Study: More Than Half a Trillion Dollars Spent on Welfare But Poverty Levels Unaffect

is welfare fund utilizing perfectly. no where utilizing perfectly? Poverty remains same until utilization of welfare fund honestly.

 

Please enlighten us.....just what about that post is racist?

And if Obama is selecting Racists for his cabinet, why isn't anyone saying anything about this?

 

How are you applying racism to what I posted?

 

A think tank worth anything can cherry pick data and spin it to their political philosophy. It's what think tanks do.

 

What has been cherry picked?
How has it been spun?

So called 'entitlement' spending has become the major component of Federal spending.

The same thing is true of FICA, (Social Security, and Medicare,) which have their own funding mechanism, although most recipients of those programs have contributed to the fund from which they are entitled to receive a payment from.

You still have left unanswered the questions, are the two items you've quoted fictional or in what way have they been refuted? From what I find sourced from the government, both statements are true. Have you a different way to spin them to make them appear untrue, or refute them otherwise?

I simply look at numbers and don't know how you found them to be racist, and you've also not explained that. In that particular post I went out of my way to provide facts which were obtained not from a source you might find to have an agenda opposite of your own, but from a source you would would find most acceptable, the government and a Democrat party provider who was appointed by the current Democrat party elected President. Just how far must one go to placate you?

 

Why not answer the question? If you're right then it should be fairly easy for you to cherry pick some data that implies his data is untrue.

 

I'm not a democrat. Democrats are part of the corrupt system.

 

outthere:

Your estimate in regard to the attention span of the "average US American" may not be that far off -- for many, simply being more attentive could very well help them get out of the welfare system and start to provide for themselves and their families.

Blabus, has stated his disagreement with the report of the OP while attacking the source and without providing any refute of the information provided -- offering nothing other than the usual (chronic) power-to-wealth droning, constant labeling and denigration of other posters and their opinions, claims of other's failure to provide substansive responses to "criticisms", and links to previous posts of the musings of one self-endeared -- overall, a rather pitiful attempt to engage in what is termed "honest debate" of the US welfare system while apparently possessing very little real knowledge of the subject. An attempt to show the success of several programs went down in flames in an earlier portion of this thread -- so far those criticisms remain unaddressed (to borrow a phrase ).

Removing power from wealth by transferring that power to government, as too many seem to support, seems an unlikey solution to any problem either real or perceived. Personal empowerment should and does come from within. Any authority capable of providing even the perception of such is certainly capable of revoking it. Governments prove as much every day.

And finally, outthere, isn't examining the accuracy of information a very effective method of determining the credibility of it's source? As has been stated, government spending figures / statistics are public record. The question remains: Have the many programs of the US welfare system been successful in reducing poverty? The answer: demonstrably and unequivocally "no".

 

That may be true, but still does not answer the questions.

The OP presents as fact that:
1. Welfare spending has exceeded more than $500,000,000,000 in a year, not over the lifetime of welfare spending. Fiction? Refuted?
AND
2. Poverty levels have been unaffected. Fiction? Refuted?
AND
3. How are you applying racism to what I posted?

 

Indie

But as I pointed out before the report was compiled by the extremely right wing libertarian group the Cato Institute, so it was not going to be in the slightest objective, it is basically a lobbying tool as piece of propaganda to promote particular views. The problem is that many ‘facts’ can be interpreted differently, it then becomes a theory or opinion and that was the conclusions of the report, a theory an opinion. Then the right wing news headlines that opinion as 'fact'.

I gave a full list of the programmes mentioned in the report (post 27) and pointed out that many seemed aimed at helping struggling working families.

For example SNAP

Then to me the big problem is not government helping out those that are in need (with “76% of SNAP households included a child, an elderly person, or a disabled person. These vulnerable households receive 84% of all SNAP benefits”) but that employers are not paying people a living wage.

To me no-one with a full time job should need assistance to get by.

But as pointed out it not that simple

- the problem with ‘poverty’ is that it is much more complicated than the right wing CNSNews piece cited in the OP (and the Cato report they use) would have people believe.

I mean according to the National Poverty Centre at the University of Michigan -
In the late 1950s, the poverty rate for all Americans was 22.4 percent, or 39.5 million individuals. These numbers declined steadily throughout the 1960s, reaching a low of 11.1 percent, or 22.9 million individuals, in 1973. Over the next decade, the poverty rate fluctuated between 11.1 and 12.6 percent, but it began to rise steadily again in 1980. By 1983, the number of poor individuals had risen to 35.3 million individuals, or 15.2 percent.
For the next ten years, the poverty rate remained above 12.8 percent, increasing to 15.1 percent, or 39.3 million individuals, by 1993. The rate declined for the remainder of the decade, to 11.3 percent by 2000. From 2000 to 2004 it rose each year to 12.7 in 2004. (15.1 percent in 2010 my edit)
So basically it goes up and down

1950s - 22.4% (US government began calculating poverty figures 1959)
1960s –70s declining to 11.1%
1980s – rising to 15.2
1990s-2000 declining to 11.3%
2000-10 rising to 15.1%

But there are problems here first the way the US defines ‘poverty’ doesn’t seem very good -

