Jun 25, · Poverty Essay Topics. Look for the List of Poverty Essay Topics at blogger.com - Also check the list of most popular argumentative research paper topics. Bibliography: Allard, Scott W., Out of Reach: Place, Poverty, and the New American Welfare State Jun 23, · Research Paper on Poverty. Introduction. Poverty is a common phenomenon in many countries. The most affected are developing countries, but that does not mean that developed nations have eliminated poverty entirely. Every government must increase the living standards of its people with the aim of bridging the gap that exists between the rich and the poor
Poverty: Research Proposal - Words | Research Paper Example
Public assistance programs are meant to relieve the hardships impoverished families experience as well as prevent families from remaining impoverished in the future or into the following generation. Over 12 percent of Americans—nearly 37 million people— are currently living below the poverty line. Even more Americans have income above the poverty line but still experience difficulties making ends meet.
Before discussing the policies that seek to help impoverished families, we should understand the characteristics of the Americans most likely to be impoverished today. Families and research paper ideas on poverty most likely to be impoverished or affected by poverty are the elderly, minorities especially African American and Latinochildren, women, single mothers, young parents, people living in the South, the poorly educated, the unemployed, and those who live in very urban or very rural areas.
Particular attention has been paid to the elderly poor in the United States, and programs such as Social Security and Medicare have alleviated a great deal of elderly poverty since their inception. Minorities face numerous challenges to employment and have less access to high-paying jobs, making them more likely to be impoverished than whites.
It is important to note, however, that there is a greater absolute number of poor whites than there are poor minorities in the United States; it is a common misconception that most poor families are African American or Latino.
Children make up a large percentage of impoverished Americans, because they have no source of personal income and are largely dependent on their parents for support. Women, similar to racial and ethnic minorities, face employment challenges and still make less money dollar-for-dollar than do men in comparable jobs. As the primary caregivers of their families, single mothers face even more difficulties in the workforce, because they have to manage work, research paper ideas on poverty care, and parenting duties without the help of a partner.
For these reasons, single mothers are also more likely than two-parent families to be impoverished. Young parents, such as those who begin to have children while in their teens, face a research paper ideas on poverty likelihood of poverty than parents who postpone childbearing until later ages; this is due to their having little time to establish a career or finish higher education.
Families living in the South or in urban or rural areas are at higher risk for poverty as well. Although poverty used to be a solely urban phenomenon, research paper ideas on poverty, rural residents have become increasingly impoverished through the decline of small, family-owned farms and now face the same limited access to low-paying jobs as urban residents.
Additionally, rural residents lack public transportation resources and often cannot retain a job because they have no reliable means of getting there. Urban residents and families living in the South lost good jobs that included benefits and a decent wage as industry moved out of these areas into lower-cost parts of the country like the suburbs and to other parts of the world.
Individuals with low educational achievement and those who are unemployed are also more likely to be impoverished than individuals who have high levels of education and those who hold jobs.
Poverty can result in a number of complications for families, including low educational achievement due to living in neighborhoods with poorly funded schools and overfilled classrooms, research paper ideas on poverty. Two of the most visible effects of poverty are poor health and subpar research paper ideas on poverty to preventative health care.
Families living in poverty often cannot afford health insurance without public assistance and therefore forgo preventative care such as yearly checkups, immunizations, prenatal visits, and cancer screenings, which results in allowing serious diseases to proceed or worsen undiagnosed.
Families without health insurance often rely on hospital emergency care when necessary, research paper ideas on poverty, which is a less-efficient and more-expensive option than visiting a family doctor or other primary care provider. Impoverished families also tend to neglect dental care; untreated dental problems have future implications for general health and access to employment.
Fathers of impoverished families are the most likely family members to neglect health care, followed by mothers and then children. Living in poverty can also cause poor nutrition, and several programs have tried to provide the resources for adequate nutrition, appropriate research paper ideas on poverty intake, and access to nutritious foods.
Homelessness and access to substandard housing also occur as a result of poverty, because families often cannot afford to pay market-priced rent, let alone purchase a home. Several assistance programs are in place exclusively to prevent families from being without a place to live, as well as to regulate the standards of housing available, research paper ideas on poverty. Antipoverty programs remain among the most highly criticized of all research paper ideas on poverty programs in the United States.
Much of this can be explained by the misperceptions that average Americans have of persons who are in poverty and who receive public assistance. There is a long-standing stereotype that persons receiving public assistance are attempting to work the system or are cheating to qualify for additional benefits.
Public assistance programs are funded in part by the federal government and in part by state and local governments. The federal government sets guidelines for how families can qualify for programs as well as for how much funding each state must also contribute to the programs. Also referred to as the welfare system, public assistance is comprised of five major programs: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families TANF ; the food stamp program; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children WIC ; Medicaid; and Subsidized Housing Programs.
