Volume 4, Issue 1, October 1995

REINVENTING THE WELFARE STATE

While appearing to be falling into disrepute with the majority of our society today, welfare has had a beneficial and meritorious contribution to our social order.

At its best, it has been making available funds to help protect citizens and promote their social well-being.

Its weakness has been to discourage free enterprise and individual initiative for some less motivated members of society.

The first has greatly surpassed the second.

The post-modern conservative belief in the privatization of the welfare state and the method of chopping social programmes without contemplating the price society will pay in chronic poverty, wasted talent and destructive anger is unsettling and unproductive.

What is happening among us presently is a serious maldistribution of wealth. The government cutbacks are exacerbating the problem. They hit the poor, the elderly, the unemployed and children - those who depend on public support - the hardest.

What is essential, along with welfare reform, are programmes for job creation. Government funds must be paired with private funds and specifically directed at well-targeted opportunities in which people can exercise initiative. Most of us would like to see welfare monies acting as seed money to enable people's efforts to become independently supported.

I would like to see strong and knowledgeable plans worked out to encourage and develop innovative ways of breaking the poverty cycle and creating employment for more people.

Assistance must be given to the needy and the poor in a democratic and caring society. That assistance should be primarily directed at helping them to be independent and productive, according to their particular abilities, reducing the inequalities in Canadian society.

Hacking away at the Canadian social safety nets as the conservatives are doing, looking only at the balance sheets, is trapping more deeply those who need help the most.

We need a goal, beyond a balanced budget, a plan for job creation for the unemployed and business growth in the new global economy of today.

We are responsible for each other, but we are not responsible to each other.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.