Posted on 03/28/2010 1:59:15 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, government has spent vast sums on welfare or aid to the poor; however, the aggregate cost of this assistance is largely unknown because the spending is fragmented into myriad programs.
As this report shows, means-tested welfare or aid to poor and low-income persons is now the third most expensive government function. Its cost ranks below support for the elderly through Social Security and Medicare and below government expenditures on education, but above spending on national defense. Prior to the current recession, one dollar in seven in total federal, state, and local government spending went to means-tested welfare.
Means-tested welfare spending or aid to the poor consists of government programs that provide assistance deliberately and exclusively to poor and lower-income people. By contrast, non-welfare programs provide benefits and services for the general population. For example, food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are means-tested aid programs that provide benefits only to poor and lower-income persons. On the other hand, Social Security, Medicare, police protection, and public education are not means-tested; they provide services and benefits to persons at all income levels.
In fiscal year (FY) 2008, total government spending on means-tested welfare or aid to the poor amounted to $714 billion. This high level of welfare spending was the result of steady permanent growth in welfare spending over several decades rather than a short-term response to temporary economic conditions.
Of the $714 billion in welfare spending, $522 billion (73 percent) was federal expenditures, and $192 billion (27 percent) was state government funds. Nearly all state government welfare expenditures are required matching contributions to federal welfare programs. These contributions could be considered a "welfare tax" that the federal government imposes on the states. Ignoring these matching state payments into the federal welfare system results in a serious underestimation of spending on behalf of the poor.
Of total means-tested spending in FY 2008, 52 percent was spent on medical care for poor and lower-income persons, and 37 percent was spent on cash, food, and housing aid. The remaining 11 percent was spent on social services, training, child development, targeted federal education aid, and community development for lower-income persons and communities. Roughly half of means-tested spending goes to disabled or elderly persons. The other half goes to lower-income families with children, most of which are headed by single parents.
Total means-tested welfare spending in FY 2008 amounted to around $16,800 for each poor person in the U.S.; however, some welfare spending goes to individuals who have low incomes but are not below the official poverty line (about $22,200 per year for a family of four). Typically, welfare benefits are received not just by the poor, but also by persons who have incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($44,400 per year for a family of four). Around one-third of the U.S. population falls within this lower income range. On average, welfare spending amounts to around $7,000 per year for each individual who is poor or who has an income below 200 percent of the poverty level. This comes to $28,000 per year for each lower-income family of four.
Welfare spending has grown enormously since President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty. Welfare spending was 13 times greater in FY 2008, after adjusting for inflation, than it was when the War on Poverty started in 1964. Means-tested welfare spending was 1.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) when President Johnson began the War on Poverty. In 2008, it reached 5 percent of GDP.
Annual means-tested welfare spending is more than sufficient to eliminate poverty in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau, which is in charge of measuring poverty and inequality in the nation, defines a family as poor if its annual income falls below official poverty income thresholds. If total means-tested welfare spending were simply converted into cash benefits, the sum would be nearly four times the amount needed to raise the income of all poor families above the official poverty line.
One may reasonably ask how government can spend so much on welfare and still have great inequality and so many people living in apparent poverty. The answer is that the Census ignores nearly the entire welfare system in its measurements. In its conventional reports, the Census counts only 4 percent of total welfare spending as income. Most government discussions of poverty and inequality do not account for the massive transfers of the welfare state.
Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, government has spent $15.9 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars) on means-tested welfare. In comparison, the cost of all other wars in U.S. history was $6.4 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars).
In his first two years in office, President Barack Obama will increase annual federal welfare spending by one-third from $522 billion to $697 billion. The combined two-year increase will equal almost $263 billion ($88.2 billion in FY 2009 plus $174.6 billion in FY 2010). After adjusting for inflation, this increase is two and a half times greater than any previous increase in federal welfare spending in U.S. history. As a share of the economy, annual federal welfare spending will rise by roughly 1.2 percent of GDP.
