Welfare
What is Welfare?
Welfare is a very broad term in the USA and while many people think of welfare solely as “food stamps”, welfare really includes so many things: Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, housing assistance, Earned Income Tax Credit and even military disability payments. While it does help people who are merely unemployed, those people are seldom on welfare for long. Welfare as a whole sees about half come off welfare within a year; 70 percent within two years and almost 90 percent within five years. The other 10% consists mostly of retirees on Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance (that a child may be on for 18 years), veterans, and other citizens with permanent disabilities like blindness who may be on their entire lives.
We know many people like to claim that people are not leaving the welfare system at the rates listed above. We are here to remind you that their budget is based on the number of people who ARE on welfare. So, if they lied and claimed the numbers were lower than they actually are, their budget would be lowered to reflect those numbers. If anything, it would be more believable that an agency would pad its numbers in order to increase their budget.
What we think people will find interesting:
- We think most people will find it interesting to see each party has had only one time where they saw an increase in welfare rates.
- We assume most people believe those rates go up often, and likely many people may feel welfare rates have been steadily rising rather than steadily falling.
- Again, it is unlikely that these agencies would lie to make their numbers appear lower as this again would mean they would receive less money. (Conspiracy theories are fun, but they seldom make any logical sense.)
- We think people may find it interestinmg that welfare rates were much higher in the past. We see welfare rates well over 20% in the past fall to under 3% in modern times.
Sidenote:
- Like unemployment, there is actually a welfare rate that is too low. In every society, you should expect that a certain percentage of that population will be in need at any given time. So, if the welfare rates are too low, this would likely be a sign of people suffering. You should expect that in any society a small percent of that population is indeed disabled in some way. If we suppose 1% of any population suffers from blindness, some form of paralysis, intellectual disability, etc. This means that a 3% welfare rate is really only 2% in need due to unemployment or other factors.
- It is also important to realize that a 5% welfare rate does not mean that the same 5% of people are always in need. Rather, it means that at any given time 5% of the people are in need. It may be that 33% of people are on welfare at some time in their life, but never more than 5% at any given time. Considering all the categories that fall under “welfare” it is not crazy to assume that almost every American will have collected welfare at some point in their lives. You can think of this like airplane traffic, at any given time there are over 1 million people in airplanes (and not on the ground), but it’s not the same 1 million people all the time, just 1 million at any given time. And almost every American will be on a plane at some point in their lives.
- Whether you want to believe this information or not is up to you, but you need to at least realize that a lot of people die every day, so it cannot be the same people on welfare today that were on when you were born.
THE DATA:
In this section, we include three charts. A “total” chart that includes every president from both parties in order to show the general trend. We felt this was important because we are aware that a lot of people like to claim welfare is so much higher today than it used to be. In reality, under virtually every president and virtually every year, welfare rates have fallen and continue to fall.
In the “party” section we just included graphs that show the percent of increase or decrease under each president and again a “party average” increase or decrease that you can use to determine what to expect on average from either party.
Welfare rates are hard to understand and that is why people manipulate them. People trying to scam you will show you charts displaying an increase in welfare. They use figures like “Total spending” and “Total number of people.” Because our population increases over time and so does inflation, the number of people and dollar amounts will always increase, even if the actual percentage decreases. Because “dollars” are variable figures, they make horrible data points. They should never be used as reference.
For example: In 1962 the monthly benefit per recipient was $31, today it is $154. So, you could make that appear like an immense increase. But if you adjust this for inflation rates, we are actually paying out less. In 1962, $31 = $181. Compare that to the $154 we pay today. In actuality, not only are we paying welfare to a much smaller percentage of the population, but we are also paying less to each of them.
Other noteworthy facts: The average size of a family on welfare in 1963 was 4 persons. The average in 2006 was 2.4. So, we are not talking about people who are having lots of children simply to collect welfare.
