Posted on 10/26/2012 1:17:43 PM PDT by grundle
New data compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee shows that, last year, the United States spent over $60,000 to support welfare programs per each household that is in poverty. The calculations are based on data from the Census, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congressional Research Services.
"According to the Census’s American Community Survey, the number of households with incomes below the poverty line in 2011 was 16,807,795," the Senate Budget Committee notes. "If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011."
This dollar figure is almost three times the amount the average household on poverty lives on per year. "If the spending on these programs were converted into cash, and distributed exclusively to the nation’s households below the poverty line, this cash amount would be over 2.5 times the federal poverty threshold for a family of four, which in 2011 was $22,350 (see table in this link)," the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note.
To be clear, not all households living below the poverty line receive $61,194 worth of assistance per year. After all, many above the poverty line also receive benefits from social welfare programs (e.g. pell grants).
But if welfare is meant to help bring those below the poverty line to a better place, it helps demonstrate that numbers do not add up.
As for the welfare programs, the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note:
A congressional report from CRS recently revealed that the United States now spends more on means-tested welfare than any other item in the federal budget—including Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. Including state contributions to the roughly 80 federal poverty programs, the total amount spent in 2011 was approximately $1 trillion. Federal spending alone on these programs was up 32 percent since 2008.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that almost 110 million Americans received some form of means-tested welfare in 2011. These figures exclude entitlements like Medicare and Social Security to which people contribute, and they refer exclusively to low-income direct and indirect financial support—such as food stamps, public housing, child care, energy assistance, direct cash aid, etc. For instance, 47 million Americans currently receive food stamps, and USDA has engaged in an aggressive outreach campaign to boost enrollment even further, arguing that “every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.84 in the economy… It’s the most direct stimulus you can get.” (Economic growth, however, is weaker this year than the two years prior, even as food stamp “stimulus” has reached an all-time high.)
Here's a breakdown of the welfare spending:
Meaning you could make them all comfortably middle class by just handing over a check and cutting out all the money-grubbing gubbermint hangers-on middle men.
If rich folks could give just a little more...
To a large extent “welfare programs” are really jobs programs for those who in Gov’t who had administer them. And these gov’t workers skew heavily female, gay and minority. This applies to the state, country, Federal level. The federal Dept of Education and the EEOC and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development are all huge jobs program for female, gay and minority.
Even the drop-out welfare class ought to figure out that someone is getting a lot more money out of welfare than they are. This information should be spread far and wide, perhaps with the caption: Who’s getting your share?
One metric commonly applied to non-Gov charities is the amount of benefits delivered to the targeted group as a percentage of revenue. I wonder what that ratio is for the Government poverty programs. This is separate from an analysis of how much of the net delivered aid is fraudulently taken, which is also important.
The same type math applies to the jobs OBlame-a claims to have “created.” Dividing the $800,000,000,000 “Stimulus” by their claim of 5,000,000 jobs created, it turns out to be $160,000 per job. Same logic. Yet the news media just accepts it, drinks the cool-aid and carries on.
Notice they’ve dropped the term “created OR saved.”
Ronald Reagan did this exact calculation during “the speech” which he titled “A Time For Choosing”.
“Somewhere, it seems, there is some overhead” he quipped to much laughter.
Several decades later it seems the joke is still on us.
With almost no incentive to actually perform eg. Government handouts, jobs, etc. that average minority IQ will remain at 85, one full standard deviation lower than whites (Dept of Education data) and the socialist redistribution of our money will never end until this Country collapses.
From “A Time For Choosing” by Ronald Reagan....
We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they’re going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer—and they’ve had almost 30 years of it—shouldn’t we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we’re told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We’re spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you’ll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we’d be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
Yes, for a couple of months. Then the money would be gone.
Most people in poverty are there because of poor financial choices, not because of a lack of opportunity. Given more money, they'll just end up back where they were.
Maybe some sort of required money management class would help some impoverished folks change the root problem.
How many years are we now without a Federal budget?
Thanks for bearing with my botched sentence structure
The federal bureaucracy took up at least $40,000 per family.
Exactly! Cut them a check for $35K and call it even.That is enough to rent a place and feed them.
Well, yeah. Congress are the poster children of poor money management. It's why they can identify with other citizens who are too.
Government employees, mostly college graduates “working hard,” making excellent salaries, are a hugh voting bloc for the Democrats.
The are two classes of people on welfare. There are the recipients and there are the administrators. The recipients barely survive. The administrators thrive, and rejoice in their circumstances.
But, without a doubt, both classes are on welfare.
We need desperately to get back to helping our neighbors locally through churches and other community-based organizations.
The biggest socialist, and single-payer welfare program in our nation is the government K-12 schools.
Does that figure include the cost of the government workers (fed, state, local) who administer the programs? I’ll bet that adds thousands per family.
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