Welfare reform
Classical liberals, neoliberals, right-wing libertarians, and conservatives generally argue that welfare and other tax-funded services reduce incentives to work, exacerbate the free-rider problem, and intensify poverty.
U.S. systems primarily focused on reducing poor single parents' need for welfare assistance through employment incentives.
Many historians trace the beginnings of contemporary welfare in Europe and America to Germany's health insurance laws introduced in the late 19th century.
[3] In the United States, the Great Depression led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's introduction of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and the Social Security Program through the Social Security Act, which created a public welfare system to provide assistance to various dependent persons in need.
[4] This initiative funded welfare programs such as Social Security, Food Stamps, Job Corps, and Head Start.
[5] The War on Poverty included new federal programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, which provided seniors, low-income individuals, and other disadvantaged groups with health insurance.
President Richard Nixon's administration proposed the 1969 Family Assistance Plan,[6] which instituted a work requirement for all welfare recipients except mothers with children under three years of age.
Charles Murray's book Losing Ground (1984) argued that the welfare state actually harms the poor, especially single-parent families, by making them increasingly dependent on the government, and discouraging them from working.
[12] Despite the public and political concerns, "sociologists, poverty analysts, and ethnographers have demonstrated that AFDC itself had little impact on women’s marital or childbearing decisions and the program acted for most recipients as a supplement to earnings or as a temporary source of support between periods of employment.
[14] In recent years reform of the welfare system in Britain began with the introduction of the New Deal programme,[15] which was introduced by the Labour Party government under Tony Blair in 1997.
Temer's plan included limiting pension benefits and raising the retirement age in order to save money and fix the economy.
Additionally, under his reform, companies have greater power to require longer work days and use part-time workers.
[23] The vote to approve the pension reform was first suspended until February 2018, and now has been further postponed as a campaign issue in this year's election.
[24] India has taken substantial strides toward dramatically reforming its welfare architecture over the last five years especially, ranging from direct benefit transfers (DBT), Ayushman Bharat, income support (PM-Kisan), and the implementation of the 14th Finance Commission recommendations; however, crucial unanswered and hotly debated concerns regarding the welfare state's architecture lie under these changes.
Hence, giving an insight in India's historical background of welfare schemes is essential to form the base layer for further examples.
[27] This action resulted in a significant rise in bank deposits and investment and this transition had a long-term effect on the success of small-scale industries and agriculture.
[28] The Jan Dhan Yojana, which pledges each Indian household a bank account, insurance coverage, and overdraft facility over the next two years, would finally give the government the opportunity to implement a universal basic income transfer to all people, reshaping the country's leaky affluent economy and even the dysfunctional welfare system.
With the introduction of PM-Kisan in January 2019, India made its first national attempt to implement a basic income support programme using the DBT architecture; however, putting too much emphasis on technology to enforce DBT has revealed three major flaws in the system: the last-mile challenge, a lack of reliable data to identify beneficiaries, and citizen alienation.
The desire to reduce payment leakage and increase performance is a key reason for scaling DBT and shifting toward direct cash transfers by income support programmes.
Local bureaucrats are important to DBT, from opening accounts to fostering financial literacy and facilitating bank transactions.
Muralidharan et al. recently completed a Niti Aayog-commissioned process monitoring exercise by using DBT to access the Public Distribution System scheme in three Union Territories (Chandigarh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, and Puducherry).
Muralidharan et al. discovered that 20% of beneficiaries acknowledged not receiving payment, despite official records indicating a transfer rate of failure of less than 1%.
The study attributes the difference to a lack of beneficiary awareness and knowledge of transactions, as well as administrative problems such as amount paid into bank accounts that recipients may not have access to, or processing errors.
At this time, King had already begun to change and remove many of the previous policies for state intervention that were established during the world war periods.
Under then Prime Minister, Louis St. Laurent, an amendment to the Indian Act was made in 1951, to allow Indigenous people to apply for provincial social welfare for the first time.
The Canadian Assistance plan also established a federal cost-sharing mechanism for social service such as a national healthcare system.
[40] This led to a new conservative political approach that rejected the former Keynesian beliefs held by Prime Ministers such as Mackenzie King.
[43] As a result of similar measures such as reductions and terminations of welfare programs, the 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in charity based institutions such as food banks and emergency shelters.
[46] Prime Minister Stephen Harper focused his welfare policies mainly on reducing the public service and supporting families.
In 2022, under the current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the federal government finalized an agreement with all the provinces and one territory for a publicly funded, Canada-wide system of childcare.
