(Chart by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)
GOP candidates are having a great time beating up on each other. But even as Mitt Romney has been warned by prominent Republicans not to hit too hard against Rick Santorum, we can expect them to vie hardest for who can be the toughest guy against the so-called
entitlement society and the
government dependency that is supposedly ravaging the nation as each struggles to be the fellow making the acceptance speech in Tampa come August.
Facts obviously don't matter when you're scrapping over who can claim to be the hardest-nosed fellow against "welfare queens." Because that's an emotional argument, the same one Republicans have been making for years about the country being overrun by bon-bon-eating, cable-television-watching, job-evading layabouts. Some voters are going to believe that baloney no matter what facts are raised in contradiction. As the candidates know, a lot of the primary-election voters they are trying to attract think truth is separate from the facts.
Nonetheless, for folks who do care about facts, Arloc Sherman, Robert Greenstein and Kathy Ruffing at the Center on Budget Policies and Priorities have mustered some on this subject that demolish the whole deluge-of-lazy-bums theme.
You can read the details at the link. Let me cut to the chase: CBPP calculated 9 percent of federal social program benefits go to people who are neither elderly nor disabled and do not live in a working household. But wait. Seven of those 9 percentage points go to Social Security survivor benefits for children and spouses of deceased workers, Social Security benefits to people who retired aged 62 to 64, medical care and unemployment benefits. In the latter case, beneficiaries have to have had a substantial work record to qualify.
You can do the math. Two percent of the total spending goes to the non-working poor who don't fall into one of those four categories above:
In short, both the current reality and the trends of recent decades contrast sharply with the critics’ assumption that social programs increasingly are supporting people who can work but choose not to do so. In the 1980s and 1990s, the United States substantially reduced assistance to the jobless poor (through legislation such as the 1996 welfare law) while increasing assistance to low-income working families (such as through expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit). The safety net became much more “work-based.” In addition, the U.S. population is aging, which raises the share of benefits going to seniors and people with disabilities.
There's a coda to the CBPP analysis that you can see in the chart appearing at the top of this commentary:
These figures contrast sharply with the distribution of the extensive deductions, credits, and other write-offs in the federal tax code, known as tax expenditures (former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has called them “tax entitlements”). The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center estimates that for tax year 2011, the top fifth of the population will receive 66 percent of the $1.1 trillion in individual tax-expenditure benefits (the top 1 percent alone will receive 23.9 percent of the benefits), the middle 60 percent of the population will receive a little over 31 percent of the benefits, and the bottom 20 percent of the population will receive only 2.8 percent of the benefits.
Such facts are likely to have as much impact on voters as do those on foreign aid. A
poll in November 2010 asked how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The median response was 25 percent. That is not a typo. Asked how much should be spent, the median said 10 percent. The actual spending is less than 1 percent.