imited federal assistance was given to war veterans and their families beginning during the Civil War, but large scale assistance to the general needy community was not available for almost 75 more years (Komisar 48). A large contribution toward the assistance of the poor in the United States came during the Progressive movement around the turn of the century. Activist groups championed not only workers rights in the form of unions, but also the right of every citizen to have access to decent living conditions (Komisar 67). The Progressive movement slackened during the prosperous ‘20s, but the social welfare issue was forcefully placed back into the public consciousness with the advent of the Great Depression in 1929. With an unemployment rate as high as 25% and millions without sanitary living conditions, ignorance of the problem of poverty would have been disastrous. In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act which, among other things, provided for the financial, medical, and material needs of the poor (Komisar 125,128). Since then, there have many additions and reforms to the bill, none of which has served to quell the controversy surrounding the effectiveness of the welfare system in the United States.The main concerns of the distribution of welfare dollars and resources can be answered by the questions “Who gets assistance?” and “How much do they receive?”. The U.S. welfare system is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, which attempts to answer these questions through a system of minimum incomes, government-calculated poverty levels, number of children, health problems, and many other criteria. This complicated system leads to one of the critiques of the welfare system—that it is too large and inefficient. President Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in 1964 designed to alleviate the burden of the poor and established ...
