When doing some random surfing, I discovered some facts about the Federal Government:
– There are 30,000 staffers who work on Capitol Hill, supporting 535 Congressmen.
– There are 487 staffers at the Whitehouse, but that number does not include working employees like chefs, housekeepers, gardeners, or security personnel- this number only includes management.
– The Federal Government directly employs over 3 million people in the civilian sector, plus another 1.4 million in the military branches, with another 500 thousand in the reserves (not counting the National Guard’s 350 thousand)
Compare that to state and local government:
-There are 3.8 million people employed by all state and local governments combined.
There are about 8.2 million working directly for federal, state and local government, or about 1 in 12 American workers. That number does not include contractors.
It is worse than that. There is also a large group of people who receive government benefits, and will lose those benefits if they get jobs. In essence, they are employed by the government to NOT work.
There are 7 million who are on disability.
There are 23 million who get food stamps and another 9.5 million who receive WIC.
There are 31 million children who get free or reduced meals at school.
There are 54 million on Social Security, 41 million on Medicare, and 43 million on Medicaid.
Despite spending several trillion dollars on the problem, the poverty level has remained near 12% ever since the United States abolished the gold standard in 1973, with the current level being 12.7%. It is important to note that the method the Government is using to calculate the poverty line only takes inflation into account, instead of the more accurate model which compares the cost of living to household income. Using this method, the current cost of living has risen from 30% of individual income in 1965 to 50% of household income in 2003. Where it used to take one income to support a family, it now takes two.
This means that the effective poverty rate has more than doubled since the “War on Poverty” began, when expressed as a real percentage of household income. Despite spending trillions of dollars fighting the “war”, the “war” has been lost.
What we are left with is a bloated government that only functions to oppress.
1 Comment
TOTWTYTR · July 16, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Actually, the war has been won. Only it's been won by the poor and their advocates because they get more and more federal money to provide fewer and fewer real benefits.
The reason that women were encouraged to enter the job market had nothing to do with equality. Women HAD to enter the job market so that households could afford the crushing combination of state, local, and federal taxes of all kinds.
Bloated is right, the federal government is way too large. It has it's sticky fingers into too many aspects of our lives. Trim down the federal government and many of our economic woes would be solved.
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