The $64,000 welfare quiz for reporters and editors

email ^ | 12/2002 | By Craig J. Cantoni

[hsmomx3]

This is a 15-question quiz for reporters and editors of the mainstream media. A perfect score entitles the winner to be called a professional journalist instead of a shill for liberal Democrats.

Question One: Other than working, deferring gratification and investing in your future, what is a surefire way of having an actual or imputed income of $64,000 in America?

Answer: Being an unwed, unemployed mother of five children.

Question Two: How can that be?

Answer: By adding up the benefits from two sources of welfare. The first source is 70 welfare programs, especially Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, free school lunches, free medical insurance, housing vouchers, Head Start, utility allowances, and child care subsidies. These account for about $29,000 of the $64,000. The second source is free public education.

Question Three: Why is public education considered welfare?

Answer: This is a trick question. Neither the government, the media nor the public education establishment classifies public education as welfare, but that is exactly what it is when a family gets free education benefits without paying anything into the system.

Question Four: How much is the education benefit for our mother of five kids?

Answer: The amount varies by state, but $7,000 per kid per year is an average benefit. The total for five kids for 12 years is $420,000, which is about equivalent to what the average worker earns in 14 years. The benefit is larger if kids are in special education or bilingual education classes. It will be even larger when school districts begin to implement President Bush's "Leave no child behind" program, which mandates the hiring of private tutors for failing kids.

Question Five: For households that pay federal income tax, what is their annual welfare bill, excluding their contribution to the public education of others?

Answer: $5,600.

Question Six: What is the total welfare bill for the nation, excluding public education?

Answer: The nation spends almost a half-trillion dollars per year on welfare. In inflation-adjusted dollars, that is more than the nation's entire Gross Domestic Product a century ago.

Question Seven: With welfare reform, has welfare spending increased or decreased?

Answer: Increased.

Question Eight: By how much?

Answer: Since the War on Poverty began in 1965, $8.29 trillion has been spent on welfare, excluding education. Today, the nation spends ten times more than was spent in 1965. Welfare spending is projected to increase 5.5 percent a year for the next five years.

Question Nine: Who receives most of the welfare?

Answer: Single-parent families receive 89 percent of welfare.

Question Ten: What are the main causes of poverty, school dropouts, crime, child abuse and other social pathology?

Answer: Out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families.

Question Eleven: What social phenomenon proves the axiom that the behavior that is subsidized is the behavior that you get?

Answer: Out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families.

Question Twelve: What is most welfare spent on?

Answer: Over half is spent on health care.

Question Thirteen: Why?

Answer: Because the government killed the free market in health care and health insurance 60 years ago through misguided tax and regulatory policies. There is not a consumer-led, consumer-is-king market in health care as there is in food, shelter and clothing. As a result, health care spending as a share of income has risen dramatically over the last century while spending on food has dropped from 43 percent of income to 15 percent of income.

Question Fourteen: Why does the establishment media almost always cover welfare issues from the perspective of the welfare recipient and almost never from the perspective of the taxpayer.

Answer: Because, as surveys show, three-fourths of editors and reporters are liberal Democrats.

Question Fifteen: In interviewing welfare recipients like our mother of five children, reporters never ask this question: "Why do you keep having children you can't afford and why do you think it is okay to take other people's money?" Why is the question not asked?

Answer: There are three reasons: a) there is an unwritten rule in press rooms that the question is verboten; b) if reporters began to ask questions like that, out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families might become socially unacceptable; c) if such behavior becomes socially unacceptable, the behavior might decrease, thus resulting in less social pathology, less welfare and fewer liberal Democrats being elected to office.

What's your score? Are you a professional journalist or a shill for liberal Democrats?

___________

Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

[DAnconia55]

Good post.

Though I think the real welfare bill is higher than $500 billion.

Was the share of interest on the debt counted, for example?

Then there are the economic costs associated with that money not being put to more productive use - jobs, economic growth foregone.

Freepers need to see more of this. 99.999999999999% of the public have no idea what the Federal budget is like. Most think foreign aid and defense are the biggest expenditures.

It's not. It's welfare.

[Lil'freeper]

Foreign aid is welfare, too, so you're doubly right.

[StACase]

[Mark Felton]

Actually, I don't care for his article too much. His inclusion of public education as a welfare benefit for the parents is not convincing, even if technically accurate.

The investigation I'd like to see would answer the question "How many welfare recipients are involved in the underground economy?"

Welfare motivates people to move into the underground economy.

Drugs will also never be legalized because it would destroy a primary income source for the underclass which would cause a huge backlash against the Democrats and Republicans alike. It would precipitate social upheaval.

I think tobacco will also eventually be made illegal because there is a huge underground economy which would benefit from illegal tobacco smuggling and sales.

Leftists have never, ever cared about the health of the people. They only ever care about the acquisition of power.

The underground economy is what turned the USSR upside down. Reagan encouraged it. Similarly Leftists in the US are using the same technique to destabilize the US (economically and therefore politically)and shred the rule of law.

[Ken H]

Next question-- What portion of this Federal spending is authorized by the US Constitution?

[doc]

Great post. Sad to say my mother in law is on the government dole. She has been receiving some sort of government assistance half of her adult life. She is fully capable of working but at the age of 50 she stated that she is tired of working and wants the government to take care of her. The government provides her funds to live 3 miles from the beach in so cal in a single family home. She knows full well how to bilk the system. Her unemployed live in boyfriend even gets paid over $400/mo.. to look after her. This women drives all over so cal, takes 3 vacations a year, physical therapy ( which she doesn't need)three times a week including a massage, etc... I've added up her costing the taxpayers approximately $100,000 a year.

[Lil'freeper]

I think it is a game of semantics, what "is" is. "They" don't call it welfare and hope we don't start to think of it as welfare. Stigmatizing social security as such could fuel the privitization debate.

[StACase]

What portion of this Federal spending is authorized by the US Constitution?
(Ken H)

Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

Sure looks like general Welfare covers a lot of ground.

[ImphClinton]

I doubt there are very many Americans serfish enough to try to take away public education.

Afterall most who would are retired. Unfornately they are not likely to see the bennifit of educating those who will never help meet their needs. Fornatelly the truly selfish number of Senior Citizens is decreassing as the baby boom generation ages and replaces those who had to live through the depression.

[hsmomx3]

You'd be surprised how many elderly people here in AZ feel that giving more tax $$ to the schools is a good thing. Then again, you're probably not surprised.

[Ken H]

The key word there is "the general welfare of the United States".

"United States" in the Constitution refers to the Federal government, not the People.

The Tenth Amendment, for example, says "The powers not granted to the United States by the Constitution, nor forbidden by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

[StACase]

Thank you for the civics lesson, I appreciate it :-)