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New Census Data Reveals Colossal Failure of Welfare State
Posted: Saturday, November 07, 2015 at 7:07 PM EST - Item ID: 493
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It would have been more productive had we flushed 22 trillion dollars down the toilet in 1965 rather than build a welfare empire. That is the gist of what any logical person should derive from last week's report on poverty from the Census Bureau. According to the Census, the poverty rate in 2014 stood at 14.8% with 46.7 million people in the United States living below the poverty line. When factoring in people who are near the poverty line (below 125% of the poverty threshold), that number grows to 19.4%. Also, the number of those who are extremely impoverished (below 50% of the threshold) is at a near-record high of 6.6%. Perhaps most disturbing is that the poverty rate for married families with children increased from 5.7% to 6.2%. You might be wondering what happened to the War on Poverty. Didn't we spend a wealth of taxpayer money and saddle the next generation with debt just so this wouldn't happen? Back in 1964, when LBJ commenced the Great Society, the poverty rate was tumbling for two decades thanks to the post-WWII economic boom. In 1966, the poverty rate was 14.7% and headed down every year. In 1969, the poverty rate dipped to 12.1%. LBJ famously declared, "the days of the dole in our country." Well, as of 2014, the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector estimated that taxpayers had spent $22 trillion (in inflation-adjusted dollars) on anti-poverty programs since the ‘60s. The result? The poverty rate has not moved one inch, and in fact, has gotten worse. Not including Social Security and Medicare, according to Rector, "100 million individualsâ€nearly one in three Americansâ€received benefits from at least one of these programs." As for the annual tab, "Federal and state governments spent $943 billion in 2013 on these programs at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient." The Cato Institute's Michael Tanner estimated in 2012 that with the amount of money spent on annual welfare programs, the Treasury could write every poor person in America a $20,610 check or every poor family of three a $61,830 check annually. It is safe to say that the War on Poverty has done nothing but subsidize and perpetuate poverty itself while growing the federal bureaucracy and wasting even more money just to accomplish this counterintuitive goal. Writing at NRO last week, Rector notes that our welfare empire is even larger than that of most European countries, contrary to popular belief. We are not sliding toward European socialism, we have surpassed much of Europe in the growth of welfare. Only Norway spends more per-capita on government transfer payments than America. And that is quite striking, because Europe spends a lot of funds on upper-middle class families as well as the poor. For the U.S. to spend more per capita and have it primarily focused on the poor – and still result in increased poverty – should serve as an incontrovertible lesson in the failure of dependency-driven programs. Sadly, for leftists in this country, the War on Poverty was never about eradicating poverty, it was about eradicating self-sufficiency and inducing inveterate dependency on government, thereby creating permanent political constituencies. In that sense, it was a smashing success. There is one other important observation from the poverty data, and that is the enormous strain our nonsensical immigration policies place on the welfare state. The poverty rate among non-citizens in this country is 24.2%. This coincides with a recent study from the Center for Immigration Studies showing 51% of immigrant households in the U.S., including 73% of those from Latin America, are receiving some form of welfare. At a time when we have so many socio-economic problems among native Americans, and with so many immigrants of all backgrounds wanting to come here, why would we still bring in so many more low-skilled immigrants to simply exacerbate the poverty situation and strain the welfare programs? Shouldn't we only bring in the best and brightest at this stage in our country's growth? Again, when viewing this through the lens of common sense, nobody would ever support such a policy, which by the way, runs counter to our existing laws disqualifying immigrants who are likely to be a public charge from obtaining a green card [Section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)]. But when viewing low-skilled immigration as a tool to create a permanent Democrat majority on top of the native dependency, it all makes sense in a twisted and tragic way. The data from the poverty report when juxtaposed to the increase in welfare spending and importation of low-skilled immigration should serve as the kill shot on the Democrat's hope to retain the White House – if the eventual GOP nominee would be willing to articulate the point.
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