WANT TO PRESERVE YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE? SLOW THE GROWTH OF WELFARE SPENDING
Our children are slated to drown under a tsunami of debt. Do they have any hope? Maybe, as the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee explain:
Currently, almost 95 percent of spending on means-tested poverty assistance falls into four categories: cash assistance, health assistance, housing assistance, and social and family services. Welfare spending has increased on a year-over-year basis regardless of whether the economy has improved or unemployment has declined, and is projected to continue this dramatic rise indefinitely. Spending on these poverty programs will rise approximately 80 percent from FY2013-FY2022, representing a total cost of $11 trillion—roughly one quarter of cumulative federal spending. Slowing the growth rate from 80 percent to a still massive 60 percent would thus result, according to standard congressional budget accounting, in a $1 trillion savings over ten years.
This chart shows the 80% projected increase in federal welfare spending:
Will reducing 80% growth to 60% growth really save a trillion dollars over ten years? Yes, it will. But let’s be more ambitious. How about if federal welfare spending–which is not really a function of the federal government, anyway–grows not at all over the next ten years? Or how about if it is cut in half–not the growth, but the spending? Now we are talking real spending cuts, of the sort that the American people are thirsting for. Let’s bring it on!
Democrat Party journalists always are eager to know what federal spending, specifically, Republicans want to cut. That question is not hard to answer, if just cutting the rate of growth in federal welfare spending from 80% to 60% produces a trillion dollars of savings in ten years!
- Mike Sigman · Top CommenterRepublicans will never win until they frame things in simple terms: "Obama wants to borrow more money from the Communist Chinese!". "Obama wants to raise the debt ceiling" means nothing to the average Joe who has been raised on 3 generations of feel-good and no history lessons.
- Dan Culton · Top Commenter · West Plains Senior HighThere are too many people (liberals and low information voters) that cannot connect government programs with their costs. As a country we have already reached the fiscal point that theses type of programs are no longer sustainable.
Unfortunately the only thing that will awaken the country as a whole is for us to hit the bottom of the fiscal canyon (we are already over the cliff).
The rest of the world appears to understand that the U.S. Treasuries are not a good investment. In 2012 61% of threasury bonds offered were purchased by the Fed and in 2013 it appears that somewhere between 80-90% of treasuries offered will be purchased by the Fed.
When others no longer have the appetite to pay for your addiction, recovery, however painful, becomes possible. - Russell Allen · Top Commenter · American UniversityThe headline misses something obvious: Why our are children? Because nearly all of the recipients of SNAP and TANF and CHIP Medicaid (obvi) are children. What preserves their future? Making sure they have health insurance, making sure they eat. There are tangible and obvious benefits to making sure kids eat well and are healthy. Why don't they get considered when we talk about "our children"?
(Also: These numbers are bogus. Provided by a demagogue with an obvious partisan agenda. Please try and use non-partisan numbers in the future. They won't be as dramatic, but they'll at least be intellectually honest.)- Russell Allen · Top Commenter · American UniversityOf course we believe in that. Most recipients of these programs have jobs. As for making people self-sufficient, I would love it if all jobs provided health insurance and a living wage and workers were allowed to collectively bargain to achieve those goals. But that isn't something conservatives are ready to support. Really, if the argument is having jobs that are truly self-sufficient, what party do you think is the one standing in people's way?
- Steven Litvintchouk · Top CommenterRussell Allen:
If our children were growing up into a country with a 4.8% unemployment rate and a 5% annual growth rate, instead of a country with a 7.8% unemployment rate and stagnant growth, then those social programs would be much less important. They would find good-paying jobs quickly rather than having to sponge off their parents' government benefits.
Reagan said it best: The best social program is a job.
What is happening here is that we are being persuaded to accept slow growth and high unemployment as the new normal. And yes, if that's the case, then there's no alternative to the public dole for those who do poorly through no fault of their own, due to the tough economy.
- David Hanig · Top Commenter · George Washington UniversityRepublicans need to cast the problem in tangible, everyday language that voters can understand and accept. We need to control spending now so that hardworking taxpayers don't have to give more and more each year to the government, leaving our children and grandchildren buried under a mountain of debt. We need instead economic policies that allow the economy to create the jobs and income to make our economic future so secure that no one needs the government's help. That means the same but probably sounds better to persuadable voters.
- Steven Litvintchouk · Top CommenterDavid Hanig:
No, it doesn't mean the same. That's just one small part of it.
Controlling debt won't help if the U.S. economy is starved of energy supplies and natural resources, for example. (The need to confront global warming could put a real cap on America's ability to exploit its reserves of fossil fuels.)
Or if America falls further and further behind in its technology and infrastructure. (Among all nations of the world, America ranks 30th in what percentage of each nation's citizens have Internet access at home.)
Or if America continues to lose manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, ending up a service economy of financiers, bureaucrats, burger-flippers, and caregivers in nursing homes.
Conservatives should be talking about all these things.
- Diggs Cleveland · Top CommenterThere is no difference between the statement "The rich need to pay their fair share" and the statement "The poor need to be given their fair share". The Republicans can say whatever they want, but until Middle America understands the first statement is the "feel good" way of saying the latter statement, we'll continue to have socialists in high office.
- Todd Foster · Top Commenter · Eden Prairie, Minnesota"Do they have any hope?"
Like any other third world country...inflation. That is the only possible ending to this. - John F. Sutherland · Top CommenterNot to worry! The whole system will collapse before that - albeit after ripping everything else off in an attempt to survive.
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