Well folks, it’s official, we have now gotten to the point where fully one third of our nation’s population is now on welfare. You see, as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau, 109,631,000 Americans lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded "means-tested programs", aka welfare. Now if that doesn’t define the ‘welfare state’, then I’m not sure what else would!
So while the Census Bureau has not yet reported on how many of our fellow Americans were on welfare in 2013 or, for that matter, even the first two quarters of 2014, we do know that 109,631,000 living in households taking federal welfare benefits as of the end of 2012. And that is a number that equaled 35.4 percent of all 309,467,000 people living in the United States at that time. I don’t know about you, but I never thought I’d see the day.
And when those receiving benefits from non-means-tested federal programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment and veterans benefits, were added to those taking welfare benefits, it turned out that 153,323,000 people were getting federal benefits of some type at the end of 2012. And even if you subtract the 3,297,000 who were receiving veterans' benefits from the total, that still leaves us with 150,026,000 people receiving non-veterans' benefits.
The 153,323,000 total benefit-takers at the end of 2012, said the Census Bureau, equaled 49.5 percent of the entire population. The 150,026,000 taking benefits other than veterans' benefits equaled about 48.5 percent of the entire population. And when America, in it’s infinite wisdom, chose to re-elect Barry "Almighty" in 2012, we had not yet reached that point where more than half the country was taking benefits from the federal government.
It is a reasonable bet, however, that with the implementation of Obamacare, with its provisions expanding Medicaid and providing health-insurance subsidies to people earning up to 400 percent of poverty, that while we have not yet surpassed that point, we will before long. So I’d kinda like to know what the breakdown was of what we the taxpayers ‘gave’ to those 109,631,000, that 35.4 percent of the nation, who were receiving benefits at the end of 2012.
Well to begin with, 82,679,000 of the welfare-takers lived in households where people were on Medicaid, said the Census Bureau. 51,471,000 were in households on food stamps. 22,526,000 were in the Women, Infants and Children program. 20,355,000 were in household on Supplemental Security Income. 13,267,000 lived in public housing or got housing subsidies. 5,442,000 got Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. 4,517,000 received other forms of federal cash assistance.
How do you better put into perspective that number of 109,631,000 people taking welfare, or the 150,026,000 getting some type of federal benefit other than veterans' benefits? Well, one way is to take a look at CIA World Factbook, according to which there are 142,470,272 people in Russia. So, the 150,026,000 people getting non-veterans federal benefits in the United States at the end of 2012 actually outnumbered all of the people in Russia.
Using that same source of information, there are 63,742,977 who people live in the United Kingdom and 44,291,413 who live in the Ukraine. So, the combined 108,034,390 people who live in these two nations is still about 1,596,610 less than the 109,631,000 collecting welfare in the United States. Now I don’t know about you, but I still have a difficult time wrapping my head around that we actually have that many people seeming to be content to live off the rest of us.
It may be even more telling, however, to compare the 109,631,000 Americans taking federal welfare benefits at the end of 2012 to Americans categorized by other characteristics. In 2012, according to the Census Bureau, there were 103,087,000 full-time year-round workers in the United States (including 16,606,000 full-time year-round government workers). Thus, the welfare-takers actually outnumbered full-time year-round workers by 6,544,000.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, when Barry "Almighty" was elected, there were 96,197,000 people living in households taking benefits from one or more federal welfare programs. After just four years of his working to "fundamentally transform" this country, by the fourth quarter of 2012, that number had grown by 13,434,000. Those 13,434,000 additional people on welfare outnumbered the 12,882,135 people estimated to live in Barry's home state of Illinois in 2013.
And yet Barry has demonstrated time and again that he is far from done when it comes to just how much more damage that he wants to do. There is much talk about his dismal approval rating, but it really matters very little because, barring something totally unforeseen, we’re stuck with him for the duration. And he has proven that he has no intention of allowing his low approval rating to get in the way of what it is that he wants to do. Which, I’m afraid, does not bode well for the country.
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