The
figures listed below are the 2012 federal government’s poverty guidelines.
However, they are not the figures that the Census Bureau uses to calculate the
number of poor persons. The Census Bureau uses poverty threshold data based on
gender, size of family, number of children, farm, and non-farm. (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/index.html)
2012
Poverty Guidelines for the
48 Contiguous States and the District of Columbia |
|
Persons
in
family/household |
Poverty
guideline
|
1
|
$11,170
|
2
|
15,130
|
3
|
19,090
|
4
|
23,050
|
5
|
27,010
|
6
|
30,970
|
7
|
34,930
|
8
|
38,890
|
For families/households with more than 8 persons,
add $3,960 for each additional person. |
(http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/12poverty.shtml/)
According
to Michael Tanner, “The poverty rate has risen to 15.1 percent of Americans,
the highest level in nearly a decade…Welfare spending increased significantly
under President George W. Bush and has exploded under President Barack Obama.” Since Obama took office, federal expenditures
on welfare have increased by 41 percent, more than $193 billion per year. (Cato
Institute, The American Welfare State, April 11, 2012)
Forty-six
million Americans live in poverty, even though the government spent more than $15
trillion on welfare since President Lyndon Johnson enacted the war on poverty
in 1964. We lost all battles because the federal government was not serious
about winning this war, it did not concentrate on fixing the problems by adding
jobs to the economy that created prosperity. We outsourced jobs, we “saved or
created’ shovel-ready jobs for bureaucrats, and we made poverty comfortable and
dependable for an increasing sector of the population.
If
we compare these 46 million poor Americans to other nations, their poverty is
considered comfortable in most places around the world and well-off in many other
countries.
That
is not to say that there are no Americans who do not genuinely need help. The
lengthy recession born by the bursting of the housing bubble, the subsequent TARP,
the failed stimulus, auto bailouts, the mismanaged economy, the crony
capitalism, created real victims who lost their homes, their jobs, their
insurance, and their livelihood. They did not deliberately “purchase” a home
that they knew they could not possibly afford to repay, nor engaged in
complicated derivatives trading with other people’s retirement money and
savings.
Yet
some Americans who truly needed help were reluctant to accept welfare or, if
they did, the benefits were inadequate or ran out. There are always Americans
in temporary or permanent need who fall through the cracks of welfare. It is people
who know how to milk the system who benefit the most from the welfare largesse.
Being
on welfare is not just the result of lack of a good education, bad choices in
life, unwillingness to work, of a culture of entitlement (it is free and the
government owes it to us), it is also a function of bad luck, personal injury, illness,
and hard times during cyclical economic downturns.
The
federal government uses personal income tax receipts to provide two-thirds of
welfare funds, while state and local governments provide one-third from state
tax receipts. Economically speaking, welfare is categorized as transfer
payments.
The largest transfer of payments (welfare) goes to Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), housing vouchers, State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
Medicaid
spent the most on health care in 2011 - $228 billion for 49 million Americans.
Food stamps or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was the
second largest expenditure in 2011 with $72 billion for 41 million Americans.
This year, 43 million Americans are on food stamps thanks to our tanking
economy under the leadership and guidance of the current administration.
According to Michael Tanner, Director of Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato
Institute, federal spending on welfare rose 375 percent since 1965. Total
federal welfare spending rose from 2.19 to 6 percent of GDP.
Since
the inception of the War on Poverty, the federal government created 126
anti-poverty programs. There are some with overlapping missions:
-
33
housing programs administered by 4 different cabinet departments
-
21
food assistance programs administered by 3 different departments and one agency
-
8
health care programs run by 5 different agencies at HHS
-
27
cash/general assistance programs run by 6 cabinet departments and 5 agencies
“All
together, seven different cabinet agencies and six independent agencies
administer at least one anti-poverty program.” (Cato Institute, The American
Welfare State, p. 3)
Keynesian
economists suggested that a better way to tackle poverty was to give income to
the poor without destroying their incentives to work via the earned income tax
credit (EITC). As earnings of a family rose to a certain level, the federal
government gave them a supplemental “grant,” proportional to earned wages. EITC
began in 1975 but became increasingly more generous since 1993, giving
income-support to over 22 million families. (Baumol and Blinder, Economics,
2007, p. 458)
We
do know how well EITC works since illegal aliens, using an IRS issued number to
encourage them to file income taxes, have taken advantage of this IRS loophole,
raking in $6.3 billion a year in tax refunds, claiming children who are not
even residents or citizens of this country.
Cato’s Michael Tanner suggests that making people more comfortable in poverty and government dependence is a bad idea - more food, better housing, more health care, free day care, etc. The solutions to get out and stay out of poverty:
1.
Finish
school
2.
Do
not get pregnant outside marriage
3.
Get
a job, any job, and stick with it.
“The
broad purposes of TANF specified in the law:
-
providing
assistance to needy families so that children could be cared for in their own
homes or in the homes of relatives;
-
ending
needy families’ dependence on government benefits by promoting job preparation,
work, and marriage;
-
preventing
and reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and
-
encouraging
the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.”
(Kay
E. Brown, Director of GAO, Testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, June
5, 2012)
Jonathan Alter, a left-wing writer, described in his book, The Promise, a short exchange that happened during President Obama’s first year in office:
“A congressman approached
the first lady at a White House reception after the [stimulus] bill’s passage
and told her the stimulus was the best anti-poverty bill in a generation. Her
reaction was ‘Shhh!’ The White House did not want the public thinking that
Obama had achieved long-sought public policy objectives under the guise of
merely stimulating the economy, even though that’s exactly what happened.” (As quoted by Paul Mirengoff in Powerline,
July 30, 2012)
While
we are $16 trillion in debt, with more Americans applying for disability than applying
for jobs, the USDA’s “Reaching Low-Income Hispanics with Nutrition Assistance
webpage states:
“USDA and the
government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible
Mexican nationals living in the United States about available nutrition
assistance. Mexico will help disseminate this information through its embassy
and network of approximately 50 consular offices.”
The
USDA-Mexico partnership was signed in 2004, under President George W. Bush, by
former USDA Secretary Ann M. Venemen and Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Luis
Ernesto Derbez Bautista. This begs the obvious questions, why does Mexico need
50 consular offices in the U.S. when all other countries have only one
consulate, and why are we responsible to feed Mexican nationals, including
illegal aliens with their anchor babies?
Eradicating
poverty should be more than just streamlining welfare – it should be about
fighting the real causes of welfare dependency: the breakdown of families, rejection
of faith, truancy, dropping out of school, having babies outside of marriage, drug
use, crime, and lack of personal pride, responsibility, and accountability for
one’s actions. Spreading the wealth, the socialist goal, is a dystopia that will
further enslave people into perennial poverty.
Representatives
Jim Jordan and Steve Southerland II suggested, “Congress should block-grant the
[welfare] funds to states and let them innovate. Grass-roots organizations and
state and local leaders know better than Congress what works in their
communities.” Follow the model of Habitat for Humanity that requires families
to put in “hundreds of hours of sweat equity before getting a new home.”
Taking
care of the truly needy and disabled is the right thing to do in our civilized
society. Taking advantage of a system that has gone beyond generosity and
making welfare a life-style choice and career opportunity is honor-less.