Federal Government Spending $60,000 For Every Welfare Household
Your tax dollars, hard at work.
“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.”
This dollar figure is almost three times the amount the average household on poverty lives on per year. “If the spending on these programs were converted into cash, and distributed exclusively to the nation’s households below the poverty line, this cash amount would be over 2.5 times the federal poverty threshold for a family of four, which in 2011 was $22,350 (see table in this link),” the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note.
But remember, America’s problem is that we aren’t taxed enough or something.
We seem to measure success in this area of policy based on the number of people “helped” by being enrolled in one government program or another, when really we ought to be measuring success by the number of independent citizens who have no need of such programs.
Tags: national debt, welfare
