They also provided for orphanages with training for work for dependent children who had neither parents nor grandparents to care for them. Poor taxes were adopted to help finance the public facilities. Imprisonment was the penalty for refusal to work, refusal to pay poor taxes, and for inability to pay debts. In all institutions, people were expected to do piecework or to be put to work as contract laborers insofar as they were able to work to help defray the cost of feeding, housing, and clothing them. The foregoing brief sketch of the origins of some of our cultural beliefs about poverty and the poor is offered because beliefs are an important starting point in the policy making process.
Governments develop public policy to solve problems or to prevent potential problems.
This endeavor requires some notion of cause and effect. Hypotheses about cause and effect implicitly or explicitly underlie the provisions of policies and the statutes and programs that implement them. Most of the hypotheses about what to do about poverty in the United States were derived from the same sources that produced the Poor Laws in England. In the British colonies and in the post-Revolutionary period, Americans substantially reproduced the British system. The major difference was that in the colonies and in the early national period, work was abundant, while in Britain, it was scarce.