Does the US really spend 60000 per household on welfare?

[RadioRaheem84]

"According to the Census’s American Community Survey, the number of households with incomes below the poverty line in 2011 was 16,807,795," the Senate Budget Committee notes. "If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011."

A right wing friend of mine told me about this the other day.

Now I know part of this is sleight of hand. They just divided up the total amount spent on government assistance programs and spread them evenly among the total amount of Americans living in poverty. Seems deceptive. Not to mention not all that spending goes to lower income families.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/over-60000-welfare-spentper-household-poverty_657889.html

Lesson to decipher coded right wing rhetoric against the poor.

[Ace High]

Yeah if that were true as implied, those people certainly would not be in poverty anymore.

[BIXX]

I wonder if they consider public services like school "welfare". Or maybe roads? Or something. Jesus.

[RadioRaheem84]

Yeah if that were true as implied, those people certainly would not be in poverty anymore.

Oh shit! You're right. How the hell did I miss that obvious one! :blushing:

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

You shouldn't listen to anything your right-wing "friends" tell you. State and federal spending obviously includes everything from road-works, corporate subsidies, military spending and so on, so tell him to piss the right fuck off.

[RadioRaheem84]

You shouldn't listen to anything your right-wing "friends" tell you. State and federal spending obviously includes everything from road-works, corporate subsidies, military spending and so on, so tell him to piss the right fuck off.

I keep forgetting that the right wing tends to define welfare with an extremely broad brush.

I believe in the US the only real "welfare" program is TANF.

[TooManyQuestions]

When I was on welfare, we got 500 a month in cash, 500 in food stamps, plus Medicaid for all for of us. I had to work 180 hrs a month to receive those benefits.

Doing the math that way, you include all of the salaries paid to the people who run the agencies as "welfare." Plus profit. Many of these agencies that provide benefits and job training are for-profit contractors. Also, Medicaid is contracted out to private insurers in many states, meaning that the state has to pay for people who don't get sick.

[Comrade Jacob]

60,000? I'm assuming you mean USD per year. That can't be so, if that was the case they wouldn't be needing welfare after a while. When my family was on welfare we got £7,000 a year, about $30,000 now, the idea that they would get twice as much as I did is not believable.

[Slavic]

If you actually read the whole article that is linked in the first post it states that

"The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that almost 110 million Americans received some form of means-tested welfare in 2011."

The 110 million Americans receiving some form of means based welfare is much more then the republican claimed 16.8 million households bellow the poverty line. Mind you a household is not always a single person but may include large families. So if you include the 110 million cited by the Census Bureau, the distribution of welfare comes out to around $9,350 per individual. That is using the grossly oversimplified mathematics that the right wingers were using in the article.

[Bardo]

This has been debunked. By the Washington Post, of all people :confused:


The chart concludes that welfare spending “equates” to $168 in cash per day for each household in poverty, which it says exceeds the median income by 20 percent. Alternatively, as Sessions put it at the hearing, this amounts to $60,000 per year, compared to a median income of $50,000 in 2011.

We had long discussions with Sessions’s staff about this figure, which they contend is mathematically correct and intended to illuminate the money now spent by the federal government on low-income people. But we have some serious problems with both the numerator and denominator in this calculation.

First, health-care spending, especially Medicaid, makes up nearly 50 percent of the total figure. But a majority of Medicaid spending goes to the elderly and disabled, not families with children.

Moreover, health-care spending is different from food stamps or the earned income tax credit in that such aid generally does not add to a family’s income level; instead, such assistance helps pays for bills that are the direct result of how sick or disabled a patient is. (That’s why so much of Medicaid spending is directed to the elderly in the last years of life.)

“Medicaid is a federal program that is intended to provide health-care services to people who are poor or near-poor,” responded a Sessions aide. “It also provides health benefits to sick people, but those people must first meet certain income criteria (and in some cases an asset test) in order to qualify for the benefit. In other words, being sick alone doesn’t qualify one for Medicaid in the same way as being hungry doesn’t qualify one for food stamps.”

Still, while the chart compares what Sessions terms welfare spending to median income, the Census Bureau does not include health benefits (such as employer-provided health care) in that calculation, even though such benefits account for half of the welfare side of the ledger. (See Page 29.) So, he’s really comparing apples and oranges.

Finally, Sessions adds up many means-tested programs, which are aimed at people with low incomes, but then divides the figure by the number of people under the poverty level — even though millions of people above the poverty level receive these benefits. That also significantly gooses up the figure for spending per household.

At first glance, many might assume that Sessions is saying this is how much money is given to each household under the poverty line. Sessions’s staff fiercely disputed that, noting that the chart says “equates,” which they say indicates it is not claiming that this money is spent only on people below the poverty line.

But that impression is certainly left, particularly given the way Sessions discussed the figure at the hearing: “We spend enough on federal welfare to mail every household living beneath the poverty line a check for $60,000 each year.”

In testimony before the House Budget Committee in 2012, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation said that simply dividing the means-tested spending by the number of the poor “can be misleading because many persons with incomes above the official poverty levels also receive means-tested aid.” He recommended dividing the figure by the bottom third of the income distribution, which yielded a figure of $36,000 for a family of four.
The Congressional Budget Office, in a report this month, had an even more nuanced approach, estimating the average federal spending per household in 2006 for the 10 largest means-tested programs (worth about 75 percent of Sessions’s total) by different income quintiles (See Box 1.) For the lowest quintile, the figure is nearly $9,000, after adjusting to 2012 dollars.