Under President Obama, government will spend more on welfare in a single year than President George W. Bush spent on the war in Iraq during his entire presidency. According to the Congressional Research Service, the cost of the Iraq war through the end of the Bush Administration was around $622 billion. By contrast, annual federal and state means-tested welfare spending will reach $888 billion in FY 2010. Federal welfare spending alone will equal $697 billion in that year.
While campaigning for the presidency, Obama lamented that "the war in Iraq is costing each household about $100 per month." Applying the same standard to means-tested welfare spending reveals that welfare will cost each household $560 per month in 2009 and $638 per month in 2010.
Most of Obama's increases in welfare spending are permanent expansions of the welfare state, not temporary increases in response to the current recession. According to the long-term spending plans set forth in Obama's FY 2010 budget, combined federal and state spending will not drop significantly after the recession ends. In fact, by 2014, welfare spending is likely to equal $1 trillion per year.
According to President Obama's budget projections, federal and state welfare spending will total $10.3 trillion over the next 10 years (FY 2009 to FY 2018). This spending will equal $250,000 for each person currently living in poverty in the U.S., or $1 million for a poor family of four.
Over the next decade, federal spending will equal $7.5 trillion, while state spending will reach $2.8 trillion. These figures do not include any of the increases in health care expenditure currently being debated in Congress.
In the years ahead, average annual welfare spending will be roughly twice the spending levels under President Bill Clinton after adjusting for inflation. Total means-tested spending is likely to average roughly 6 percent of GDP for the next decade.
That chart could also represent social pathologies in the black community. Disease, single moms, out of wedlock births (quaint phrase), divorce rates, murder, drive-by shootings, drug use, HIV/AIDS, incarceration...you name it. The more wealth we transfer, the worse things get.
Get ready for a whole new round of even more virulent pathologies embedded for the next 3 or 4 generations.
-- The Political Perspective of the Democratic Socialists of America
--We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.
--The fundamental task of democratic socialists is to build anti-corporate social movements capable of winning reforms that empower people.
--In the United States, we must fight for a humane public policies that will provide quality health care, education, and job training and that redirect public investment from the military to much-neglected urban housing and infrastructure. Such policies require the support of a majoritarian coalition of trade unionists, people of color, feminists, gays and lesbians and all other peoples committed to democratic change. Our greatest contribution as American socialists to global social justice is to build that coalition, which is key to transforming the power relations of global capitalism.
---Socialists have historically supported public ownership and control of the major economic institutions of society -- the large corporations -- in order to eliminate the injustice and inequality of a class-based society, and have depended on the the organization of a working class party to gain state power to achieve such ends. In the United States, socialists joined with others on the Left to build a broad-based, anti-corporate coalition, with the unions at the center, to address the needs of the majority by opposing the excesses of private enterprise.
---Social Redistribution. --the shift of wealth and resources from the rich to the rest of society--will require:
1.--massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector, in order to provide the main source of new funds for social programs,income maintenance and infrastructure rehabilitation, and
2.--a massive shift of public resources from the military (the main user of existing discretionary funds) to civilian uses.
Although such reforms will be very difficult to achieve on a national scale in the short term, their urgency increases as income inequality intensifies. Over time, income redistribution and social programs will be critical not only to the poor but to the great majority of working people. The defense and expansion of government programs that promote social justice, equal education for all children, universal health care, environmental protection and guaranteed minimum income and social well-being is critical for the next Left.
Election agenda
--Electoral tactics are only a means for democratic socialists; the building of a powerful anti-corporate coalition is the end. Where third party or non-partisan candidates mobilize such coalitions, democratic socialists will build such organizations and candidacies. However, to democratize U.S. electoral politics - whatever its party form -requires serious campaign finance reform both within and without the Democratic Party.
Pelosi is a big part of this.
Something is definitely wrong here. We all know that clinton ended “welfare as we know it” way back in 1995. Why does that graph show the numbers going up and up and up?
