Logic Behind the Personal Responsibility and Work Essay

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logic behind the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act "and a U.S. House resolution in 2004 dealing with strengthening the original law's emphasis on promoting marriage "was based upon the idea that by "encouraging marriage the marriage rate will increase and the poverty rates will go down and the individuals on welfare will decrease...The original Welfare Reform Act linked the decline in two-parent households to an increase in poverty levels" (Kickham & Ford 2009). However, the question arises as to whether such a bill treats the root causes of poverty. Single parent households may be more common in underprivileged environments, but that may be more due to a lack of hope amongst all residents rather than a unique feature of single parent households. Children being born to unwed mothers may be more of a symptom than a cause.

The idea that government should 'engineer' the life of the poor, particularly in the private sphere of marriage, seems like a potential violation of individual rights. Incentivizing wedlock does not necessarily mean incentivizing positive marriages. "In the ideology of promoting healthy marriages, divorce is seen as the antithesis of that goal. Lowering the divorce rate, as suggested by state policy makers, is assumed by those same entities as an important component of the overall effort to stabilize marriages" (Kickham & Ford 2009).

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However, the effect of such laws is that all marriages are presumed to be better than a severed union, regardless of whether the marriages are truly 'healthy' and promote the welfare of all. Is a marriage where one spouse is abusive healthy? Incentivizing a woman to remain in a marriage that is harmful to herself or her children is a potentially horrifying result of such policies, given that women are often already feel emotionally and economically unable to leave such unions. Although children of divorce may score less well on indicators of social health than children from two-parent homes, once again the question of correlation vs. causation arises -- children from divorced homes may have had a less stable, more contentious upbringing, even before the divorce.

Race and class also are implied in the rationale behind these laws -- it is assumed that individuals on public assistance should be compelled by the law 'for their own good' to remain married, while middle-class and upper-class individuals have no such compulsion. Treating the root causes of social inequality and broken homes like poor educational systems, a lack of jobs, and a lack of affordable houses would be a more effective way to address the stresses young people and their families in underprivileged environments must….....

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