CNS News reports that the United States has arrived at that interesting point in the evolution of the Welfare State at which the takers outnumber the givers.
The number of Americans receiving subsidized food assistance from the federal government has risen to 101 million, representing roughly a third of the U.S. population.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a total of 101,000,000 people currently participate in at least one of the 15 food programs offered by the agency, at a cost of $114 billion in fiscal year 2012.
That means the number of Americans receiving food assistance has surpassed the number of full-time private sector workers in the U.S.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 97,180,000 full-time private sector workers in 2012.
The population of the U.S. is 316.2 million people, meaning nearly a third of Americans receive food aid from the government.
SDD
There is no way the economic math of this works out to the sort of robust growth the US experienced in the 1982-2007 quarter-decade.
It appears that the country has chosen a path where the portion of the population actually producing continually declines. When you offer people incentives not to work, more of them will choose to do that. When you offer employers incentives to convert to a part-time work force and keep full-timers under 50, more of them will do that. [Note: The second largest employer in the US is now Kelly Services — temp agency]. People respond to incentives, and the incentives we are providing are not the sort that increase a full-time workforce.
The only hope I can see is some sort of technology breakthrough that affords huge increases in productivity and allows us to warehouse half the population. That could happen someday, but I doubt we will see it in the next ten years. What we will see in the next ten years is more “stagnation” of the kind we have been experiencing during the last five “Recovery Summers”. This is EXACTLY the sort of economy that Democrats want. Millions and millions of voters who are dependent on the government for support.
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