The irony of the Government declaring war on inanimate objects, or a group of people’s current fiscal state has always baffled me. It is almost like the government is writing its own epitaph without knowing it. You cannot win a war against nothing. The wars on Drugs, Poverty, wealthy, etc. are all losing battles.
You think prohibition would have taught us that if you want to make something popular, make it illegal. Even when the Government hinted at banning FourLoko it made sales go through the roof. I didn’t even know what FourLoko was until they tried getting rid of it.
But i digress, we as a people spend a lot of energy and time trying to control the choices and lives of other people. I could talk a lot about legalization of drugs but I will save it for later.
What I want to talk about is the recent report from the Senate Budget Committee; they compiled data from the Census, the office of Management and Budget, and the CRS (Congressional Research Service).
In my most humble opinion, this single report should be the main focus for the rest of the election. It is only evidence that we need to support the smaller government argument. It is major proof that the government cannot solve our issues for us and truly, TRULY does not work.
To my conservative friends this will not be anything new. To all the others, it might just change your vote!
In 2011, according to the census the number of households below the poverty line was 16,807,795. That is a family of four in one house with a total income of $22,350 per year or less. Now for the mind bottling part.
One thousand and twenty-five billion dollars was spent on programs meant to fight poverty. Sure that is a lot of money, but that is not the mind numbing paradox that is our government. It is the fact that when divided by the number of poverty stricken households, it turns out we spend $61,194 per impoverished household doing it!!!
Or put another way, we spend sixty thousand dollars per year per poor household fighting poverty!!!
The republicans on the Senate Budget committee released a note:
A congressional report from CRS recently revealed that the United States now spends more on means-tested welfare than any other item in the federal budget—including Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. Including state contributions to the roughly 80 federal poverty programs, the total amount spent in 2011 was approximately $1 trillion. Federal spending alone on these programs was up 32 percent since 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment