Their research revealed that the average household below the poverty line has received $168 per day of financial assistance from the government, which is a combination of unemployment, food stamps, Medicaid and other benefits. This is based on the Senate Budget Committee's own published statistics from the 2011 fiscal year.
Adding insult to injury, the median household income is just over $50,000, averaging out to just over $137 per day. That means welfare recipients are being paid the equivalent of $30 per hour over the course of a 40-hour 'work' week, and the average job only pays $25 an hour.
More than 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of the nearly 80 federal welfare programs in 2011, at a total cost of $717 billion. When state programs were taken into account, the figure soared above $1 trillion, making it the largest item in the federal budget.
That's only the tip of the iceberg however, as Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshall pointed out in their report:
Since the beginning of the War on Poverty in the mid-1960s, government has spent $19.8 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars) on means-tested welfare. By comparison, the combined cost of all the wars in American history — from the Revolutionary War through the current war in Afghanistan — has been $6.98 trillion (in 2011 dollars). The War on Poverty has thus cost three times as much as all of our real wars combined.Meaningful reform was passed back in 1996, increasing self sufficiency levels, but it has since been gutted by the Obama administration. With sensitive issues like sequestration and amnesty for illegals being debated on the congressional floor, one has to wonder if the subject of welfare reform has been seriously considered for its overwhelming relevance to both.
