Welfare Entitlements: Addressing the New Realities.

The article reports on the internal revenue code to accomplish different social and economic objectives. This article proposes that social workers should advocate for changes in the internal revenue code that promise to reduce poverty, the most fundamental social problem in the United States. The new political realities reviewed in this article strongly suggest that social work should promote changes in the Internal Revenue Code that will reduce poverty through job growth and incentives that make work more rewarding for welfare recipients and low-income Americans. Entitlement programs are further burdened by the public perception that the majority of the nation's poor people live in inner cities where they take advantage of entitlement programs. Wages and salaries for American workers increased an average of 1 percent per year between 1970 and 1989. Meanwhile, the consumer price index rose at an average of 5 percent per year. Some economists argue that the economy actually made a U-turn in the 1980s and that the number of bad jobs began to outpace the number of good jobs. The growing economic squeeze on the middle class is also the result of the shift in the tax burden to the middle class. Although its significance with respect to economic philosophy may not yet be fully comprehended by the middle class, the progressively of the tax code, the cornerstone of democratic liberalism, was seriously eroded during the 1980s.