Explaining the Democrats????? Success (The Ugly Truth).

[_bcspace]

You're spending a trillion more per year than comes in and as we found out earlier, welfare spending equals 60K per person (on welfare) per year. Almost no one on welfare receives anywhere near 60k in benefits. the bottom line is one could cut social programs in half and still deliver the same or more benefits. The fact that the Obama administration is unwilling to cut the deficit by social spending cuts alone is an example of how they criminally have bought the electorate.

Add to that economy crushing policies such as Obamacare and you have one of the worst presidents in history based on economics alone. Again and again it is proven than no Democrat or other Socialist knows how wealth is created or how the economy works. It is also proven that their electorate is more apt to be dazzled by bells and whistles than be motivated by anything moral, intelligent, or even rational.

[_Kevin Graham]

You're spending a trillion more per year than comes in and as we found out earlier, welfare spending equals 60K per person (on welfare) per year

Explain your math please. Who do you consider to be welfare recipients? The Right Wing sources of disinformation are ranting about how there are over 100 million Americans on welfare. If that is your number, then that means we're spending at least $6 trillion per year on welfare.

Obviously that is nonsense, so what's your definition of welfare? The Weekly Standard article refers strictly to food stamps (45 million people) and Medicaid (54 million people). It says Food Stamps are projected to cost $800 billion over the next decade, but that is only assuming current trends continue. I think it is still something like $75 billion a year as a record high last year, but there is no reason to believe that trend would continue.

So based on the data from this Right Wing source, that's less than $1,680 per year, per food stamp recipient. I don't know too many people outside of Ghandi, who can eat on less than $1,700 a year. I get a kick out of the way food stamps are attackd by RIght Wingers who pretend this is one of the biggest problems that adds to our deficit, when in fact we could completely remove the program altogether and only cut the deficit by less than a quarter of one percent. That's it. That's how insignificant that $75 billion is when we're dealing with a $3+ trillion budget.

Now Medicaid cost about $438 billion last year. Given the 54 million figure above, that comes out to be roughly $8,000 per year, per recipient. And of course most of this is due to rising health care costs, and we're usually dealing with people in need of medical attention here. Medicaid can't be compared to something like free food, to encourage people to be lazy and not work, or whatever O'Reilly tells you to think.

So with these two welfare programs alone, we're talking about less than $10,000 in annual benefits received. Hardly the "65k" number you apparently pulled out of your arse.

[_Droopy]

In 2011 the food stamp program cost the taxpayers 71.81 billion, which is up 43% from the previous year.

Medicaid runs somewhat over $400 billion per year, and will expand to over $800 billion by 2019.

Medicare (with a present unfunded liability of $37 trillion) costs $560 billion (as of 2012) and will rise to $1.041 trillion by 2022.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Presently the government runs nearly 126 means tested welfare programs, many of which are redundant and overlapping, including the major entitlements. These encompass direct cash payments, food assistance, housing subsidies, jobs programs, subsidization of college tuition etc. Keep in mind too that Social Security is technically a welfare program (a vast number of present recipients receive more in benefits than they ever contributed to the program, that excess above actual contribution and interest being a wealth transfer from other taxpayers)

The present unfunded liability of Social Security is $8.6 trillion, and over $20 trillion out beyond 75 years.

Then there's a substantial amount of quid pro quo corporate welfare and outright corporatism (otherwise known as fascism) funneled to politically connected corporations who make things the state approves of (virtually the entire "green" tech sector falls under this rubric).

The entire "welfare" state is presently costing the economy around a trillion per (approximately $20,610 for every poor person in America, or $61,830 per poor family of three) for pathetically little in return, historically, and at the cost of the creation and maintenance of a vast body of social pathologies and the coming collapse of the American economy if the major entitlement programs are not thoroughly reformed and re-imagined.

Since 1964, the federal government has spent $12 trillion dollars fighting poverty, which rises to $15 trillion if state efforts are added to this total. And yet, not only does entrenched poverty still remain, during the late sixties through the decade of the seventies (the decade in which entitlement spending went through its single most significant increase) welfare roles expanded dramatically, the black family was destroyed in the inner cities, and an "underclass" emerged centered around the welfare state itself and values grounded in its incentives and psychology.

Empirically, if one looks at actual rates of welfare usage and dependency between the mid-sixties and the end of the seventies, it appears that the Great Society was a substantial engine of poverty creation, rather than a pressure exerted against it.