Welfare State Grows by Nearly 19% Under Obama – to Almost $1 Trillion a Year

(CNSNews.com) – Federal and state welfare assistance has grown almost 19 percent under President Barack Obama, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

All in all, there are 79 means-tested federal welfare programs, at a cost approaching $1 trillion annually, said Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector.

Rector conducted a comprehensive analysis of spending for government assistance programs, ranging from food, education and childcare programs to housing and medical care.

Since Fiscal Year 2009, federal and state welfare spending has risen from $779.9 billion to $927.2 billion, an increase of 18.8 percent. That fiscal year includes spending from Oct. 1, 2008 to Sept. 30, 2009.

In his report, Rector said the increase in federal means-tested welfare spending during Obama’s first two years in office was two-and-a-half times greater than any previous increase in federal welfare spending in U.S. history, after adjusting for inflation.

Rachel Sheffield, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, told CNSNews.com that this kind of pay out can not be maintained.

“It’s a huge amount of money we’re spending on these programs and our debt is growing,” she said. “It’s not sustainable.”

According to the report, titled “Examining the Means-tested Welfare State,” in FY 2011 the federal government dolled out $717.1 billion on welfare programs, while states spent $210.1 billion.

Since FY 2007, state welfare spending has stayed relatively flat, averaging $190.2 billion per year. Federal spending, however, has increased 53 percent, going from $468.7 billion in 2007 ($717.1 billion) to $717.1 billion in 2011.

In FY 2011 the largest share of total welfare spending went towards medical related programs (49.5 percent), followed by cash assistance (19.6 percent) and food assistance (11.8 percent).

That year nearly half of spending went to families with children at 49.9 percent, followed by disabled adults at 28.1 percent and elderly adults at 14.4 percent.

Since the 1950s when means-tested welfare spending (as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product) was less than 1 percent (0.93), welfare disbursements have ballooned to 6.1 percent of GDP in the 2010s.

Heritage’s Sheffield said the fastest growing welfare program is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as the food stamp program. As of May 2012, 46.5 million Americans are participating in SNAP, accordingto the Department of Agriculture, a 2.4 percentage increase from a year ago.

According to Rector, the government has spent $19.8 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars) on means-tested welfare since President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty began in the 1960s.

“In comparison,” he wrote, “the cost of all military wars in U.S. history from the Revolutionary War through the current war in Afghanistan has been $6.98 trillion.”

“The War on Poverty has cost three times as much as all other wars combined,” he said.

The increase in the welfare state shows no signs of slowing down, according to the Heritage report.

President Obama’s budget for FY 2013 estimates that total welfare spending will increase to $1.57 trillion by 2022, largely due to new entitlements under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

Star Parker, a leading champion for welfare reform in the 1990s, said the size and scope of benefits programs to the poor is “unfathomable” at nearly 80 programs and a cost of $1 trillion annually.

“How in the world will we survive as a country?” asked Parker in a speech at the Heritage Foundation on Friday.

“I mean the demand on the states and the local communities then is it a wonder that they are now going broke themselves, they’re having to file bankruptcies trying to keep up with the pensions and the promises that they’ve made to their underclass?” she said.

This shouldn't surprise anyone: it's part of the political war the liberal cult is engaged in. It's called buying votes. This strategy has been very effective, being one of the biggest reasons traitors like Obama get elected, so it makes perfect sense for them to expand the program.

Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it;" Obama promised to end America as we know it (with the code words "hope and change"). If this army of dupes led by traitors manages to get Obama reelected, America is finished.

67% of Americans say our country is headed in the wrong direction. Obama says FORWARD!

The Cloward-Piven Strategy

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the â€œCloward-Piven Strategyâ€� 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.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue an African American man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces â€¦ for major economic reform at the national level."……………………………..

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA694.pdf

“Welfare spending increased significantly under
President George W. Bush and has exploded
under President Barack Obama. In fact, since
President Obama took office, federal welfare
spending has increased by 41 percent, more
than $193 billion per year. Despite this government
largess, more than 46 million Americans
continue to live in poverty. Despite nearly $15
trillion in total welfare spending since Lyndon
Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964, the
poverty rate is perilously close to where we began
more than 40 years ago”.

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