Talk:Welfare

Merge?

Could this be merged with Social welfare? -- Zoe

Isn't the "productive/unproductive" comment a little contentious? A working man with a low wage may be more "productive" than a man living off inherited wealth. Exile

Just to clarify that comment - not all welfare payments go to the unemployed.

Also, some welfare is "in kind" eg free health care and education. In the UK, the majority of the population both pays taxes and receives welfare. Also, most people in the UK, regardless of circumstances, will be net gainers from the welfare system when in childhood, in old age and in periods of illness and unemployment, and will be net losers during periods of paid employment. Welfare acts as a kind of socialised insurance scheme. So, to characterise welfare as a payment from the productive to the unproductive deserves deletion, or at least putting in quotes, I feel. Exile

Don't forget childcare, at least in the US. Hyacinth 04:12, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)

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Currently, the Further Reading section occupies a full half of the article! Perhaps some trimming is required? -- Mihnea Tudoreanu 14:10, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

article split

I thought I would split the article welfare into welfare (disambiguation) and welfare (financial aid). The reason is that I thought the description of different possible things that welfare could mean was beginning to get a bit long, and that welfare as financial aid is a big enough subject area to deserve a separate article to general welfare.

Okay I know there's already the Social Security (United States) - but I think that a separate article about welfare can be expanded to compare different welfare and financial aid systems in different countries - or, rather, the things in other countries that might be called welfare in the US.

However - admittedly I didn't look at the list of articles that link to welfare before making the split. And there's loads of them. Checking the relevancy of all the links and editing them will be a lot of work. I've changed a handful already but before doing lots of them, I want to get some feedback to see if people think this is a good idea, or if we should just go back to the single article we had before. Thanks. Squashy 23:15, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Oh yeah - the original article at welfare has got a very long edit history. By rights I should have moved that over here - I realise that now but didn't at the time. Whoops. Sorry. Course, I've also created a talk page here, so I can't do it myself now. So I shall be requesting a administrator manual move of the welfare history to here. Squashy 10:04, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Above comments predate this being a disambiguation page

Corporate welfare

Corporate welfare is not a pejorative to everyone -- just to anarchists and few joking conservatives.--Chuck (talk) 00:01, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Reorganisation

I've turned this back into an article, merging content from welfare (financial aid) and social welfare provision, which are now both redirects. This article is still in very basic shape, but the previous situation was an absolute mess, with terrible duplication across multiple articles. There is still social security to merge into this.

This is still missing a theory and policy section to discuss sociological and public policy approaches to welfare, and similarly the history section needs expanding. Summaries of various national welfare systems should help to flesh out the general overview sections also. A terminology section might also be useful to discuss some of the various names that are used, as well as specialised terms like welfare state (which can probably exist as a separate article but also currently duplicates much material and should be trimmed and then summarised here).

The disambiguation material is now at welfare (disambiguation), which was previously a redirect. Once you take out the duplicated articles and the dicdef stuff, all that's left is the movie, the ships, the economics topic (which is unrelated to this topic) and animal welfare, which is related to a different dicdef. This topic is appropriate for primary disambiguation, those other topics beng not sufficiently important to dislodge this one in my view. --bainer (talk) 16:03, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Good bold move, but though you apparently incorporated almost everything from one article, you incorporated almost nothing from the other, whose last version is here. --Espoo (talk) 17:40, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

It was mostly unsourced generalisations (on forms of welfare, and on circumstances in which it is provided), not that they were incorrect but it would probably be better to start from scratch. --bainer (talk) 23:21, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Pogey?

I like typing odd-sounding and (often) made-up words into the wikipedia search function just to see where they take me. I was redirected to this page when I entered "pogey." I could find no reference to "pogey" at all in the article. Can anyone here tell me what the connection is?165.91.65.2 (talk) 03:15, 27 September 2009 (UTC)RKH

According to this prior revision in the redirect's history, apparently it is "A Canadian term used to describe unemployment payments." The Wiktionary entry for the word also says the same thing. Although I'm Canadian myself but have never heard of the word <shrug>. Anyways, I've decided to redirect the word to Social welfare in Canada instead and tagged the redirect with {{R from alternative name}}. -- œ^™ 05:37, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Add this?

"In requiring reports of a beneficial interest in Trust funds and of holdings of a trustee, the law reveals a portion of the social security system of the rich. It is an excellent system, and provides much security for its beneficiaries. But in considering it, one wonders about the oft heard thesis of many conservative and ultra-conservative spokesmen and newspapers that the federal Social Security System, the Family Welfare System and the trade-union system all carry great danger of destroying the characters of the participants. They might, among other things, become mercenary or lazy. The rich themselves very evidently do not believe that being the beneficiaries of huge trust funds has undermined their characters, or that establishing trust funds for their children will distort the children's characters. No case has come to light where the children of the wealthy have been left penniless for their own benefit... Why, if drawing benefits without labor from a big trust fund does not destroy character, will drawing benefits in old age from Social Security or a pension system do so? Why would a true Welfare State be injurious to the general public when a private welfare system of trust funds is not apparently injurious to its limited number of beneficiary heirs?" Ferdinand Lundberg, "The Rich and the Super-Rich" Stars4change (talk) 05:47, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Template added today and later blanked.

I blanked the template recently added to this page because it seemed to me to be potentially highly contentious. There should be a good reason for adding this kind of template because there are already categories and related links as a way of getting further information.

I'd be grateful if editors would take a look at the template as it was before I delted it and also at the discussion I started at the template's talk page and provide some feedback.