In addition to taxes, now for every dollar the Govt. borrows, a NEGATIVE $.45 is the GDP result. We are past the point of no return. Here is an article and graph in support:
http://www.swarmusa.com/vb4/entry.php/25-THE-Most-Important-Chart-of-the-CENTURY
On older, outdated set of data from 1910 on that has not counted recent borrowings:
Year Gross Debt in Billions [6] as % of GDP
1910 2.6 n/a
1920 25.9 n/a
1930 16.2 n/a
1940 43.0 52.4
1950 257.4 94.1
1960 290.5 56.1
1970 380.9 37.6
1980 909.0 33.3
1990 3,206.3 55.9
2000 5,628.7 58.0
2001 5,769.9 57.4
2002 6,198.4 59.7
2003 6,760.0 62.5
2004 7,354.7 64.0
2005 7,905.3 64.6
2006 8,451.4 64.9
2007 8,950.7 65.5
2008 9,985.8 70.2
2009 (est.) 12,867.5 90.4
2010 (est.) 14,456.3 98.1
2011 (est.) 15,673.9 101.1
2012 (est.) 16,565.7 100.6
2013 (est.) 17,440.2 99.7
2014 (est.) 18,350.0 100.9
The way a society should run is for every able bodied person to have a job, not for a huge group to receive financial aid from the rest of us (the aid takes numerous forms including tax and mortgage breaks and now healthcare). Now a huge group (40 percent or so) pays no taxes. Crazy, man! And here we are cranking up a healthcare program to give additional aid primarily to that same 40 percent.
Universal healthcare is a wonderful idea from a moral standpoint. The only problem is cost. The only real solution is for practically everyone to make enough to to pay for their universal level of healthcare. The solution is not to have the universal level of healthcare to be so expensive that an enormous fraction of our population must have a subsidy. Massive programs where one part of the population takes care of another part only sap the society’s energy and motivation.
Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people's money."
"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both." - James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
So, Patriots, when is real change going to happen?
How long will it take this administration to bring this country and its citizens to the same status as Haiti or other third world African and Asian nations? Soon if some type of action isn’t taken.
In 2014, it will be $18.35 trillion? My suspicion is that Obamacare will never go into effect. I don’t think the federal government is going to survive the next 4 years.
Maybe he’ll stop when he reaches an Obamillion?
Obamacare will create jobs for 17,000 more IRS agents, more govt. people to harass us, and possibly imprison some of us.
Exactly.
Yes, no valid currency inevitably means no country and probable war. The last time our country experienced a currency “not worth a Continental” was during the Revolutionary war. Now we have “not worth a dollar” approaching imminently, we have a revolutionary administration to transmorph the US into something visionary and mean, and we are in multiple wars/conflicts with one expanding temporarily (? Afganistan). This time we have Obama in comparison to George Washington and the founders....founders vs flounderers.
CAGW Names Rep. Louise Slaughter Porker of the Month
http://www.cagw.org/newsroom/porker-of-the-month/2010/cagw-names-rep-louise.html
And that's just the way they want it. Classic Cloward-Piven strategy to bankrupt the system and replace it with socialism/communism. "The Cloward-Piven Strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse." More Cloward-Piven info Here
Those SOB's doing this on purpose. Grrrr. Remember when you Vote and make sure every American knows by November 2, 2010!
Well summed up—
Their political perspective surely includes ending America’s projection of power for freedom abroad—and well as ending freedom within.
If persons think they have all answers through Marxist analysis, while lacking restraints of religious faith, the ends justifies whatever means are necessary.
They become gods unto themselves.
A friend of mine went to work for Goodwill right after Welfare reform was passed. She was floored that so many she had go through her entry into the workforce progam had no idea how to fill out a application to go to work, nor had they ever known anyone who worked for a living.Many told her they were just there until they could get pregnant again becuse as long as you had a child unter the age of 2, the welfare kept coming.
The whole rotten system would crash and burn long before Premier Hussein ever gets his hands on that much money. The Chinese are our mortal enemies but they are not fools. Even they won’t lend us that much money...
Pick a problem, whether it is poverty, or unemployment, or maintaining high employment,or average profits too low, or even average profits too high, and Keynesians will believe that the cure is increased government intervention, with increased government spending and increasingly larger government deficits.They don't have a problem with wasteful spending. They believe that the government can always tax more, borrow more, or print more money.
Surprise, surprise..
The scumbag Ubanga administration is all about reparations.
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