So you know how Republicans are always complaining about welfare...

The Lonious Monk

Well if you do any research whatsoever, it turns out that all the ? they say about welfare is ? .

http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/

First off, they try to make it seem like minorities are the ones draining welfare. Well, most minorities don't have significant numbers of people on welfare at all. Now it's true blacks do have a relatively large population on welfare compared to the other minorities at 39.8%. Guess what? Whites are at 38.8%. It's hilarious that they paint us as just living off the system when only 1% more of us are on welfare than them, which by the way equals out to a lot more of them draining the system than us since there are more of them than us.

Second, they try to make it seem that people just live forever off welfare when in reality 53.5 people are off within 2 years and 74.4 are off within 5.

Third, they claim that Republican policies keep people from needing such assistance, but many of the states with the highest welfare usage are Republican states.

It's crazy how politicians can stand on the platforms and push them so hard even though everything they say in support of those platforms is fiction.

whitecracker

i just learned some new ? ..thanks

jono

Knew this already, its about creating and maintaining a stereotype of lazy, poor black people taking all your money away to feed their illegitimate children.

playmaker88

Yeah knew this already... and subsidies.. = WELFARE but let them crackas tell it

The Lonious Monk

I mean I knew that there were way more White people on welfare than Black people, but I'll be honest, I had no idea the percentages were practically the same. I understand the agendas, but every politician that has been out there trying to pass it as though blacks are the ones that are lazy welfare recipients should be slapped. That's not a simple political half truth. It's just a bold faced lie.

playmaker88

The Lonious Monk wrote: »

I mean I knew that there were way more White people on welfare than Black people, but I'll be honest, I had no idea the percentages were practically the same. I understand the agendas, but every politician that has been out there trying to pass it as though blacks are the ones that are lazy welfare recipients should be slapped. That's not a simple political half truth. It's just a bold faced lie.

Only in America! should post in GNS too

blakfyahking

I thought way more white people were on welfare..............plus there are several programs provided by the govt that could qualify as "welfare" that most people don't even consider

those stats might be off when you consider that black folks are only 13% of the US population

CashmoneyDux

This is why after college I'm out of America

cobbland

Tuesday, January 24, 2012
8 Myths About "Welfare Queens", Debunked

We all know the stereotype:
America is full of budget-devastating welfare queens- Escalade-driving, PlayStation-buying, boozing, smoking, drug-taking women who drink too much soda, eat too much McDonald's, refuse to work, and spend their entire lives freeloading on welfare while pumping out a new kid every year to up their payments- in short, being lazy, no good spendthrifts, living a lifestyle of luxury while you, the taxpayer, suffer an austere, self-disciplined, and generally morally superior existence.

How did ideas about poor moms get so hysterical?
Welfare programs in the United States originated in the 1930s with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and had two components: social insurance (Social Security and unemployment insurance) and public assistance (Aid to Dependent Children, Aid to the Blind, etc.). Distinction between different types of women was there from the start: needy widows, seen as deserving, were given payments through Social Security, while needy divorced and single moms, seen as immoral and irresponsible, were put on the quickly stigmatized ADC (which later became AFDC and today is TANF- the assistance program whose cash benefit component is “bankrupting our country” and generally making racist, sexist citizens positively apoplectic). Monitoring and control of poor mothers was there from the start, too: until the 1960s, several states dropped moms from ADC for having a relationship with a man (today, several states are seeking drug-testing of welfare recipients).

By the early 1960s, popular media such as Reader's Digest were printing sensationalized stories about welfare fraud, but the myth of millions of ? rotten welfare cheats fleecing the public seems, like so many of our nation's ills, to have really become entrenched with the rise to prominence of Ronald Reagan. In 1976, Reagan made a speech in which he claimed a "welfare queen" from Chicago's South Side had been arrested for welfare fraud:

"She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting Veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."

This woman did not exist, but with Reagan, the stigmatized poor mother of yore became the greedy, lazy, criminally fraudulent black poor mother of today. With racist and sexist sentiments stirred, public hostility toward poor moms became ever more hysterical, eventually resulting in Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation- the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or, the War on Welfare. But the entire War on Welfare is built on a boogeyman- that of the resource-draining, undeserving poor mom.

The colorful stereotype of the lazy, fraudulent welfare mother relies on eight myths about welfare and poor moms:

1. Myth: “Welfare” is comprised solely of cash handouts to poor moms. In fact, welfare is provided to Americans of all income levels and especially to corporations. Welfare includes Social Security, tax breaks, corporate subsidies and incentives, Wall Street bailouts, Medicare and Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the means-tested cash assistance or in-kind support (food stamps, housing, childcare vouchers) that we associate with welfare “queens.” Of the means-tested public assistance programs for the poor, food stamps have the broadest reach- some 46 million Americans (about 15% of the population, and an all-time high) were receiving food stamps in 2011. However, when most people talk about dodgy welfare moms, what they mean is the cash assistance and other meager benefits supplied (sometimes) under TANF. TANF support sometimes includes vouchers for childcare, clothing, and other needs along with cash assistance, but this varies wildly from state to state (Southern states tend to be meanest when it comes to assistance for the poor). For the purposes of this discussion, I will pretend that the only type of welfare is indeed the cash and in-kind support given (mostly) to poor moms through TANF.