The current federal poverty line was created in 1964 by Mollie Orshansky, an economist working at the U.S. Social Security Administration.1 Tasked with setting a threshold for what it meant to be poor, she started by analyzing the cost of one of life’s basic necessities: food. Orshansky’s first step was to determine the cost of feeding a family on the “economy food plan,” the cheapest of the four food plans deemed nutritionally adequate by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). She then estimated that the average family spent one-third of its budget on food. The poverty threshold, then, could be set by multiplying the cost of the most basic food plan by three... Except for annual adjustments for inflation, the poverty line has not been touched since. (Beyond the Poverty Line By Rourke L. O'Brien & David S. Pedulla

But what about housing, water, electricity, the environment etc

I mean - In 1950, 27 percent of all households in the country lacked access to complete plumbing facilities…By 1970, only 5.9 percent of all U.S. households lacked piped water.
Still Living Without the Basics
http://win-water.org/reports/RCAP_full_final.pdf

Now this was mainly achieved through public investment in the water and waste infrastructure.

So while a lot of people in 1950’s America (some 50% in rural areas) had no plumbing or flushing toilets by today only a few go without those things.

Now this is a great improvement in many peoples quality of life (and health) and could be seen as a movement away from an ‘existence of poverty’ but it also comes with a utility bill that would not have been there before, an extra cost that is not taken into account by the US definition of ‘poverty’.

As I say it’s more complicated that it looks.

 

It is said that “out of families with children suffering from food insecurity and hunger, 68 percent contained at least one adult working full-time, 10 percent had at least one adult working part-time, seven percent had an unemployed adult actively looking for work, and eight percent were headed by an adult with a disability. The main problem is low wages and few jobs, not laziness.”

So if people were being paid a real living wage those 68% of people seeking some assistance wouldn’t need that help?

As late as the 1960’s, teams of doctors were able to find pockets of Third World-style hunger and malnutrition in America, which generated significant media reaction and political attention. In response, Presidents and Congresses worked together in a bipartisan fashion to expand the Food Stamp Program and federal summer meals programs for children from relatively small pilot projects into the large-scale programs we know today, and also created the National School Breakfast Program, as well as the WIC Program that provides nutrition supplements to low-income pregnant woman and their small children. These expansions succeeded remarkably in achieving their main goal: ending starvation conditions in America. In 1979, when investigators returned to many of the same parts of the U.S. in which they had previously found high rates of hunger, they found dramatic reductions in hunger and malnutrition, concluding: "This change does not appear to be due to an overall improvement in living standards or to a decrease in joblessness in these areas.... The Food Stamp Program, the nutritional components of Head Start, school lunch and breakfast programs, and... WIC have made the difference."
http://www.nyccah.org/learn-about-hunger/new-food-stamp-facts

As I said ‘poverty’ is complicated people can be statistically poor and hungry or statistically poor and not so hungry, their quality of life has improved but they remain poor, ‘poverty’ has not being ‘reduced’ statistically but ‘poverty’ that is in its effect has been reduced.

What some here seemed to be suggesting is that poor people should feel the full blast of ‘poverty’ because they seem to think that will ‘force’ those in ‘poverty’ to be less lazy.

But again many are working and others are actively looking for work.

 

Bal,

So the OP is an opinion and NOT a fact?

How much, at a minimum, should a person be paid working full time?

Wouldn't the problem be much less complex to solve at a level much closer to the source, than by a Federal government bureaucracy far removed from the many sources, and variations relative to where and why they exist?

 

Exactly.

 

Bal,

To me it seems that 'some' here are suggesting that the Federal government is NOT the best source of solving many problems, and more often than not, only exacerbates the problems making them more permanent and much more difficult to solve.

 

Your "local government is good, federal government is bad" meme is overly simplistic.

 

Indie

Again you bang on about ‘federal government’

We have been through this many many many many…times - yours is an ideology that covers ‘governance’ at every level and the charge levelled at your ideology is that it would vastly increase the power and influence of wealth, a charge you seem unable to refute.

As to localism we have been through that many many many…times

We have been through this many times – localism is fine up to a point but only up to a point, for example someone – say X – lives in a prosperous area with high employment, they might ‘evaluate’ and find little reason to give since there are few disadvantaged. But only a few miles away their could be a town with high unemployment with many people in hardship but since X doesn’t live there, doesn’t go there and so cannot ‘evaluate’ that towns needs they have to suffer hardship.

If you have a national scheme with the duty, time, and knowledge to ‘evaluate’ things nationally if can move resources to those places where it is most needed.

But if often then that you get self serving arguments or ones based in prejudice and bias.

- Why should I give money to people I haven’t personally evaluated I mean they are most likely feckless, scroungers.

- The people around here don’t need so much help probably because they work harder than those feckless scroungers.

 

Yes I do, after all we, the U.S.A. is a Constitutional Republic, not a Statist democracy. Read our Constitution as it was written, without application of your desired reinterpretive agenda. Sovereignty begins with the people, not the Federal government.

The so called self serving arguments based on predjudice or bias are of your creation.

 

The FG has their own agenda and it aint a kind or compassionate one either. It's about control and power, but you knew that

 

I've always found complex problems much more easy to solve by first reducing them into their more simple components.

 

Indie

You fail to address the problem that your ideology covers all levels of governance and that you seem unable to address the many outstanding criticisms of that ideology.

How does that fit in with your suggestion that wealth be given extra voting power so it can block the vote of the people?

That’s fine but only if those ideas can stand up to criticism and your ideas seem to fail that challenge.
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