In recent years much has been made in the mainstream press about welfare spending and all of the lazy Poor Bastards who are allegedly sitting around The Kingdom collecting benefits, channel-surfing through cable-wonderland, while the rest of us slave away at the rock pile....Now that the dust has settled from the election and everyone has had a chance to take a breather, the Grand Poo Ba thought he would do a little research in order to set the record straight!
Let's start by putting one of the biggest myths to rest, which is that welfare spending is somehow going to bankrupt the country....
The reality is that total federal spending on welfare as of 10/15/2012, not including food stamps, amounts to $132 billion dollars a year!
In view of the fact that the current federal budget calls for $3.7 TRILLION in spending (that's 3.7 followed by TWELVE zeros, for all of you Poor Bastards
who can't count), this means that welfare spending, not including food stamps, amounts to around 3.5% of total federal spending!...And again, if you are a
mathematically challenged Poor Bastard, that would be the equivalent of spending four bucks on a Big Mac and being charged an additional fifteen cents to pay for some less fortunate Poor Bastard's double-chubby-chuck! Hell, most of you would leave the change in the jar for Jerry's Kids anyway, so what's the difference?
Food stamps account for another $71 billion in "welfare" spending, meaning that total federal spending on what is generally thought of as welfare totals right at $200 billion per year.
However, because food stamps are treated somewhat differently under the laws of The Kingdom, all spending on food stamps cannot technically be categorized as welfare spending. This is so because it is possible for an Unfortunate Poor Bastard to be gainfully employed and still qualify for food stamps due to the pathetic pittance they earn in wages!
So, the notion that every Poor Bastard who receives food stamps is lying around picking their nose, watching day-time reruns on TV, while they munch away on frozen pizza and turkey pot pies that were paid for with food stamps is simply not true! In fact, it could even be argued that the money used to provide food stamps to those Poor Bastards who are employed, is a form of corporate welfare, since it serves as a form of subsidy for the employer, who is then able to get away with paying his workers less money that it actually costs to survive, while the federal government picks up the tab for the his employee's groceries!
Not to belabor the obvious, but this rate of spending is hardly enough to break the bank! In reality it is little more than an annoyance, kind of like when White Collar Poor Bastards pilfer office supplies from their employer and take them home from the office.
Is is stealing? Yes.
Does it cost the employer money? Yes, but it is unlikely to result in the bankruptcy of the company.
The second myth that needs to be laid to rest is that welfare recipients are nothing but a bunch of free-loading Malingering Poor Bastards who are too lazy to work and would rather make a career out of lying around on the sofa waiting for the mailman to deliver "the welfare check."
The reality is that under current federal law, any one Poor Bastard welfare recipient can only draw benefits for 60 months, after which time they are out the door! In some states the benefit period is even less, depending on the laws of each state. Federal law does allow the state to occasionally extend benefits beyond 60 months, but only to 20% of the Poor Bastards who make up the caseload in each state!
This means that fully 80% of the Poor Bastards in the U.S. who receive welfare will have their benefits terminated after five years and will be dropped from the system!
Now the last time I checked, 5 years hardly constituted a "career", even among the Malingering Poor Bastard class!
The third myth is that the welfare rolls are clogged with unmotivated, single mother Poor Bastardettes who are hanging around with like-minded Degenerate Poor Bastards, breeding like flies, cranking out Future Poor Bastard babies, in order to increase the benefits they receive from welfare....When in fact the reality is that as of 10/15/2012 the average household receiving welfare had 1.9 children living in the home...a far cry from the romper room imagery the conservative media would lead you to believe is the case!
In total the ultimate reality is that federal spending on corporate welfare far outpaces any money that is spent on more traditional forms of welfare. By "corporate welfare" I am referring to everything from military spending to corporate bailouts to paying the interest on the national debt. And speaking of that national debt, all of you Retiring Poor Bastards should know that the annual interest payments now total more than 50% of the amount of money the U.S. spends on Social Security each year.
In order to get a realistic grip on exactly what all of this corporate welfare is really costing, let's look at some of those statistics....
Interest on the national debt is currently running $475 billion per year - more than 3.5 times the amount we spend on traditional welfare, not including food stamps. Much of this money is a wealth transfer from Working Class Poor Bastards to some of the world's richest individuals, companies and countries. A substantial amount of this debt is money that congress has "borrowed" from the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds. And it is this borrowing that has led to the destabilization of the Social Security program and therefore the retirement prospects for every last one of you Poor Bastards throughout the Kingdom of the Poor Bastard!
Military spending, including spending on veterans and retirees, now totals approximately $860 billion dollars per year, almost 6.5 times what we spend on welfare, not including food stamps. If we assume that 50% of this spending is unnecessary to actually "protect" the U.S. from its enemies around the world, that leaves $430 billion dollars, more than 3 times what we spend on welfare, that ends up mostly in the hands of private corporations as a result of lucrative contracts associated with defense spending.
As for corporate bailouts, there are very few reliable sources available from which to draw meaningful statistics, no doubt due to the fact that the federal government doesn't want all of you Disgruntled Poor Bastard voters to know just how much these bailouts are costing the U.S. taxpayers. But, we can draw some sort of comparisons just from the numbers which have been tossed about in the press over the last few years.
So, let's take the AIG bailout as an example. This gift from our government to the corporate cabal is said to have cost the U.S. $75 billion dollars, or almost 40% of the amount we spend each year on welfare and food stamps for the rest of us Poor Bastards, and that's just one damned company!
Other bailouts and federal spending to rescue Wall Street and the rest of the transnational corporate empire from their own malfeasance and incompetence, have easily totaled hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars, since Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.
In total, it doesn't really matter what the exact numbers are. What matters when it comes to this discussion of welfare, is that the cost of supporting the Poor Bastards on welfare, whether they are people who have a legitimate need or are just lazy Malingering Poor Bastards, is a trifle drop in the bucket when compared with the amounts of money the federal government is shoveling into the coffers of some of the world's richest corporations and private citizens every day of the year!
