FREE ESSAY ON RULING IDEOLOGIES

RULING IDEOLOGIES

Core Studies 3 Casilda Adames
Take-Home Exam November 16, 1999
The ruling ideology dealing with welfare is a negative view among the majority of
Americans. It states that welfare recipients are lazy people who have lots of children
and collect checks for a long period of time. This statement is believed mostly among
higher-class people because they feel that if they can work hard for their money, welfare
recipients can do the same, and not live off other people's money.
Charles Murray supports the statement "welfare policies encourage poor women to have more
children" in one of his books, but is proven wrong by careful studies and demographics.
It has been studied that welfare has almost no effect on bearing children. These studies
show that younger women are more likely to be poor and their poverty makes their children
poor. American adults by far are more unequal in wealth and income than any other
industrial society as well as the declining incomes of young men since the mid-1970s.
Many young men cannot afford to keep their children out of poverty or decide not to the
handle the duties or responsibilities of marriage, leaving young mothers and children
even poorer, leading them to depend on welfare. According to a New York Times article
dated 2/29/92, there are fewer children receiving assistance from welfare and are not
just being lazy but and collecting checks, but actually getting off welfare.
This ruling ideology that most of the American society supports leads to the lack of wide
political support and budget-cutting of means-tested programs. These mean-tested programs
are available only to those people who can prove that they 
are poor. Only Social Security and Medicare, both Universal programs, have largely
survived cutbacks in recent years because it is widely accepted throughout the American
society. The reason it is accepted in the American society is that everybody contributes
to social security and everybody benefits from it. As stated before many people in the
American society do not want to support the welfare people because they are perceived to
be lazy bums, who just collect checks and have lost of children, which persuades people's
attitudes to not support these means-tested programs including welfare.
AFDC has been repeatedly cut and will continue to decline as long as federal governments
transfer responsibility for welfare to state governments which aids the American's
ideology that help to the poor must be "limited, conditional and unpleasant" so that
people get off welfare and acquire jobs. This cuts and limits the amount of means-tested
programs such as welfare because neither the federal nor the state government take it
upon themselves to protect welfare and other programs from being cut, in contrast to
universal programs such as Medicare and Social which are politically supported. Universal
programs have helped reducing poverty among mostly the elderly and not the younger
welfare recipients. 
This dominant ideology contained among the American society is just one of many, that
shows the degree of inequality in our society today and how poor are perceived through
the rest of the society.