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Welfare, economically speaking, refers to money paid by the government to persons who are in need of financial assistance, but who are unable to work, or whose circumstances mean the income they require for basic needs is in excess of their salary (e.g. tax credits for working mothers). The sum paid usually gives an income well below the poverty line, and it usually also has conditions attached, such as the need to prove one is searching for work or that there is some condition, such as a disability or obligation to care for children, that prevents them from working. In some cases recipients are even forced to do work, and this is often known as workfare . A universal welfare system is a standard component of socialism or systems heavily influenced by socialism.In the United States, assistance of this type has now been largely restricted to households where children are included (usually headed by single mothers) and even these households have only been able to access benefits for a maximum of five years per lifetime of the adult recipient since 1996. Before that, most American states had been providing welfare benefits to single adults and childless married couples as well since the Great Depression, but the number of states doing so declined steeply during the 1990s, and many of the states still doling out such benefits use methods other than cash payments to render the assistance; indeed, today only two states - New Jersey and Utah - still give out cash to poverty-stricken adults who do not have child dependents. These programs were often known officially by such names as Home Relief and General Assistance . The federal welfare program for households with children was originally named Aid to Dependent Children; this was later changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (often referred to by the acronym AFDC ), and since 1996 has been officially known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (or TANF ).
Welfare has a quite different meaning in formal or technical economics (see welfare economics), as in the term social welfare function. In this context it refers to utility or well-offness, either for an individual, or aggregated for a group.
The field of welfare often also involves program evaluationProgram evaluation is essentially a set of philosophies and techniques to determine if a program 'works'. It is a practice field that has emerged, particularly in the USA, as a disciplined way of assessing the merit, value, and worth of projects and progr to determine if the welfare programs are working, how well they are working, and how they could be improved.
In a more general sense, the term welfare refers simply to the Human conditionThe human condition is a term used in literature to describe the joys and terrors of being human, and generally refers to biologically determined events which are common to most human lives. These include: birth childhood adolescence love sex reproduction whereby people are faring well, that is: prosperous, in good health and at peace.
1 See also
- Social welfare
- Welfare advocacy
- Welfare reformWelfare reform is the name for a political movement in countries with a state-administered social welfare system to institute changes in that system, generally in a more conservative direction. Reasons usually invoked include: the perceived high cost of s
- Welfare stateThere are three main interpretations of the idea of a welfare state # A welfare state is a type of government that assumes the primary responsibility for the individual and social welfare of its citizens. The welfare state refers to the provision of welfa
- Welfare trapThe welfare trap is a name for the phenomenon by which taxation and welfare systems jointly contribute to keep people on social insurance. This is also known as the poverty trap in the UK, sometimes referring a little more generally to the loss of means-t
- Common goodThere are several definitions of the common good . In the popular meaining, the common good describes a specific " good" that is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a given community, and it is also how the common good is broadly understood i
