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Abundance of sources here on Poverty and Dependency in America: http://www.akdart.com/poverty.html

E Pluribus Own’em.

USDA Spends $5 Mil To Recruit Food-Stamp Recipients. The number of food-stamp recipients has skyrocketed in the last few years yet the Obama Administration keeps wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to recruit more participants in the name of eradicating “food insecure households.” The latest publicly-financed campaign to boost the food-stamp rolls — officially known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP — was announced this month by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agency that administers it. The USDA is dedicating $5 million this year to “improve access to and increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”

State Gets $5 Mil Bonus For Food Stamp Sign Up. In its quest to promote taxpayer-funded entitlement programs, the Obama Administration has actually rewarded one state with a $5 million bonus for its efficiency in adding food-stamp recipients to already bulging rolls. It’s part of the administration’s campaign to eradicate “food insecure households” by improving access and increasing participation in the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Incidentally, the program was recently changed to SNAP to eliminate the stigma that comes with a name like food stamps.

New Tax Math: Single Moms + Big Brother. The wrong-headed welfare system started in the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and his proclaimed war against poverty. The system should have been called the war against marriage. LBJ’s Great Society set up a grossly immoral system whereby millions of people were taught they had an “entitlement” to pick the pockets of law-abiding, taxpaying families if they met two conditions: They didn’t work, and they were not married to someone who did work. This destroyed the work ethic and subsidized illegitimacy by giving single moms money and scores of benefits, such as welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, housing, utilities, WIC and commodities.

Fraudulent tax returns surge 181%. The IRS identified 335,341 tax returns claiming $1.9 billion in fraudulent refunds as of March 4, 2011, according to the findings of an audit conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. ... The Earned Income Tax Credit, aimed at helping lower-income taxpayers, has been a large source of fraud, with people falsely lowering their income to qualify or claiming children they don’t have. The IRS estimates that 23% to 28% of EITC credits are wrongfully paid to Americans every year, totaling $11 to $13 billion.

Welfare in a Bad Way. What most Americans identify as government “welfare” are payments to single mothers, food stamps and (perhaps) Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor. But that’s not the half of it. Since 1960, government has changed radically. Then, 52 percent of federal spending went for defense, 26 percent for “payments for individuals” — the welfare state. By 2008, 61 percent consisted of “payments for individuals,” 21 percent for defense. Social Security and Medicare — programs for the elderly — represented the biggest share: $1 trillion in 2008.

The Myth that Liberals Care About the Poor: Almost every program the Left supports to “help” the poor in this country is surreptitiously designed to de-motivate them and keep them dependent on the government. The Left saps their will to work with welfare and food stamps, the Left reduces their income and puts them out of jobs by encouraging illegal aliens to enter the country, and the Left fights voucher programs that would allow poverty-stricken students to go to the same schools as the rich Americans. Liberals incessantly ramble on about how much they care about the poor — and they do, the same way a Venus Flytrap cares about a random bug that happens to fly into its maw.

Obama Will Spend More on Welfare in the Next Year Than Bush Spent on Entire Iraq War. As a candidate for president, Barack Obama decried the financial toll that the Iraq war was taking on the economy, but Obama’s proposed spending on welfare through 2010 will eclipse Bush’s war spending by more than $260 billion.

How Liberalism Exploits The Vulnerable. Not knowing that she was on camera, this “community organizer” gave away the dirtiest of the dirty secrets of the left. Herein lies the explanation of how and why major segments of America, particularly in urban areas, upon becoming increasingly liberal over the past several decades, have become more lawless, more hopeless, and more helpless. While claiming to “help the little guy,” liberalism has a vested interest in keeping the “little guy” oppressed and dependent. Only in such a state can he fulfill his intended role as a “resource” of the liberal machine.

Strange Facts about America’s ‘Poor’. Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning. Fully 92 percent of poor households have a microwave; two-thirds have at least one DVD player and 70 percent have a VCR. Nearly 75 percent have a car or truck; 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks. Four out of five poor adults assert they were never hungry at any time in the prior year due to lack of money for food. Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television. Half have a personal computer; one in seven have two or more computers. More than half of poor families with children have a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation. Just under half — 43 percent — have Internet access. A third have a widescreen plasma or LCD TV. One in every four has a digital video recorder such as TiVo.

America’s Ever Expanding Welfare Empire. America’s welfare state is not a principality. It is a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world. Just one program, Medicaid, cost the federal government $275 billion in 2010, which is slated to rise to $451 billion by 2018. Counting state Medicaid expenditures, this one program cost taxpayers $425 billion in 2010, soaring to $800 billion by 2018. Under Obamacare, 85 million Americans will soon be on Medicaid, growing to nearly 100 million by 2021, according to the CBO.

Gov’t Welfare Widens The Wealth Gap. Starting in 1964, when President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, a well-intentioned crusade to end poverty, the U.S. has spent an estimated $16 trillion trying to help the less well-off. LBJ and other well-meaning Democratic politicians at the time also hoped that the burgeoning welfare state would make people more self-sufficient, a noble goal. It didn’t work. Today, some 44 million Americans are on food stamps. In 2007, it was 26 million. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently boasted that U.S. issues more than 80 million checks a month. But while the U.S. has more than 70 means-tested welfare programs, the poverty rate today is higher than it was in the late 1960s.

Moocher Index
Go west, but not too far west, to find self-reliance. The graph [in this article] was plotted by Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell from data assembled by the Center for Immigration Studies. The horizontal axis represents the percentage of non-poor residents of each state signed up for government assistance — in other words, income redistribution programs. Mitchell calls the measure the Moocher Index. ... Allow me to provide a few observations to assist you in seeing some staggering messages.
[#1] 6 of the top 10 (in fact, 4 of the top 5) states with the most moochers are in the Northeast.
[#2] 11 of the top 30 mooching states are on the East Coast.
[#3] Fully half of the top 20 mooching states are on either the East of West Coasts.
[#4] Half of the ten states with the lowest percentage of moochers are in the West, but not the West Coast.