In both cases, when a more nuanced approach was taken, the headline number shrinks.
“This calculation was not intended to trick people into thinking that poor households receive $60,000 in benefits. It was also not intended to suggest that these programs are available only to those in poverty,” the Sessions aide explained. “It was intended to start a discussion about how much we spend on programs that most people believe are intended to support poor people, what the benefits include (e.g., we’ve talked about showing how small an amount relative to the total is directed at jobs programs), and who the benefits are for…. We intended this statistic to open up a dialogue about how we (as a society) define the welfare state and who should be covered by that welfare state.”
Those are certainly worthy questions. One could also explore whether some benefits add to a disincentive to work, because workers face a “cliff” in which they rapidly lose more benefits for each extra dollar they earn, as the chart below from Gene Steuerle of the Urban Institute shows.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

God, if you want to talk about a conversation that gets me riled up, its the subject of welfare.

As some of my foreign comrades may know, the typical stereotype of a welfare recipient in this country is of an obese, middle-aged (and usually non-white) housewife with six kids and curlers in her hair who sits around on her ass all day and just leeches off of the system.

Of course, as most of you comrades would guess, the reality is far more complex than that. Most (if not all) states require you to have some kind of job, or at the very least be actively seeking employment (and being able to provide evidence of said employment seeking).

And if you want to talk about a truly humiliating experience, then needing welfare is one of them. You feel like an utter failure. Like you did something wrong.

It's also extremely depressing. It's not neccessarily that the people at the government center are unfriendly, but something about having to sit in an overcrowded lobby with several other people (many with very young children) just makes you want to kill yourself.



.....Out of curiosity, could any of my british comrades tell me how the whole dole system works in the UK? I'm interested.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

As some of my foreign comrades may know, the typical stereotype of a welfare recipient in this country is of an obese, middle-aged (and usually non-white) housewife with six kids and curlers in her hair who sits around on her ass all day and just leeches off of the system.


This is the British stereotypical view as well, the Torygraph peddled nonsense. In Sweden, the stereotypical view is of middle-eastern immigrants on welfare, often in the same way (many kids, can't support themselves, this and that, hurrhurr).


Of course, as most of you comrades would guess, the reality is far more complex than that. Most (if not all) states require you to have some kind of job, or at the very least be actively seeking employment (and being able to provide evidence of said employment seeking).

Similar in the UK and parts of Europe, though the exact application varies. The move in later years has been towards installing disgusting fucking systems that seek to emulate the TANF (Fuck off and die, Clinton) with "workfare" and "service in return" for the benefits. And death to the whole guilt-tripping deal. More benefits, more welfare, take what you can.

Luckily I never had to go to any office to get welfare, but one sure does not live in plenty - even with my rent covered 91% by the housing benefit, at the months end, nothing really remains most of the time.

[Polaris]

AHHHHHHH I was almost finished typing my response when I accidentally erased it all! Here goes again...

Summary:
I found the document this was based on which includes 83 'welfare' programs (which I cannot post a link to, but you can find it yourself if you go to the Republican US Senate Budget website and search for "CRS report"). The first thing I noticed was that many do not only apply to those below the poverty level (which is ~$20,000 for a household of four,) but anyone with "low income,"; if the total amount spent was divided by anyone with "low income," (whatever that means), I'm sure the figure would be decrease quite a bit.

For example, the National Free/Reduced Price Breakfast and Lunch Program for K-12 students was included, but to qualify for that a household's income can be up to 185% of the poverty level. I'm sure there are many similar cases, but I'm not going to go through every single program included.

Yeah if that were true as implied, those people certainly would not be in poverty anymore.
It does seem ridiculous that that much is spent per household; obviously there is some huge issue with the data that I'm not seeing. Whether that means the figures are an outright lie or something else, I have no idea. Of course, the CRS' definition of 'welfare' seems to be pretty broad. Additionally, the 'State Contributions' section isn't even backed on actual data, it is only an estimate. Almost all of the 'State Contributions' went to medicaid and children's medicaid, so it should be included with the 'health programs' section; interestingly the figure then reaches $620 billion, over half of all of the spending.

EDIT: Woah a bunch of responses magically appeared. Seems like some others have already (stole my thunder) debunked it, and much better than I, I might add.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Oh, and don't forget folks: we Americans don't have universal healthcare either.

So combine all of the above with that pretty little bit of reality, and you have something that, regardless of whether or not you're a socialist, should make your blood boil.

[BIXX]

And if you want to talk about a truly humiliating experience, then needing welfare is one of them. You feel like an utter failure. Like you did something wrong.

It's also extremely depressing. It's not neccessarily that the people at the government center are unfriendly, but something about having to sit in an overcrowded lobby with several other people (many with very young children) just makes you want to kill yourself.

When my mom needed to collect unemployment it was the same. And even if they government workers aren't RUDE per say, they seem condescending, and kinda act like you're a failure.

[tachosomoza]

No. Take anything the right wing bourgeois minded anti-working poor louts throw at you with a ton of salt.

[RedBen]

God, if you want to talk about a conversation that gets me riled up, its the subject of welfare.

And if you want to talk about a truly humiliating experience, then needing welfare is one of them. You feel like an utter failure. Like you did something wrong.

It's also extremely depressing. It's not neccessarily that the people at the government center are unfriendly, but something about having to sit in an overcrowded lobby with several other people (many with very young children) just makes you want to kill yourself.

i felt this way much of growing up. living in battered women's shelters and homeless shelters, going into public aid offices for hours... just today at a pro choice rally i had some dickhead screaming about women spending other people's money on abortion. we almost had a throw down on michigan ave downtown, he walked away. this kind of selfish and "me-ist" attitude is disgusting. like someone being uplifted or helped is some how inherently bad for other people.