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New rules Essay Seven years ago the first wave of welfare families were about to reach the time limits that had been set for receiving benefits and would soon have their cash handouts cut off. This was happening because of time limits states imposed as welfare reform that was put into place eleven years prior. Republicans created new rules for welfare that hadn’t taken place in over 40 years. In August of 1996 President Bill Clinton signed a law that required the states to push welfare recipients into the workforce. This became known as â€Å"workfare† (Douthat, 2007). This law gave incentives to state welfare offices to shrink their caseloads, and limited families to five years or less of federal money. This incentive included taking the money saved from welfare and converting them into block grants that states could spend as they see fit. Many conservatives thought that this would force poor mothers off of welfare. But many including The Urban Institute said that changes would push more children into poverty (Green, 2007) this did not happen. When the time limits took affect many states scrambled in the fall of 2000 to enact an emergency force that would help families through the transition. The need for this service was not needed. â€Å"After peaking in 1994, when many states began experimenting ahead of the federal law, America’s welfare caseload fell by 60% over the next decade, from 5 million to 2 million families† (Alfred, 2007). Welfare mothers were finding jobs with the largest increase being unmarried mothers. Their unemployment rates jumped from 44% in 1993 to 66% in 2000 and the poverty rate dropped 15.1% to 11. 3%. Reform showed to be working (Derose, 2007). But this was only because of the booming economy during the years between 1993 and 1999. During this period unemployment rates fell and rapid job development created the jobs. Wage subsidies helped with this trend also. When the government increased the earned income tax credit this created a reward for low income families and an incentive for them to work. With this success states changed practices in their welfare offices and in some cases turned many of the caseloads to private firms. Most of the offices would stress work for people that sought help this included job training sessions when they signed up for assistance. Some states required applicants to try job searches before signing up for benefits. The federal grants that were shifted were used for work support. Some of these benefits include childcare, healthcare and transport subsidies (Peters, 2007). But this did not help all incomes because earnings of women that left welfare rose more than their cash assistance fell and this still left families just scraping by. After leaving welfare many women went on to get training and education with government help to find jobs with better pay and benefits. Showing the quality of many of the mother’s lives increasing because of welfare reform. But on the other side things didn’t fare so well. Around 10 to 15 % of America’s former welfare recipient’s are not working or receiving benefits. These individuals are relying on relatives or other forms of charity just to meet their daily needs. Many of the remaining welfare cases are of people with mental or physical disabilities who cannot support their families by working. Welfare reform is not working for them. It makes it difficult for these individuals making them give up or not even try. Welfare reform has helped against the battle of dependency and America is in a better stance to attack poverty head on, but still t here are three important challenges that need to be addressed (Ponnuru, 2007). The first is to find new plan to help the children whose parents are mildly disabled, emotionally disturbed, mentally slow or addicted to drugs or alcohol. These are the individuals that are showing up at the welfare offices for help. These families face a limited ability in raising children which worries many in America. Dealing with these individuals is very complicated you can’t just get them work many are eligible for disability benefits and obtaining them is a long hard process (Mead, 2007). A solution would be training for social workers to identify the needs and solution of these individuals making it more assessable to individuals that are not mobile rather than harder.