Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
The number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 to over 128 million today. A shocking new research paper by Patrick Tyrrell and William W. Beach contains that statistic and a whole bunch of other very revealing numbers. According to their research, the federal government hands out money to 41.3 percent of the entire population of the United States each month. Overall, more than 70 percent of all federal spending goes to what they call “dependence-creating programs”. It is the most massive wealth redistribution scheme in the history of the world, and it continues to grow at a very rapid pace with each passing month. But can we really afford this? Of course we never want to see a single person go without food to eat or a roof to sleep under, but can the federal government really afford to support 128 million Americans every month? If millions more Americans keep jumping on to the “safety net” each year, how long will it be before it breaks and it is not there for anyone? The federal government is already drowning in debt. This year the U.S. national debt will easily blow past the 17 trillion dollar mark and we are rapidly heading toward financial oblivion. We are stealing more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day with no end in sight. If we don’t get our finances in order as a nation, what will the end result be?
According to Tyrrell and Beach, federal spending on entitlement programs has been rising more than 6 times as fast as population growth has in recent years…
Between 1988 and 2011, spending on dependence-creating federal government programs has increased 180 percent versus “only” a 62 percent increase in the number of people who are enrolled in federal government programs, and a 27 percent increase in the population. Not only are more people enrolled in government programs than ever before, but more US taxpayer dollars are being spent on each recipient every year.
But even though the numbers that Tyrrell and Beach present in their paper are incredibly shocking, the truth is that they have probably underestimated the true scope of government dependence in America today. Just consider the following numbers…
Food Stamps
Back in the year 2000, there were about 17 million Americans on food stamps. That number has exploded to more than 47 million today.
Medicaid
If you can believe it, today more than 70 million Americans are on Medicaid, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
Social Security
Right now, there are more than 53 million Americans on Social Security, and that number is projected to absolutely explode as huge waves of Baby Boomers retire in the coming years.
Medicare
As I wrote about in a previous article, the number of Americans on Medicare is expected to grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 millionin 2025.
And those are only four examples of government programs that have seen their numbers explode in recent years. There are so many more that could be mentioned. Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different “means-tested welfare programs“, and almost all of them are experiencing explosive growth.
So is the “128 million” figure that Tyrrell and Beach have come up with actually too low? I believe that it is. But in any event, nobody can deny that the “welfare state” in the U.S. has absolutely mushroomed in size since the turn of the century.
According to one recent poll, 55 percent of all Americans say that they have received money from a safety net program run by the federal government at some point in their lives. We are a nation that has become very comfortable leaning on Uncle Sam for help.
And poor people from all around the globe see how good things are here and they are eager to get a seat at the table. In a previous article, I talked about a federal government website (“WelcomeToUSA.gov“) that actually teaches new immigrants how to apply for welfare once they are able to get into the United States.
Will we all eventually becoming dependent on the government? If that happens will we still be free men and women?
Once someone is dependent on the government, they become forced to do what the government tells them to do in order to survive. If we all eventually become dependent on the federal government, how much power will that give them over us?
That is something to think about.
Another thing to ponder is how the U.S. middle class is rapidly disappearing.
There will always be poor people, and we should always take care of them, but what we should be truly alarmed about is how the middle class in America has been dramatically shrinking in recent years.
One of the biggest reasons why so many Americans are applying for government assistance these days is because there simply aren’t enough jobs for everyone. Politicians from both political parties have fully embraced the one world “free trade” economic agenda of the global elite, and as a result millions of our jobs are being shipped out of the country. Big corporations can either choose to pay U.S. workers a living wage with benefits, or they can choose to set up shop on the other side of the globe where it is legal to pay workers slave labor wages with no benefits. Plus there are much fewer taxes and regulations to deal with typically on the other side of the globe.
As long as this nation pursues this “one world economic agenda”, there will never be enough jobs in the United States ever again. Chronic unemployment will become the new normal. Our formerly great manufacturing cities will continue to degenerate into gang-infested war zones.
Apologists for the current system continue to insist that the answer is “more education”, but the truth is that government dependence is even exploding among those with advanced degrees. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article on The Chronicle Of Higher Education…
People who don’t finish college are more likely to receive food stamps than are those who go to graduate school. The rolls of people on public assistance are dominated by people with less education. Nevertheless, the percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food stamps or some other aid more than doubled between 2007 and 2010.
