e mothers. AFDC recipients are often eligible for many other programs, including Medicare, food stamps, Aid to Woem with Infant children (WIC) and subsidized housing. While not all AFDC recipients receive all of these benefits, enough do that they are considered part of the welfare equation. The majority of these programs have come to be resented by middle America. The resounding echo of the middle class has been "welfare's a mess, let's go back to the way things were."
             Actually, it would be difficult to find a time in America when welfare was not a part of society. In colonial times, towns or churches often took responsibility for their poor. Some towns required residents to house the homeless, most towns and churches had charity programs which members were required to contribute to. While community support of the poor was a concept as old as time, welfare as we are familiar with it did not begin into 1935, when Roosevelt incorporated it into his New Deal legislature.
             It began as a small part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Social Security Act. In addition to AFDC, the Act consisted of the programs we now call medicaid, medicare and social security. It originally included several other programs, which have been incorporated into the others over time. The Social Security act was meant to help Americans who had been hurt by the Great Depression get back on their feet as the economy picked up. Even critics of the Act never imagined how far-reaching the programs in it would become. Critics did, however, say that the entire act was a breeding ground for waste, fraud, and misuse. Roosevelt answered them by saying, "Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in the spirit of charity, then the constant omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." Indeed, the Social Security Act was originally created in the spirit of charity. For quite some time, AFDC accomplished its mission-- to allow single ...