No, we don’t spend $1 trillion on welfare each year - WaPo, Konczal

[Bill USA]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/12/no-we-dont-spend-1-trillion-on-welfare-each-year/

If you’ve read any conservative commentary on the war on poverty in the past week, you’ve likely seen this talking point ("talking point" - i.e. LIE -Bill USA) : “We spend $1 trillion each year on welfare and there’s been no reduction in poverty.” That’s crazy! Then, a sentence later, you’ll probably see a line like this: “It’s true. According to a recent report, we spend a trillion dollars on means-test programs each year, yet the official census numbers show no reduction in poverty.”

If you are reading that second line quickly, you probably think it bolsters the credibility of the first line. It’s an “official” number, and the census and the report probably quote accurate numbers too, night? They do, but the second sentence is actually used as an escape hatch to say something that isn’t true. We don’t spend anywhere near a trillion dollars on welfare unless you mangle the term “welfare” to be meaningless, and we do reduce poverty.

First, Dylan Matthews has already dissected the claim that poverty hasn’t declined. It has. It’s just that the “official” poverty rate doesn’t factor in the earned-income tax credit or food stamps in its calculations. Given that these are two of the most direct ways that the government tries to lift people out of poverty, that’s a major problem. These programs do, in fact, lift people out of poverty--it just doesn’t show up in the official rate, because that’s how the rate is constructed.

The claim about $1 trillion on “welfare” is more interesting and complicated. It shows up in this recent report from the Cato Institute, which argues that the federal government spends $668 billion dollars per year on 126 different welfare programs (spending by the state and local governments push that figure up to $1 trillion per year).
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[msongs]

1. military welfare is a huge chunk of that nt

[SunSeeker]

2. The article is an excellent take down of the Cato (Koch) lie of $1 trillion in "welfare."

Cato is trying to resurrect Reagan's welfare queen myth, suggesting we hand out $1 trillion is cash to a nation of shiftless moochers sitting on their ass collecting checks. We don't give $1 trillion in cash to poor people. Cato includes Medicaid in that figure, which is about one-third of that $1 trillion total. The rest is child tax credits, earned income tax credits, community programs, etc. Only $75 billion of it is for food stamps--the vast majority of which go to the working poor because we don't require employers to pay a living wage.

But if Cato is willing to say tax credits are welfare, why don't they go after the really big welfare moochers, Big Oil and Big Ag? [It's a rhetorical questions, I know why.]

[seattledo]

3. The number doesn't matter a damn bit.

That's just GOPpers trying to distract from the issue. The issue is that we obviously do not spend enough.