The United States did not have any comprehensive public assistance programs until President Franklin D. Roosevelt mandated that the government provide employment through public spending during the Great Depression. Public assistance continued to provide services to impoverished Americans until President Lyndon B. Following the War on Poverty, the number of people accessing public assistance services grew rapidly.
The enrollment for Aid to Families with Dependent Children AFDC, a program that preceded TANF increased by percent, and enrollment for Medicaid a program introduced in the s skyrocketed. The U. public continued to scrutinize the welfare system throughout the s and s, research paper ideas on poverty, and all federally funded public assistance programs were eventually overhauled during the period of welfare reform under President Bill Clinton.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act ofcommonly known as welfare reform, was hotly contested by advocates for the poor but did not end the debate over welfare. Although the number of people accessing social services has greatly declined since the reform by as much as two-thirdspublic assistance programs continue to undergo constant evaluations of their effectiveness. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families TANF is also referred to as cash assistance because it provides qualifying families with a monthly stipend of cash based on the number of persons present in a household and proportionate to the cost of living in their state.
To qualify for TANF, research paper ideas on poverty, recipients must generally have an income below the federal poverty level for their household size and must care for one or more dependent infants or children.
Because mothers, rather than fathers, are more likely to have custody of their children, the vast majority of TANF recipients are women and their dependent children. Single persons not taking care of dependent children generally do not qualify for TANF. Prior to the reform, TANF then called AFDC did not impose a time limit on recipient families, meaning that families could receive AFDC cash assistance indefi research paper ideas on poverty nitely as long as they continued to meet the eligibility criteria, research paper ideas on poverty.
Opponents and critics of AFDC argued that the lack of time limits was not providing impoverished families with any incentive to get off assistance and go to work, and so post TANF instituted a federal standard of a month lifetime limit per recipient.
The second notable change of the reform called for stricter work requirements for its recipients, meaning a mother with children has to spend 10 to 40 hours per week participating in some kind of job training, job search, or educational program in order to remain eligible for TANF benefits.
Despite imposing time limits and work requirements, the reform also offered states some autonomy research paper ideas on poverty respect to TANF, research paper ideas on poverty. The lifetime limit for TANF can also be extended by individual states through the use of additional state funds, although some states have elected to make the month limit noncontinuous meaning a person can only be on TANF for 24 continuous months and then must leave welfare for at least a month before exhausting the rest of the time limit, research paper ideas on poverty.
States were also granted the ability to waive or change work requirements for recipients as part of various state-sponsored trial projects; this flexibility allowed states to experiment with TANF requirements in order to arrive at the best and most efficient way to move individuals from welfare receipt to employment.
The effectiveness of research paper ideas on poverty change from AFDC to TANF is notable, as the number of individuals seeking cash assistance has declined by two-thirds. TANF is still not without controversy, however, as the program has been criticized for not significantly improving the lives of those who seek its assistance. The emphasis on work requirements for welfare recipients has been very well received, as critics of TANF and AFDC were opposed to the idea that one could qualify for cash assistance without making a concerted effort to find employment.
The success of these work requirements is limited, research paper ideas on poverty, however, because requirements restrict the time a mother has to spend with her children and can put a strain on child care arrangements. Often, work programs offer child care assistance and other benefits, such as help with resume writing or transportation assistance, but these are not universally granted to all of those enrolled. Work programs are also criticized by recipients as being useless or as not teaching them anything, and the employment they find is often that of the minimum-wage, service-sector variety and offers no health insurance.
One major challenge TANF faces in the future is to assist families in eventually achieving permanent, gainful employment in order to make a successful permanent transition out of poverty, research paper ideas on poverty.
The food stamp program began in in response to physicians and army recruiters who noticed the pervasiveness of malnutrition within urban and rural populations. Created to provide a better opportunity for families to meet their basic nutritional needs, the food stamp program follows federal guidelines for qualification that are more lenient than those for TANF, meaning families who do not qualify for TANF may at least receive some food stamp assistance. If a family is already receiving TANF, they are automatically eligible for food stamps.
Food stamps may be used to purchase any type of food item except hot, prepared foods intended for immediate consumption. Families must requalify for food stamps every six months to one research paper ideas on poverty but are not required to report changes in income in between requalification periods.
The effectiveness of the food research paper ideas on poverty program has been criticized because food stamp research paper ideas on poverty are still more likely to have poor nutrition than are non—food stamp participants.
The National Food Stamp Survey found 50 percent of respondents still experience times without adequate food, and many households do not get enough folic acid or iron in their diets.
