Posted on 10/30/2012 1:00:42 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The federal government spent enough money on federal means-tested welfare programs to have sent each impoverished household a check for nearly $60,000, according to figures from the Census Bureau and the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
According to a report from the CRS produced for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), $1 trillion was spent on federal welfare programs during fiscal year 2011 with $746 billion in federal funds and $254 in state matching funds.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported that there were approximately 16.8 million households living below the federal poverty level of $23,000 per year for a family of four in 2011. ( See: 2011 Households Below Poverty 2011.pdf )
If each of the estimated 16.8 million households with income below the poverty level were to have received an equal share of the total welfare spending for fiscal year 2011, they each would have received $59,523.
If only the 2011 federal share of welfare spending (no state matching funds) were spent as direct cash payments, each household would have received $44,404, which is nearly double the federal poverty level for a family of four.
This federal welfare spending does not include programs such as Medicare and Social Security, because they are not means-tested programs. Means-tested programs are those that only pay out benefits to people whose incomes fall below a certain threshold, such as food stamps, traditional cash welfare, and Medicaid.
In other words, if the government were to discontinue its myriad federal welfare programs, such as housing vouchers, food stamps, and Medicaid, and instead just wrote every poor household a check, it would nearly quadruple their income: increasing it from at most $23,000 per year to nearly $83,000 per year.
If you were to give these households 50k each. They would never buy healthcare for themselves or anything like that. They would spend it on crap and still cry poverty.
According to one of the “Parkinson” Laws 70% of the money for welfare programs goes to the administrators and bureaucracy not the poor.
C. Northcott Parkinson was a sociologist who annunciated this and a couple of others. Expenditure rises to meet revenue for governments was another and I can’t remember the third.
All of those SEIU gov’t employees would be hittin’ the bricks.
After hearing Rush talk about this, I can’t think of a single more important story for the American people to be aware of.
They just keep pushing...
I’ll make them a deal.
Go ahead and write those checks then shut the department down for good.
Helping the poor isn’t really the point.
For the liberal “architects”, it’s about control and power.
For the sheeperals, it’s feeling good about themselves as good people without any effort expended on their part.
History has been that every welfare program that the federal government deals in sucks 75 cents out of every dollar for the administrators.......let’s all sing now.....”look for the union label.”
That’s a lot of crack cocaine, tattoos, Aire Jordan tennis shoes, and Cadillac Escalades for the inner-city tribal parasites, and they vote 95% FOR MORE !
I have been saying it for years- there is THE EQUIVALENT OF one full-time government employee for each family on welfare
The government ADMITS Welfare is only 27% efficient. So that means for every family getting $27,000 per year in ‘benefits’ there is an additional $73,000 per year that the government keeps, which is a darn good full-time salary.
we could save HALF of the cost of welfare if the governent would pay a company $50K to hire someone off welfare.
The company gets a free employee... the government saves 50%
Actually AFSCME and AFGE are the two big government unions, SEIU is more dishwashers, nurses, orderlies and that type, IIRC.
70+% of that went into government bureaucracy
You beat me to it—I was going to post that you could write them each a $60K check, and they would still want their foodstamps and Obamaphones.
Excellent math...but are you sure that many companies would want the “free” employee?
For $50k I would have the cleanest bathrooms in the corporate world
also the parking lot would shine
Youre forgetting about all those government employees pension plans. Its not about the poor, its about government employees.
Corrupting the susceptible into dependence on Government, is but one of the many steps in the process of our destruction.
William Flax
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