2. Myth: Most poor moms are on welfare. It is true that the majority of TANF’s clients are women and children, but most poor families never receive any assistance at all. In 2010, there were about 78 million families in the United States. Just over 9 million families (about 12%) were officially in poverty, but about 28% of families qualified as in poverty or near-poor. While some 20-odd million families were poor or near-poor and thus arguably in need of some kind of assistance, very few were poor enough to be eligible for TANF, and of those families eligible for TANF, only 1.9 million were actually receiving TANF in 2011. Since the welfare reform of 1996, participation by eligible families has plummeted: 84% of those families in need received ADC in 1995, dropping to 52% receiving TANF in 2000, and only 40% in 2005. Most poor moms, whether single or married, are not on welfare.

3. Myth: Moms on welfare take up a huge amount of the national budget. Actually, each year, about 20% of the national budget goes to defense, and another 20% to Social Security. Less than 1/3 of the $3.7 trillion dollar 2012 federal budget went to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which administers TANF and other programs. Of the HHS’s 2012 budget, 54% went to Medicare, 30% to Medicaid, 14% to other programs, and 2%, or about $17 billion, to TANF. Meanwhile, $13 billion was budgeted in 2012 for TARP- yet another welfare handout to bankers that nearly matches that of TANF recipients. Speaking of welfare handouts for bankers, it’s worth noting that it would take about 42 years for our nation’s 1.9 million TANF recipients to equal the $700 billion dollar handout given to Wall Street in 2008.

****Continued in link****
http://www.junkland.net/2012/01/8-myths-about-welfare-queens-debunked.html

cobbland

Reagan's "Welfare Queen" FOUND!
Monday, 03 December 2012 16:17 By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks , The Daily Take | Op-Ed

Good news everyone, after more than thirty years of searching by the news media, Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Welfare Queen” has finally been found. She lives in Bentonville, Arkansas.

“She has eighty names, thirty addresses,” Reagan warned during his 1976 run for President about a nameless, Cadillac-driving woman who’s conning the social safety net. He added: “She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” In total, Reagan said, “Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

For more than thirty years, Republicans have used the existence of this “Welfare Queen” to justify their attacks on public spending and prove that the “welfare state” has run amok. Yet, her identity has never been revealed. After decades of searching, the best and brightest minds in the field of journalism were never able to discover who’s behind the wheel of the “Welfare Queen’s” Cadillac, or if she even existed.

That is until now.

We now realize our mistake. In our search for this “Welfare Queen,” we were looking for actual people when we should have been looking for corporate people. We should have been looking at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is the largest private employer and brought in more revenue in 2011 than any other company in the nation. Wal-Mart pocketed a not-too-shabby $16.4 billion in profits that same year and the six Wal-Mart heirs, the Walton family, own roughly $100 billion in wealth, which is more than 40% of Americans combined.

But, despite making all of this money, Wal-Mart’s business model hinges on mooching from the government. It hinges on being the biggest “Welfare Queen” in the United States.

Because of the “everyday low wages” that the retail giant pays its employees, our government has to step in and provide public assistance to Wal-Mart workers just so they can survive…which is why the Wal-Mart workforce represents the largest recipient of federal aid in the nation.

****Continued in link****
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13127-reagans-welfare-queen-found

Independent Business
New Study Finds Wal-Mart’s Miserly Wages Cost Taxpayers
| Written by Stacy Mitchell | 11 Comments | Updated on Aug 13, 2004

California taxpayers are spending $86 million a year providing healthcare and other public assistance to the state’s 44,000 Wal-Mart employees, according to a new study by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Industrial Relations.

The study, “Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs,” found that the average Wal-Mart worker required $730 in taxpayer-funded healthcare and $1,222 in other forms of assistance, such as food stamps and subsidized housing, to get by.

Even compared to other retailers, Wal-Mart imposes an especially large burden on taxpayers. Wal-Mart workers earn 31 percent less than the average for workers at large retail companies (more than 1,000 employees), the study found, and require 39 percent more in public assistance.

Employees who’ve been with Wal-Mart for at least a year (about 65 percent of the company’s workforce) make an average of $9.70 per hour, compared to $14.01 per hour for workers at other large retail stores. In addition, 23 percent fewer Wal-Mart workers are covered by the company’s health insurance plan than employees at large retail stores as a whole.

The wage and benefit differential is even greater when Wal-Mart employees are compared to workers at unionized supermarkets, where health coverage is nearly universal and wages average $15.31 per hour.

As Wal-Mart expands in California, the cost to taxpayers will grow. While more than half of the company’s stores nationwide are supercenters, in California, Wal-Mart’s first supercenter opened just a few months ago in Palm Springs. The retailer plans to build at least forty supercenters across the state over the next few years.

Citing the competitive threat of Wal-Mart, supermarket chains in California are demanding wage and benefit concessions from their employees. The UC Berkeley study estimates that if other large retailers adopt Wal-Mart’s wage and benefit levels, it will cost California’s taxpayers an additional $410 million a year in public assistance.

Wal-Mart dismissed the study’s findings, arguing that many of its 44,000 California workers would otherwise be unemployed, placing an even greater burden on government welfare programs. There is strong evidence, however, Wal-Mart produces no net growth in employment. The jobs created by its stores replace other, often higher-paying, jobs at existing businesses that are forced to downsize or close.

The UC Berkeley study’s finding that the average Wal-Mart employee requires $1,952 per year in assistance is very similar to the results of another study released this year, in spite of the fact that the two studies used different methodologies. The other study, produced by US Representative George Miller, found that Wal-Mart workers cost taxpayers $2,100 per year on average.

http://www.ilsr.org/new-study-finds-walmarts-miserly-wages-cost-taxpayers/

Melanin_Enriched

Trolling crackas when I get home