However, families that receive food stamps tend to spend more on food than they would otherwise, and food stamp participants showed increased consumption of protein, vitamins A, B6, research paper ideas on poverty, and C, and other important minerals.
Food stamp fraud presents another point of concern for the food stamp program because food stamp recipients sometimes sell food stamps for cash as opposed to using them to buy food. Studies have suggested, however, that the people selling food stamps also buy stamps. This indicates that families might be so strapped for cash that they prefer to sell stamps when they need cash, but then later buy their stamps back to purchase food.
Scholars have proposed that the food stamp program can circumvent this issue by distributing stamps throughout the month rather than in a once-per-month lump sum. Like the food stamp program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children WIC was formed to provide nursing or pregnant mothers and children under five years old with better nutritional resources.
These food items are sources of iron, research paper ideas on poverty, vitamins A and C, calcium, and protein. WIC also provides participants with a nutritional education session each month when they come to get their WIC coupons and monitors the research paper ideas on poverty of infants and children under five years old.
Children are no longer eligible for WIC benefits after their fifth birthday, and mothers must be nursing or pregnant to qualify. Participants must have incomes under percent of the federal poverty level, although mothers and children under five years old automatically qualify if they are also receiving Medicaid. The more generous income guidelines have come under fire, because this allows more people to qualify for WIC and raises the cost of the program, although participation rates for WIC are much lower than they would be if every eligible individual participated.
However, this underenrollment raises questions about whether WIC is truly serving the families who might need it the most. WIC, compared to the food stamp program, loses very little money to fraud, probably due to the food-item-specific nature of the program. The food coupons have very little resale value because they are restricted to certain food items and, research paper ideas on poverty, furthermore, specific product sizes and brands.
Because WIC is the most-studied federal nutrition program, there is less controversy over whether WIC is effective compared to the food stamp program or the National School Lunch Program. WIC participation has reduced the incidence of low- and very low—birthweight babies, meaning public money spent on WIC saves on medical expenditures in the long run.
Studies of WIC have also found positive health outcomes for toddlers, although not to the same extent as the outcomes for infants. Some have criticized the WIC program because it offers nursing mothers free formula and subsequently provides a disincentive to breast-feed. The health portion of the WIC program has begun to encourage mothers to breast-feed, but WIC mothers are still less likely to breast-feed than mothers not in the program.
The Medicaid program seeks to provide federally and state-funded health insurance to qualifying low-income women and children. The Medicaid program also offers public health insurance to disabled disability insurance and elderly persons Medicare. About half of all Medicaid recipients are low-income children and one-fifth are lowincome women. It is expected, however, that the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of will begin lessening that percentage.
As of the change implemented by the Defi cit Reduction Act ofany families who qualify for TANF are automatically eligible for Medicaid benefits as well. Medicaid benefits became available to pregnant women, two-parent families, and to teenage mothers living with their parents, as long as the incomes of these various types of households fell within the qualifying income guidelines.
By the s, families with incomes at percent of research paper ideas on poverty federal poverty line or below became eligible for Medicaid, with some states choosing to raise eligibility guidelines further, up to percent of the poverty level. By October41 of 50 states were using their own funds to raise the income guidelines for women and children.
Having Medicaid does not necessarily translate into having access to health services, because providers often restrict their practice to allowing only a certain percentage of Medicaid patients or refuse to see these patients at all. Additionally, the length of Medicaid doctor visits is, on average, shorter than the average non-Medicaid visit, which may indicate a lower quality of care for Medicaid patients.
Although there are multiple kinds of housing programs, only two will be discussed here. Housing research paper ideas on poverty began in general with research paper ideas on poverty passing of the Housing Act ofresearch paper ideas on poverty, which called for an end to unsafe, substandard housing. Some housing programs operate by offering incentives to contractors to construct low-income housing.
In contrast, the programs discussed here provide low-cost housing to families at lower-than-market rent.
CSM 10 Poverty Rate Research Project
, time: 6:34A List Of 25 Good Argumentative Essay Topics On Poverty
Poverty Research Papers are custom written on the sociology problem of Poverty. The problem of poverty can be examined sociologically, politically or historically. Economics also plays a role in poverty. Have the writers at Paper Masters research and write on any part of poverty in the world or poverty in the United States Oct 10, · In conclusion poverty is an epidemic that each and every other government should try and blogger.com effort should be employed inthewar against poverty for the well being of the society and the world in blogger.comng institutions of higher quality should be put up to provide good learning blogger.com opportunities should be created for the educated Estimated Reading Time: 10 mins Jun 23, · Research Paper on Poverty. Introduction. Poverty is a common phenomenon in many countries. The most affected are developing countries, but that does not mean that developed nations have eliminated poverty entirely. Every government must increase the living standards of its people with the aim of bridging the gap that exists between the rich and the poor
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