By welfare, I mean actual handouts to the poor. I’m excluding Social Security because it’s basically a pension plan to people who have already paid in their entire lives, and student loans don’t count because they have to be paid back.
Also, how does today’s percentage compare to what it was before Clinton signed welfare reform into law?
You need to be more detailed about what you mean by “handouts.” Do you include Medicare? The federal portion of Medicaid (which is linked to what the states spend)? Food stamps and WIC? Federal subsidies for the school lunch program? Job retraining progtrams? Pell Grants for college students (which are linked to family income)? Or do you just want to declare what used to be AFDC and post-Clinton is known as TANF?
Good question. I guess I’d exclude Medicare as “welfare” under the same logic as I’d exclude Social Security (because it’s basically a pension program). Medicaid counts because it goes to people who haven’t necesarily paid very much (or anything) into it.
So I guess what I’m asking for is: Food Stamps & WIC + Medicaid + Pell Grants + Job Training + School Lunch + TANF.
Both of them are pretty far from a pension in theory or practice, and both are/have the potential to be significantly re-distributive.
I guess the key difference I’m seeing is this: Insurance (that someone has paid premiums into) may be “redistributive” in the sense that a minority of people will get more than they’ve paid into it, but I wouldn’t classify it as an outright handout. Just like if I get my car totalled, and Geico replaces it, I’m not getting a “handout” from the insurance company. If this were a GD thread, we could argue about the difference, but for the purposes of this thread I’m giving my own idiosyncratic (and perhaps to some extent, arbitrary) definition of “welfare.”
Are you counting corporate welfare?
From here:
"Safety net programs: About 14 percent of the federal budget in 2010, or $482 billion, will support programs that provide aid (other than health insurance or Social Security benefits) to individuals and families facing hardship.
These programs include: the refundable portion of the earned-income and child tax credits, which assist low- and moderate-income working families through the tax code; programs that provide cash payments to eligible individuals or households, including Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or disabled poor and unemployment insurance; various forms of in-kind assistance for low-income families and individuals, including food stamps, school meals, low-income housing assistance, child-care assistance, and assistance in meeting home energy bills; and various other programs such as those that aid abused and neglected children."
You also have to consider a lot of states have programs like earnfare or workfare, where you have to work off your food stamps every month.
In Illinois for instance, it’s called earnfare, and Walgreens and Avon are two big employers that get breaks, from it. The single recepients of food stamps can work there or at other places for up to six months of every year. They work off their food stamps at minimum wage $8.25/hr.
And other programs as noted, so you can see the actual cost is hard to calculate.
SSDI is welfare. It may be administered by the SSA but it is still welfare.
Well, not quite. 80% of retirees receive more in Social Security benefits than they paid in payroll taxes. A good article and chart on this topic can be found here.
For most retirees, where do you think the “extra” money comes from?
I’ll add another not-quite. If you haven’t worked for 10 years (paying Medicare taxes), you can still enroll in Medicare if you pay the full monthly premium. However, there is assistance available to low-income people who cannot afford the full monthly premium. So, you could get into Medicare without ever paying into it, or paying anything close to what you take out of it.
Furthermore, since the eligibility point is ten-years, that means that someone who paid into Medicare for only ten years and someone who paid into Medicare for 40 years more or less get the same benefit.
Obamacare is massively redistributive, because it offers heavy federal subsidies for lower-income workers. The subsidies go all the way up to family incomes of around $80,000. In fact, the way the subsidies are set up it’s quite possible that the lower income workers who have health care will drop off employer health care programs in exchange for an increase in pay, and then use the federal subsidy to pay for health care insurance through a public exchange, and actually come out ahead in cash money.
But no one really knows until the exchanges are up and running and the market reacts to them.
(Surprised that mods haven’t reprimanded Sam Stone for using a politically loaded term in a GQ thread.) However, I’m wondering if the OP is also ruling out various agricultural subsidies to farmers to not grow crops and other financial subsidies to various industries? It’s not insurance, so for the sake of the question, how do you interpret it?
Errr … facts would be interesting, instead of gibberish blog.
First: “Retirees” excludes people who die before retirement; the Soc Sec obviously shows a “profit” on many of them, thus providing more money for those who do live to retire.
Second: Your phrasing implies you ignore that Soc Sec invests their money with a positive return. Of course more will be paid out then paid in! 
Now, if useful facts were studied they might very well support the right-wing agenda to “prove” Soc Sec is just another way to rob from the rich and help the poor. But you won’t find such facts at the silly blog you link to, even if the blogger is “a visiting scholar at The American Enterprise Institute”. 
Um, I get Social Security, and I have paid absolutely nothing into it.
Then basically BigT you’re a welfare recipient. But I think what you really mean is social security disability because as far as I know if you work all your life and didn’t pay into the retirement system then you can’t receive any benefits. I know a man that worked as a contractor all of his life and never paid any social security and was told he is not eligible to receive any benefits.
Disability is a different story however since it is officially welfare anyone that is “disabled” (and I use that term loosley) can receive it.
Except that the system, as a whole- has a surplus, thus contributions pay for benefits. It’s an insurance system. In fact, most Private Funded Pensions pay out whaaaay more than the employee paid in.
You do not appear to understand how a pension is funded. It is not “get back out exactly what you paid in” otherwise, what’d be the point? The pension fund does pay out what it gets in, but there are three things that allow some to collect more than they pay in: 1. Some dudes die before collecting their share. 2. The fund earns interest and dividends, etc 3. The employer funds it also.
Soc Sec is not “Welfare” any more than a private Pension is.
I don’t if the OP feels their question was answered, but the link to the CBPP provided by Dewey Finn is probably a good answer. One way to avoid the agrugment about Medicare and Soc Security is to reframe the question about what is spent on people outside of benefits only available for retirement age. Then you can debate the percent for each category (what retirees get that others cannot vs what all people can get now).
Anyway, here’s an interesting graphic that doesn’t show percents (although they give the numbers so you can easily get the precents from the graph) but shows the size of various parts of Obama’s propsed budget: Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
I know it doesn’t exactly address the OP, but it is a fun way to look at the “size” of various things in one nifty interactive graphic.
Also, if you want general bacground on specific programs, the place to look is the “Green Book” Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
Note that it is a bit dated (not sure why it isn’t updated constantly), but it gets you started.
That is a nice graphic! No direct pie-chart percentages, but size=portion is arguably better.
Click “Hide Mandatory Spending” and most of the chart turns white. I’m not sure the anti-spending folks have much to complain about with the 2011 budget. $5 billion less wasted on Education for the Disadvantaged, although the 3% rise at the NIH costs $1 billion. Would be fun to lead one’s TeaParty buddies to this graphic and ask them to show what to cut further.
(Did the 2010 budget have special stimulus making this graphic somewhat misleading? Are there similar graphics with other time frames?)
An interesting graphic, updated yearly, that was posted on this board a few years ago. Blow it up to full screen and scroll around. Fun stuff for numbers geeks.