I just have a sense that visuality of the template and some of the subcategories could have had a politically unbalanced presentation not in the spirit of Wikipedia. For instance the linking with articles about the negative side of the welfare state (fraud, dependency, etc.) without equal linking to articles on the positive side (alleviation of stress, social cohesion, etc.). Also some of the articles where the template was placed seem to me to have very little to do with the welfare state per se. --Hauskalainen (talk) 18:34, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

The goal is to help users find related articles in Economics and it should be kept for that reason, so I'm putting it back. Economics is a pretty well established field, and welfare economics is a major part, so it seems not very controversial. Please don't erase material without getting a consensus first. Rjensen (talk) 09:23, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree that the fields are non-controversial. But the use of the sidebar is. There is a risk (as I have mentioned here and here for sidebars such as this to be misused.Firstly, there is the danger are that if you, as an editor, only have the article on your watchlist, you will NOT be aware of changes made to the template which feeds into the article you are watching; and secondly that edits made to the sidebar may feed inappropriate material into the main article thru sissociated connections. The one I witnessed was a connection being drawn between Universal Health Care and Sociialism. As far as I am aware, there is no such connection. There are socialist societities without UHC and capitalistics ones with UHC.

If the goal is there to help users find other articles, what is wrong with using Wikilinks and the "See Also" section? This would completley get around the objections that I have raised and the reader equally well able to find related articles. --Hauskalainen (talk) 15:47, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

we should look at the article as not just about welfare, but about a branch of economics, alongside other branches. I do not see anything at all controversial or misleading about the Economics sidebar, and it will draw econ students to this article because it appears on many other articles as well where they start from. Rjensen (talk) 16:07, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

We are not discussing the economics sidebar but the welfare state sidebar which, on the surface, was about the welfare state, but which had serious problems because of its contentious content politically charged content and because of that content flowing onto many inappropriate pages even without watchers of that page being aware of it. Do you really think serious students of the welfare economics should be directed to articles called Nanny state? This is a politically charged term which has a rightful place in the encyclopedia but not in a way that it can appear prominently in potentially a hundred or more different articles. Please tell me what is wrong with using Wikilinks and See Also. You have avoided this, the most pertinent question that I posed.--Hauskalainen (talk) 19:17, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Misusing of refs

Jagged 85 (talk · contribs) is one of the main contributors to Wikipedia (over 67,000 edits; he's ranked 198 in the number of edits), and practically all of his edits have to do with Islamic science, technology and philosophy. This editor has persistently misused sources here over several years. This editor's contributions are always well provided with citations, but examination of these sources often reveals either a blatant misrepresentation of those sources or a selective interpretation, going beyond any reasonable interpretation of the authors' intent. Please see: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Jagged 85. That's an old and archived RfC. The point is still valid though, and his contribs need to be doublechecked. I searched the Welfare (financial aid) page history, and found 4 edits by Jagged 85 (for example, see this edits). Tobby72 (talk) 14:12, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

U.S. Welfare

The welfare discussion under the subsection of the United States is very minimal and simplistic. Unlike other countries, the U.S. is an extremely diverse country, with many different languages, ethnicities, and immigrant groups. This diversity makes the welfare system very complex and, particularly, racialized. Therefore, it is imperative that a discussion on misperceptions of welfare be included, as well as a presentation of how welfare, a program designed to assist the neediest, has become to be closely associated with specific races/ethnicities (primarily Hispanics and African Americans). Unmdgs (talk) 02:01, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I support a split, this subject needs to be developed in a dedicated article. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 02:32, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Confusing phrases with no source

The sentence quoted below is currently in the article. I can't make sense of this sentence and I'm especially confused by the phrase "black T-ford" (is the something to do with cars?). I suspect this is country specific colloquialism and as such needs some explanation if it is going to be used in the article. Is this describing a system to preserve "a good life" at various levels between a minimum and average (the current grammar seems to suggest this), or is it describing a system to raise quality of life from a minimum to average?

It is also a systematic infrastructure to protect a good life, from a minimum up to (today) just about average (like 'one size fits all' or 'black T-ford').

Anonymous watcher (talk) 13:12, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

History of Social Welfare page needed

This is an important topic and yet the history section is weak. Worth adding a History of Social Welfare page? Nathangeffen (talk) 06:38, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Welfare = Corruption

Money is made by trading for production. Any deviation from that principle, no matter how small, impinges on the value earned by the producers. This impingement results in more demand for produced value without awareness or involvement of the price setters. Thus, the values negotiated are false. Ergo Welfare = Corruption.

There is a portion that can be diverted to helping those in need. For thousands of years, this was called charity. The "stigma" of charity was one of the more subtle motivators to avoiding those circumstances. As we remove those motivators, less people produce, and the value of money declines. This quickly turns into a vicious cycle, as less is produced, and more money is diverted to helping those who find themselves in need, and less is produced...

Charity, on the other hand is a virtue. There was a day when folks would actively look for those who needed help. Churches and civic organizations would do what they could to be discrete about such transactions. Having the motivator exist does not remove the pain, nor make the pain any more necessary.

Having more private organizations involved spread the knowledge of the state of things though the community. Knowledge bread compassion, and sympathy. It also removed the "stigma" of being aware of the situation you fed. As long as someone is striving to get out of the hole they are in, people are glad to help. Government made this understanding illegal, and feeds many destructive behaviors.

"Corporate Welfare" is a barrier to entry to new businesses. Unless you are connected, you are often unaware of such "rewards". Subsidies lead to a vicious cycle of crony-ism.

Ultimately, governments are funded by taxes. Taxes are collected at the point of a gun. Using taxes to fund "charity" destroys the virtue of the act. Welfare = Corruption

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. – James Madison

 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.249.55.44 (talk) 00:09, 2 September 2011 (UTC) 

Wikipedia does not permit nor support soapboxing, your opinions or original research on welfare are not of use to an encyclopedia based on the use of reliable secondary sources.--R-41 (talk) 08:22, 19 December 2011 (UTC)