Reform
In 1996, President Bill Clinton negotiated with the Republican-controlled Congress to pass the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act which drastically restructured the program. Among other changes, a lifetime limit of five years was imposed for the receipt of benefits, and the newly-limited nature of the replacement program was reinforced by calling AFDC's successor Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Many Americans continue to refer to TANF as "welfare" or AFDC.
TANF has remained controversial. In 2003, LaShawn Y. Warren, an ACLU Legislative Counsel said that TANF gives states an incentive "to deny benefits to those who need it most. The solution to getting people out of the cycle of poverty is not to prematurely kick them off welfare. Too many have been denied aid unfairly, creating a false impression that the number of people who need help has decreased."
In 2006, The New Republic suggested, A broad consensus now holds that welfare reform was certainly not a disaster—and that it may, in fact, have worked much as its designers had hoped. More recent results, notably taking into account the effects of the Financial crisis of 2007-2010 and taking place after the lifetime limits imposed by TANF may have been reached by many recipients, suggest instead that the reforms have not been as successful as originally claimed.
Read more about this topic: Aid To Families With Dependent Children
Famous quotes containing the word reform:
“The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone’s sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.”
—Alison Neilans. “Justice for the Prostitute—Lady Astor’s Bill,” Equal Rights (September 19, 1925)
“And let Reform her columns roll.
With thunder peal, and lightening flash.
We’ll preach deliverance to the soul.
‘Mid proud Oppression’s waning crash.”
—Ignis, U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Genius of Liberty, pp. 9-10 (November 1853)
“No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)