It has been ten years since President Clinton signed into law the first major overhaul of the nation’s welfare system in decades. The new law replaced the AFDC entitlement program with a new program which emphasized job readiness with a time limit on those benefits received. Since that time, the number of people living on public assistance has declined sharply. Some leftists, however, have bemoaned the law from the get go and still maintain that Temporary Assistance for Needy families (TANF) leaves the poor out in the cold.

In a recent feature story, USA Today highlights the plight of several families who continue to face obstacles ten years after “welfare reform” was enacted.

Michelle Gordon was 30, a poor, single mother with four kids between 5 and 13, when the federal government decided in 1996 that parents on welfare should go to work… Between her many jobs, she used up her cash benefits under the five-year time limit imposed by the welfare overhaul. Without work, she lost her federal housing subsidy, which helped pay her rent. So in October, she and three of her kids moved in with her mother. Her oldest son is in jail; she cares for his 6-year-old daughter. The three fathers of her children pay no child support. She gets about $500 a month in food stamps.

If Michelle Gordon’s story is typical of most people on welfare then it should come as no surprise that this woman is in the position she now finds herself. Multiple jobs in a ten year period, four children with three different fathers, relying on welfare and food stamps, if anything this woman’s actions are criminal and rise to the level of child neglect.

Poverty in this country remains a problem because so many of this nation’s so-called “working poor” continue to make poor decisions and lifestyle choices. In the case of Michelle Gordon, her priority was not education, not investing in her future and not in finding gainful employment, her priority was intercourse, and as a result she has four children with one in jail and no reliable means to provide for those children, ensuring that they too will likely grow up in squalor. Are these the actions of a responsible adult? Gordon’s story is not unique, across the country, there are millions of Michelle Gordons, each of them relying on handouts or meager earnings to care for multiple children with multiple fathers.

As USA Today reported, the job requirements imposed under welfare reform have led many former AFDC recipients to find employment, but many more continue to make the same poor decisions that brought them to this juncture in the first place.

Leftists site the fact that many families still struggle. Are we to assume that the state has a responsibility to reward slothful behavior or placate those who use their bodies as a human assembly lines? Certainly not! Harsh? Perhaps, but at what point are we expected to exhibit personal responsibility? We must be willing to accept consequences for our actions, only then will certain individuals come to realize that life requires hard work and responsibility not complacency and an entitlement mentality. Welfare reform is a good first start, but true reform would assume the characteristic of welfare abolition.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-17-welfare-reform-cover_x.htm