courts are calculating in their efforts, utilizing discipline, education, health and social relationships all necessary to integrate into society as tools to cultivate this community. One tool used by family court is degrading families reducing their capacity to provide necessary resources for child competitive development. A simple way to achieve this fate is by ensuring a child has access to one parent, while access to the other parent is restricted using legal maneuvers and procedures that severely complicate the ability of both parents to influence the lives of children. Family courts thrive by creating partial orphans of minority children.

 Also destroying parent economic to power that ensures while parent is being economically degraded by the court the other is sentenced to a life of welfare unable to be dependent or to guide children to a state of independence. One only need to visit court 246 Houston Texas and witness a case in progress, then speak with the participants inquiring as to what took them to the court, differences between the parties and their expectations for children concluding the trial. You would soon realize that difference are mostly minimal and most families would settle with little effort, once children were cared for with input from both parents and that no party was unfairly dealt with.

 This is not in the best interest of family courts since their motive seem to be long term sustaining of a system that creates and maintains dependency on hand out social welfare services. It has been well documented that dependence on welfare compromised self esteem, waste resources, limits innovation and compromise growth. Welfare reduces ambition and its effects can be experienced affecting one generation to another. Social dependence is a chronic illness encouraged to exist by institutions like family courts to isolate a segment of society in order to maintain a class of disadvantaged members that can be exploited, oppressed yet serve the purpose of determining a demography useful for politicians and other social experimentation.

 The general public in the United States has long linked welfare and race. This association has played a major role in attitudes toward the welfare system and in the politics of welfare reform. Attitudes toward welfare spending are correlated with racial attitudes (Bobo and Smith, 1994:389), and opposition to welfare among White voters has been shown to be related to attitudes toward race (Gilens, 1995, 1996). Many analysts have noted that the general popular perception that minority racial and ethnic groups dominate the welfare rolls has been historically incorrect, for minorities have historically accounted for no more of the welfare caseload than White families.

 Ethnic minorities do, however, have higher rates of participation in the welfare system than does the majority White population, given their lesser total numbers. Thus, the popular perception has some basis in fact, if interpreted to mean that minorities have higher propensities to make use of the welfare system. A natural question to which this observation gives rise concerns the source of the ethnic and racial differences in welfare receipt rates. The research in this area has noted that there are two conflicting general views. One is that the differences arise from differences in the underlying risk factors associated with welfare receipt—rates of single motherhood, poverty, low earnings capability and job skills, high rates of unemployment, low levels of education, and similar variables.

 The other is that there are inherent differences in the propensity to take up welfare by different ethnic and racial groups, usually thought to arise from different cultural and social norms for the acceptability of being on welfare and different degrees of stigma associated with welfare receipt. This stigma can be either transmitted across families in a given neighborhood or city or transmitted across generations, as children of welfare recipients themselves learn to find welfare receipt more acceptable. This study documents and explores racial and ethnic differences in welfare-participation rates in the United States in two ways.

 First, we examine what those differences are today and how they have changed over the last decade. We find that substantial racial and ethnic differences in welfare participation exist, regardless of how they are measured, but we also find that these differences have not changed much over this period. Second, we explore the alternative sources for this difference by quantifying the relative importance of measurable risk factors, which differ across race and ethnic groups, on the one hand, and immeasurable differences, which include differences in cultural and social norms, on the other.

 We find that the majority of most differences in welfare receipt can be explained by measurable risk factors, including differences across race and ethnic groups in earnings and other forms of non welfare income, in family structure, in education, and in other variables representing disadvantaged status more generally. This implies that it is these underlying risk factors, and their underlying causes, that require policy attention if racial and ethnic disparities in welfare receipt are to be reduced. THE U.S. WELFARE SYSTEM The U.S. welfare system is composed of several distinct components. The most well known is the program that provides cash assistance to families with dependent children—defined as families in which one or both parents are not present—currently called the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program and called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) prior to 1996. The AFDC program was created by the Social Security Act in 1935.

 It originally provided benefits primarily to poor widows, but in the 1960s its caseload shifted toward benefit provision to poor divorced and separated women with children, and has more recently shifted toward poor never-married women who have had out-of-wedlock births.1 These shifts in the composition of the caseload undoubtedly explain some of the changes in public attitudes toward the program. Eligibility for the program also requires low income and low levels of assets. Currently, the TANF program has strict work requirements and a maximum five-year time limit as well. The AFDC-UP (for unemployed parent) program provided benefits to families with children in which both parents are present, but restrictive eligibility conditions in the program limited its size to only a small fraction of the AFDC caseload. Both dollar and caseload terms today are the programs providing noncash benefits to low-income families.

 These include Food Stamps, Medicaid, low-income housing assistance, and a host of other programs including job training, Head Start, and a variety of food assistance programs other than Food Stamps. By one authoritative account, there are upwards of 80+programs in the United States providing cash or noncash assistance to low-income families (Burke, 1995). Eligibility for all the programs is restricted to those with low income and assets, and usually there are additional restrictions on eligibility. The three largest noncash programs are Food Stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance. The Food Stamp program is unique in providing benefits to families and individuals regardless of family structure, for neither the presence of children nor the absence of a parent, for example, is required.

 The Medicaid program historically provided benefits primarily to AFDC families but today provides significant benefits to children of poor, non welfare families, resulting from a series of legislative expansions of eligibility in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Housing assistance is the only major non cash program that is not an entitlement, and serves all family types who are low income; however, priority has historically been given to AFDC families, which has resulted in a caseload that is disproportionately composed of unmarried women with children. Aside from AFDC-TANF, the only major remaining cash-benefit program is the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which provides cash benefits to aged, blind, and disabled adults and to blind and disabled children.

Although it is not a transfer program, the Earned Income Tax Credit, if counted as a cash program, is also very large. Families with children and with earnings below certain thresholds receive tax credits and reductions in tax liability under the program. Figure 7–1 shows the trend in the per capita caseloads of four major programs—AFDC, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and SSI—over the last 30 years.3 The AFDC rolls grew tremendously during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a growth often attributed to relaxation of eligibility requirements and increased generosity of the benefit “package” associated with being on AFDC, but partly also a result of reductions in the stigma of welfare receipt.

The AFDC rolls then flattened out from 1973 through 1989, a result usually thought to be attributable to decreasing real AFDC 2 Medicaid also provides benefits to the elderly and disabled. We do not discuss those groups in this study. 3 Other programs are much smaller than these four. The Job Training Partnership Act and Head Start programs, for example, are less than 15 percent as extensive as SSI, the smallest of the four. Note that the Medicaid caseload numbers illustrated in Figure 7–1 include only dependent children and adults, not the elderly.

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