Except you see, Medicare has paid for itself until recently, with even a surplus some years. You’d have to take that out since the collection of Medicare tax would stop. Social Security has MORE than paid for itself. You pay 12.4% Soc sec and 2.9% Med, or just under 16%. So, if you take that income OUT, the reduction would be small, as we have said.
And, this is America, we’re not going to stop payments of Soc Sec to seniors who paid in for forty years and who’d starve without it. In fact, it’d be immoral and likely illegal to just stop payments to those who have contributed for decades.
Soc Sec and Medicare are supposed to pay for themselves, and more or less you’re supposed to get out of them like you would with other pensions and insurances. They are not “welfare’ in any way shape or form. True, due to a deadlocked Congress, Medicare has fallen into a deficit and SocSec will also do so in a few years. But this can easily be fixed.
What would be considered 'true" welfare accounts for around 2% of the budget.
Medicare and Social Security are not figured into the 20% figure. Medicare and Social Security are 36% of the Federal Budget. According to those numbers at the site.
However since if Social Security and Medicare ended tomorrow then those taxes could be cut and tax rates then reduced by 16%.
As for the expenses listed under the loaded term “welfare”…where to even begin? For example, the biggest line item in the category “Social exclusion n.e.c.” (meaning Not Elsewhere Considered) is the Earned Income Tax Credit. How, exactly, is offering a tax deduction to people who find and maintain employment welfare? It shouldn’t be a line item anywhere unless you are going to get into every deduction and tax credit on the books, the majority of which benefit wealthy taxpayers and corporations. That’s why they’ve hidden it under the boring-looking “miscellaneous” category of Not Elsewhere Considered.”
Another example this author didn’t give is Unemployment, which is funded by a special tax and is not “welfare”
If you don’t like that cite here is another from the Congressional Research Service. It says spending on welfare in 2011 was 746 billion dollars.
As the name implies the Earned Income Tax Credit is a credit not a deduction.
Here is a cite from the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
It shows that 13% of the budget is spent on what it calls safety net programs and 7% is spent on Medicaid and SCHIP. This equals 20% of total federal budget, and is exactly what I said it was before.
lets not forget the outbreaks of disease and us looking WORSE than the black hole of calcutta because of the sudden influx of elderly and disabled people without food, shelter or meds needed to maintain lives. We’d probably spend more because of having to form a service that gathers up the dead in the streets and disposes of the bodies before disease takes a foothold, not to mention all the piss and shit people would leave everywhere because they didn’t have bathrooms.
We already have this problem on a moderate scale with homeless in this country, suddenly we are going to increase it by a huge chunk of our population, not to mention the rest of the world would hopefully turn their backs on us in complete disgust.
I will admit it disgusts and enrages me that medicaid in my state is pretty goes to people who dropped out of school, got knocked up several times and have never held a job. People like me who endured school and graduated and busted our asses in shitty jobs and didn’t have kids we couldn’t afford to take care off and paid into the system then became disabled don’t get medicaid, don’t get utility assistance, and I qualify for a whole 13$ in foodstamps. The bitch across the road who dropped out gets her utilities paid, full medical care and 400 in food stamps because of the 6 six kids who live with her on paper but who are really kept by relatives or in the case of her fifteen year old is shacked up with a drug dealer elsewhere. she also gets something like 500 in cash to put gas in her car and pay for what foodstamps doesn’t cover.
the problem with the system is the money doesn’t go to those who need and merit it. It would probably cost half what it does if they revised the crazy fucked up method in which it is administered.
Incorrect. Please take erroneous statements in support of a political agenda to Great Debates. (Not intended as junior modding, just expressing annoyance at abuse of GQ.)
Employers pay into an Unemployment Insurance Fund for each eomployee; I believe in some states there is also a payroll deduction from the employee.
Persons who have worked a specified minimum of weeks within the previous two years are entitled to a percentage of their average regular-time wages per week, contingent on a showing of actively seeking work and being available for work, when they lose their jobs by act of the employer without cause (“are laid off”), for a term not to exceed a set number of weeks (usualy 26 to start). Rules vary as to whether and when persons who lost their jobs for cause (“were fired”) or by their own act (“quit”) may be eligible.
AFAIK, the only involvement the politicians have are (1) when the standards for eligibility are set in statute rather than regulation, and (2) when extensions of the eligibility term beyond 26 (or whatever) weeks are given owing to high unemployment.
The federal budget doesn’t operate like a family budget. While chopping off the ending zeroes in “the budget this year was $3,700,000,000,000” does make it easier to understand (our brains have no idea what a trillion of something even means), calling it a household generates harmful misunderstandings.
Households can’t print their own money, levy taxes, or wage war. If a household doesn’t pay its bills, larger institutions exist that can forcibly repossess property or wages. Households are grains of sand compared to the size of the economy they live in (often even just on a city level) and compared to the institutions they owe money to. Households are only able to borrow money either with collateral or at punitive interest rates. Households don’t attract outside investors. &c.
All of these things mean a national budget operates under entirely different pressures than a household budget. For starters let’s do interest rates - during the depths of the recession, the interest rate less inflation for short term loans to the US government was a fraction under zero.
Going back to the household comparison, borrowing money the way a single household can, by either putting up the house and getting say 3% interest, or on a credit card at 20%, is something any rational person should avoid as much as possible. But suppose you could borrow at -1%? That is, borrow $100 from the bank and the banker tells you “I only need $99 of that back next year”? The banker’s effectively paying you $1 to safeguard $99 of their money. That’s what investors were doing for the government for a short while.
Obviously this was a short term event, but it gets lost in the picture whenever people make the comparison to households. I’ll quote this from some tea party website:
The intended response from anyone who sees this is to think “well let’s just cut $16500 more from the family budget already, that’s what I’d have to do!!!” That would represent an overnight 10% slash to the GDP. GDP drops 1-4% in an ordinary recession. You can imagine the chaos that would result.
Don’t you hate it when the wrong opinion slips into GQ?! Of course, your opinion that it is insurance is the right one!!
If it’s insurance how do you explain politician’s ability to change the rules whenever they want to in order to give as much as possible to as many as possible for as long as possible?
I’ll agree that I hate erroneous info in GQ. Perhaps you’d like to explain what you meant by “Employers pay into an Unemployment Insurance Fund for each eomployee” … we’d hate to have people think that each employee has his own little lock-box.
… and maybe you’d like to take a stab at correcting** Dr Deth’s **erroneous statement in post #26.
It is insurance. Forced insurance yes, but insurance none-the-less. True, Congress can give dues a free extension, and that does get into welfare a little. Not entirely as you have to have worked to qualify.
Debateable … but my focus was on your statement “You pay a premium, you get benefit if you then qualify” and mixing up you to mean both you and your employer.
Only three states require the employee to pay any part of the money that goes to the government to help fund unemployment benefits.
It’s still inaccurate to call it welfare, however, since (mostly) it doesn’t come from general tax receipts. It does operate like an insurance fund (though it’s equally inaccurate to say the beneficiary is the one paying the premium).
Not necessarily. That’s the same logic that people on the right use to argue against a minimum wage (“employers are going to spend X on payroll, so if they are paying people an extra fifty cents an hour they can’t employ so many”) but it’s not really true. If the mandatory unemployment contribution ended tomorrow, your employer wouldn’t give you an extra dime.
