Today I re-posted two articles that I think are significant to the unemployedif they rely on any type of government assistance. One article debates what theRepublicans define as "welfare" and the other article refers to theRepublican's proposed cuts in spending next year.
Also read "The Human Disaster of Unemployment", posted inthe NewYork Times by Dean Baker and Kevin Hassett on May 12, 2012:
"Older workers have seen the largest proportionate increase in unemployment. The number of unemployed people between ages 50 and 65 has more than doubled. A worker between ages 50 and 61 who has been unemployed for 17 months has only about a 9 percent chance of finding a new job. Economists estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss. There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide."
I am the 'Beast' the Republicans want to 'Starve': Starve theBeast is the well-documented and radical 34-year-old plan that Mitt Romney,the Republicans, and the Tea Party endorses for deliberately bankrupting thegovernment."
Define ‘Welfare State,’ Please
Even those who denounce our “unsustainable welfare state” don’t agree on what it is or how its spending should be measured.Brandishing the phrase in his recent call for a structural revolution, David Brooks of The New York Times didn’t get specific.
The Heritage Foundation sometimes offersa narrow definition of the “unsustainable welfare state,” based onmeans-tested programs – benefits directed to those with income below a povertythreshold, like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, food stamps andMedicaid.
Like many conservative Republicans, however, the Heritage Foundation oftenincludes bigger entitlement programs that are not means-tested, like SocialSecurity and Medicare, within its unsustainable category.
The ball seems to get bigger as it rolls downhill. Some criticsconsider the entire government payroll part of the unsustainable welfare state.Others use governmentspending as a share of gross domestic product as a warning sign. By thesemeasures, military expenditures also count.
Academic researchers also disagree about specifics. The economists IrwinGarfinkel and Timothy Smeeding, for instance, assertthat spending on education should be considered part of the welfare state,emphasizing its productive contributions to the development of human capital.
Like many other researchers, including Christopher Howard, author of “TheHidden Welfare State,” they insist that analysis of government spendingalone provides an incomplete picture, because tax expenditures, such as thecosts of tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, or for children,should also be counted.
It seems odd to give the same “welfare state” label to all thesedifferent categories of spending. Their distributional impact varies enormously.Means-tested government spending on low-income families is small relative toother transfers. Social Security and government employment tend to benefit themiddle class. Tax expenditures, in particular, tend tobenefit the rich.
Spending trends also vary enormously. Spending on means-tested programs otherthan Medicaid has not increased much over the long run. According to the Budgetof the United States Government for fiscal 2011, it represented about thesame percentage of G.D.P. in 2007 as in 1976 – about 1.3 percent. It increasedto 1.7 percent in 2009 as a result of the great recession.
When unemployment goes up and stays up, spending on programs like food stampsand the earned income tax credit goes up, helping people who can’t find a joband buffering the economy from the effects of income loss.
Spending on Social Security, often treated as the greatest bugaboo of ouraging society, has remained at 4.5 to 5 percent of G.D.P. since 1985. Thealready carried out transition to a higher retirement age is contributing tocost containment.
The scary increases in government spending have come in Medicaid andMedicare. These two programs, which consumed 1.2 percent of G.D.P. in 1975,reached 4.1 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.
These increases have less to do with government spending than with theincreased costs of health care, regardless of who is paying the bill.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research offers anonline calculator showing how much lower our projected deficits would be ifwe could reduce health care spending per person to levels comparable to those ofother affluent countries. The center also graphs the improvement that wouldresult from successful fulfillment of the AffordableCare Act.
If you distrust these calculations, consider that government spending onretirement and health security is largely a substitute for private spending. Tryprojecting your personal expenditures on retirement and health care if SocialSecurity and Medicare are downsized. Your taxes might go down, but you mightneed to spend more out of your own pocket to buy the services you need.
All government programs deserve critical scrutiny, and there is plenty ofroom for meaningful debate over the relative efficiency of public versus privateprovision. But there is no evidence that social spending in the United States isapproaching some upper limit of feasibility.
What is unsustainable (or should be) is the current level of confusion,misinformation and paranoia about the future of the so-called welfare state.
My Post: Obama's 'Welfare State'
- "Define Welfare State Please" posted in the New York Times by Nancy Folbre on May 14, 2012
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