During that three-year period, the number of people with master’s degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.’s who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655, according to tabulations of microdata done by Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute. He drew on figures from the 2008 and 2011 Current Population Surveys done by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
After reading that, does anyone still believe that “more education” is the answer to our problems?
What we need is more jobs, and lots of them. Unfortunately, our politicians continue to pursue policies that absolutely kill American jobs.
So the number of Americans that are forced to turn to the government for assistance will continue to grow, as will our national debt.
Sadly, most Americans still don’t realize what is happening. Most of them are still listening to those in the mainstream media that are insisting that everything is going to be just fine.
For example, the most famous economic journalist in the country, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, recently wrote that the deficit crisis has been “solved”…
True, there are projected problems further down the road, mainly because of the continuing effects of an aging population. But it still comes as something of a shock to realize that at this point reasonable projections do not, repeat do not, show anything resembling the runaway deficit crisis that is a staple of almost everything you hear, including supposedly objective news reporting.
So you heard it here first: while you weren’t looking, and the deficit scolds were doing their scolding, the deficit problem (such as it was) was being mostly solved.
Oh really?
I don’t know how in the world Paul Krugman can get paid to write such nonsense, but the truth is that our government debt problems are only just beginning.
In a previous article, I explained that the unfunded liabilities of the federal government are growing so rapidly that we could not cover them even if we raised the highest tax rate to 100%…
According to Chris Cox and Bill Archer, two men who served on Bill Clinton’s Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, there is no way in the world that we could raise taxes high enough to pay for all of the obligations that we are currently taking on. They say that even if we taxed all corporations and all individuals at a 100% tax rate on all income over $66,193, “it wouldn’t be nearly enough to fund the over $8 trillion per year in the growth of U.S. liabilities.“
Yes, Paul Krugman, we do have a spending problem. Even if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the federal government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days. We simply cannot go on spending money like this.
If anyone out there believes Paul Krugman and is convinced that the federal government is no longer facing a massive debt problem, please read this article: “55 Facts About The Debt And U.S. Government Finances That Every American Voter Should Know“.
But if we can’t afford to do all of this spending, then why are we doing it?
Well, it is because there are a whole lot of people out there that are really hurting. Poverty in the U.S. is absolutely exploding, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor has grown to unprecedented heights.
According to a recent article posted on Economy In Crisis, the bottom 60 percent of all Americans only own 2.3 percent of all the financial wealth in the nation combined.
That is astounding.
If you live in a wealthy area of the country, you may look around and things may look really good to you. But in many other areas of the country things are worse than they have ever been in the post-World War II era. For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
Can you imagine that? We have over a million kids that are attending our public schools that do not have a home to go back to at night.
Our economy desperately needs more jobs, but we just continue to lose more of them. On Thursday, it was announced that American Express is eliminating 5,400 more jobs. More announcements like this come out just about every day now. 65 percent of all Americans expect 2013 to be a year of “economic difficulty”, and there aren’t a whole lot of reasons to be optimistic about things at this point.
When you lose your job, it can feel like your entire life is falling apart. The competition for jobs is absolutely fierce, and a lot of workers have fallen through the cracks. In this rough economic environment, there are millions of Americans that have never been able to put the pieces of their lives back together. A recent CNN article profiled a 42-year-old woman up in Oregon named Lynette who has had her life totally turned upside down by unemployment…
I’m a single mom with a son in high school.
Three years ago, I was laid off from a job working at a propane company. I had just gotten back on my feet after battling breast cancer, then cervical cancer, but the economy tanked, and I was the first to go.
I am now 42, and the cancer is gone. But it appears my employability is also gone.
She used to work in a position that helped others find government assistance, but now she is the one who has been forced to seek it…
Before I was diagnosed with cancer, I worked for the state of Oregon and was the number one service manager for the Department of Human Services. My job was to help low income families find work and get food stamps and insurance. Now, I cannot even get a job at McDonalds, and I’m the one living on social assistance.
Does anyone out there have a similar story to share? If so, please feel free to share it below…