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发帖数: 16625 | 1 http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/330821/total-welfare-spend
Total Welfare Spending Now at $1 Trillion
By NRO Staff
October 18, 2012 4:00 A.M.
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Total annual spending on federal means-tested welfare programs has hit $1
trillion. The Congressional Research Service is out with a new memorandum on
spending on these programs. Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican
on the Senate budget committee who requested the memo, has crunched the
numbers and come up with the astonishing figure of $1 trillion in annual
total spending on these programs as of fiscal year 2011, nearly $750 billion
in federal dollars and another roughly $250 billion in state funding.
Senator Sessions explains:
Ranking Member Sessions and the minority staff of the Senate Budget
Committee requested from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS
) an overview of cumulative means-tested federal welfare spending in the
United States in the most recent year for which data is available (fiscal
year 2011). The results are staggering. CRS identified 83 overlapping
federal welfare programs that together represented the single largest budget
item in 2011—more than the nation spends on Social Security, Medicare, or
national defense. The total amount spent on these 80-plus federal welfare
programs amounts to roughly $1.03 trillion. Importantly, these figures
solely refer to means-tested welfare benefits. They exclude entitlement
programs to which people contribute (e.g., Social Security and Medicare).
CRS estimates that exclusively federal spending on these federal
programs equaled approximately $746 billion, and further emphasizes that
there is a substantial amount of state spending—mostly required as a
condition of states’ participation—on these same federal programs (
primarily Medicaid and CHIP). Based on data from the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services and the Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government
Finance, Budget Committee staff calculated at least an additional $283
billion in state contributions to those same federal programs,1 for a total
annual expenditure of $1.03 trillion. By comparison, in 2011, the annual
budget expenditure for Social Security was $725 billion, Medicare was $480
billion, and non-war defense was $540 billion.
The exclusively federal share of spending on these federal programs is
up 32 percent since 2008, and now comprises 21 percent of federal outlays (
this share too is more than Social Security, Medicare, or defense).
As a historical comparison, spending on the 10 largest of the 83
programs (which account for the bulk of federal welfare spending) has
doubled as a share of the federal budget over just the last 30 years. In
inflation-adjusted dollars, the amount expended on these 10 programs has
increased by 378 percent over that time.
Many factors have contributed to the growth in federal welfare spending,
causing it to rise during times of both high and low unemployment.
Persistently weak GDP growth over the last several years is unquestionably a
factor in the record amount of money now being spent. But understanding the
growth in federal welfare expenditures must also be understood in the
context of a federal policy that has explicitly encouraged growth in welfare
enrollment—combined with a weakening of welfare standards and rules. | a******o
发帖数: 16625 | 2 多呼哉？ 这里面不包括medicare，SSN。 |
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