HOW LONG BEFORE THE SYSTEM BREAKS? Working Americans increasingly made to pay for those on welfare

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
4/16/2014 (4 years ago)
Catholic Online (https://www.catholic.org)

If you're an American who awakes each day to begin a day of toil you have no interest in, take heed: There are only more reasons to hit your pillow in frustration each night as you drift off to sleep. You are an endangered species, and the media has not rallied to your side as they would, say, the polar bear.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - It's estimated that there 86,429,000 full-time working Americans in 2012.

"These are the people who built America, and these are the people who can sustain it as a free country," columnist Terrence P. Jeffrey writes. "The liberal media has not made them famous like the polar bear, but they are truly a threatened species.

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"It is not a rancher with a few hundred head of cattle that is attacking their habitat, nor an energy company developing a fossil fuel. It is big government and its primary weapon - an ever-expanding welfare state," Jeffrey writes.

Approximately 103,087,000 people worked full-time, year-round in the United States. According to the Census Bureau, a full-time, year-round worker is a person who worked 35 or more hours per week (full time) and 50 or more weeks during the previous calendar year (year round). 

Of these year-round workers, 16,606,000 worked for the government. That included 12,597,000 who worked for state and local government and 4,009,000 who worked for the federal government.

The 86,429,000 Americans who worked full-time, year-round in the private sector, included 77,392,000 employed as wage and salary workers for private-sector enterprises and 9,037,000 who worked for themselves.

While this figure seems encouraging, the growing size of the benefit-receiving population mitigates this.

Broken into two groups, the first group includes those who receive benefits for public services they performed or in exchange for payroll taxes they dutifully paid their entire working lives. This group includes groups getting veteran's benefits, those on unemployment and those getting Medicare and Social Security.

The second category are those who are "means-tested" government benefits - or welfare. This group includes those who get Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, public housing, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Women, Infants Children.

Let's examine this second category first, which the Census Bureau reports as "anyone residing in a household in which one or more people received benefits from the program."

This figure, which includes both the welfare recipients and the non-welfare beneficiaries, there were 151,014,000 who "received benefits from one or more programs" in the fourth quarter of 2011. Subtract the 3,212,000 veterans and that leaves 147,802,000 non-veteran benefit takers.

Jeffrey warns that as more retire and as Obamacare comes fully online, the number of takers will inevitably expand. "And the number of full-time private-sector workers might also contract.

"Eventually, there will be too few carrying too many, and America will break."

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