One of six dollars goes to Welfare--Does That Make Any Sense?

Welfare Makes Up One-Sixth Of Federal Budget

April 19, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

PHOTOS.COM

A strange amalgam of interests, accelerated by the Administration of President Barack Obama’s constituency-expanding entitlement policies, are driving a surge in the predominant role that welfare programs continue to play in accounting for an ever-increasing chunk of the Federal budget.

Welfare spending programs — not includingSocial Security, Medicare and unemployment — have come to comprise one-sixth of the Federal budget, according to a Forbesreport.

That’s one-sixth — without taking into account the money the government throws at the Medicare mammoth.

As it turns out, the war on poverty is a lucrative business for special corporate interests wise to the fact that there’s money to be made in helping the welfare state extend its reach — in expanding the definition of “poverty,” as the Obama Administration has done, in order to catch more Americans in its entitlement dragnet.

“A record-shattering 50 million Americans now live below the poverty line, a number likely to grow as Obamanomics drives more people out of the work force and onto one assistance program or another,” the Forbes article states. “What could be better for the myriad civil servants and wing-tipped bankers who dole out benefits as ever more ‘clients’ join the ranks of the poor and unemployed?”

Financial institutions lap up the transaction fees processed each time a food stamp card is swiped at the point of “sale.”

Farmers, already among the most subsidized of any private capitalists, serve out the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agenda of expanding various nutrition assistance programs by devoting an increasing portion of their yields to food aid programs that have grown since their inception in the 1960s.

And, on the government side, the Federal worker bureaucracy compounds in both complexity and number each year, because it takes more government employees to cross-coordinate and implement Federal assistance programs that dish out more “help” to more people than at any time in our Nation’s short history as a welfare state.