Want to Preserve Your Children’s Future? Slow the Growth of Welfare Spending

by John Hinderaker in Debt, Federal Budget, Federal debt and deficit

Our children are slated to drown under a tsunami of debt. Do they have any hope? Maybe, as the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee explain:

Currently, almost 95 percent of spending on means-tested poverty assistance falls into four categories: cash assistance, health assistance, housing assistance, and social and family services. Welfare spending has increased on a year-over-year basis regardless of whether the economy has improved or unemployment has declined, and is projected to continue this dramatic rise indefinitely. Spending on these poverty programs will rise approximately 80 percent from FY2013-FY2022, representing a total cost of $11 trillion—roughly one quarter of cumulative federal spending. Slowing the growth rate from 80 percent to a still massive 60 percent would thus result, according to standard congressional budget accounting, in a $1 trillion savings over ten years.

This chart shows the 80% projected increase in federal welfare spending:

Will reducing 80% growth to 60% growth really save a trillion dollars over ten years? Yes, it will. But let’s be more ambitious. How about if federal welfare spending–which is not really a function of the federal government, anyway–grows not at all over the next ten years? Or how about if it is cut in half–not the growth, but the spending? Now we are talking real spending cuts, of the sort that the American people are thirsting for. Let’s bring it on!

Democrat Party journalists always are eager to know what federal spending, specifically, Republicans want to cut. That question is not hard to answer, if just cutting the rate of growth in federal welfare spending from 80% to 60% produces a trillion dollars of savings in ten years!

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/01/want-to-preserve-your-childrens-future-slow-the-growth-of-welfare-spending.php