Questions
Add comments to the questions at hand, and add some questions to discuss.
Is this growth sustainable, effective, or even ethical?
From the time period from 1966 to 2008, total welfare increased by 100x, or 12% per year. See chart at the right.
The amount of the Federal Budget that is given to transfer payments is nearly 60% or in round numbers = $2.2T, yes with a trillion. This is just with the Federal Budget.
If we assume that 11% is in the definition of poor, which historically has been the case (despite the definition creeping causing an increase in %, giving about 33 million in this category.
This computes to $67K per capita per year if the transfer payments were allocated to the poor, since the transfer payments were originally justified on the basis of taking care of the poor.
Some would even argue that the real percentage that is poor is closer to 5% and that the transfer payments are close to 2/3rds of the Federal Budget, giving $160K per capita.
However you slice these numbers, the poor are not getting anything close to this number, providing weight to the argument that there is a substantial amount of middle class welfare.
One can be sure that if this was put to the public in a honest, data driven manner the question of support would be quite negative.
In the video at right, the cultural aspects and tests of too much entitlements is in question and is not acknowledged by the Liberal community.
When one reads that that Food Stamp program has doubled during Obama's term and doubled before that in Bush's terms, the question of where is welfare headed must be raised. We need only look at the crisis of dependency in Europe to see the answer.
So what do you think about this question?