Welfare and social responsibilityWelfare. Read that word to yourself and ask yourself what popular images surround it. The first thing is probably women and children. This is correct, because 97% of the AFDC (Aid for Families with Dependent Children, the federal "welfare" program) is made up of women and children. Young women? Not really: the average age of a mother receiving social assistance is 29 and only 7.6% are under 20. Is it black? Perhaps because the composition of welfare roles is approximately the same percentage between whites and blacks. More children than you can count? The average assisted family is made up of 2.9 members. This means a single mom would have 1.9 children (less than the national average). Forever "dependent?": the average duration of an assisted stay is 22 months. We certainly think they don't work. Without raising the question of why raising children is not considered work, the average AFDC benefit plus food stamps still represents only 69% of the poverty line. Women on welfare are constantly working to close this gap. Do we think welfare is expensive? AFDC represents just over 1% of the national budget. If welfare isn't about young women who have lots of children and live their lives on the largesse of the state, and if it represents a tiny portion of the federal budget, why did Republicans choose it as a pilot issue? Why, while our Federal Reserve is raising interest rates and attempting to maintain a 6.2% unemployment rate, and when a minimum wage job would still leave a mother with two children 23% below the threshold of poverty, is entry into the paid workforce becoming increasingly difficult? pushed as the panacea for poverty? If we are serious about getting people to work, we need relevant training programmes, childcare and job creation efforts. At least these were discussed in the Clinton plan, although in many other respects the plan was just as punitive and inconsistent as the Republican plan. Republican ideology is particularly insidious because it shifts the entire framework of the debate from the structural to the moral one. This implies, even stating, that if those people would simply clean up their morals and stop being so lazy, they could have a place in the American Dream. Today, welfare mothers are considered the symbol of everything that is morally wrong in America.