America’s entitlements problem
The “government of the United States of America has become an entitlements machine,” Nicholas Eberstadt writes in A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic. “As a day-to-day operation, the U.S. government devotes more attention and resources to the public transfers of money, goods, and services to individual citizens than to any other objective; and for the federal government, more
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: At what point did we become a nation of takers?
EBERSTADT: It’s a work in progress, for better or worse. The sort of statistics I present in my little book help to illuminate the underlying trends.
According to the Census Bureau, as of spring 2011 (the latest data available at this writing) nearly half — i.e., 49 percent — of Americans lived in households accepting at least one public entitlement benefit. That would have been about 150 million Americans.
We think of Social Security and Medicare — our social guarantees for senior citizens — as being the country’s main entitlement vehicles. In purely financial terms, these are certainly America’s two biggest entitlement programs: Taken together, Medicare and the Social Security pension fund account for roughly half of the almost $2.4 trillion in transfers the government handed out this past year. But of the 150 million Americans who were on entitlements, only 50 million were Social Security pension recipients.
So who were all the rest? Well, about 100 million American entitlement recipients werenot on Social Security. Two-thirds of Americans getting entitlement benefits today, in other words, are not senior citizens, and are not living in households that included Social Security beneficiaries.
The overwhelming majority of Americans who use public benefit programs these days are getting “means tested” benefits, poverty-justified benefits: Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, TANF, and all the rest. One American in three now lives in a “means tested” home.
And remember, those benefits don’t just get sent out: You have to apply for them. Never before have so many able-bodied and (at least by any historical benchmark) relatively well-to-do Americans pled poverty for the purpose of getting a handout from Uncle Sam.
These patterns, I would submit, speak to a profound, even radical, change in mentality in the United States. That’s why I called my book Nation of Takers.
read more:
to these ends than to any other purposes combined,” he underscores. Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, talks about the book and our entitlement culture with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: At what point did we become a nation of takers?
EBERSTADT: It’s a work in progress, for better or worse. The sort of statistics I present in my little book help to illuminate the underlying trends.
According to the Census Bureau, as of spring 2011 (the latest data available at this writing) nearly half — i.e., 49 percent — of Americans lived in households accepting at least one public entitlement benefit. That would have been about 150 million Americans.
We think of Social Security and Medicare — our social guarantees for senior citizens — as being the country’s main entitlement vehicles. In purely financial terms, these are certainly America’s two biggest entitlement programs: Taken together, Medicare and the Social Security pension fund account for roughly half of the almost $2.4 trillion in transfers the government handed out this past year. But of the 150 million Americans who were on entitlements, only 50 million were Social Security pension recipients.
So who were all the rest? Well, about 100 million American entitlement recipients werenot on Social Security. Two-thirds of Americans getting entitlement benefits today, in other words, are not senior citizens, and are not living in households that included Social Security beneficiaries.
The overwhelming majority of Americans who use public benefit programs these days are getting “means tested” benefits, poverty-justified benefits: Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, TANF, and all the rest. One American in three now lives in a “means tested” home.
And remember, those benefits don’t just get sent out: You have to apply for them. Never before have so many able-bodied and (at least by any historical benchmark) relatively well-to-do Americans pled poverty for the purpose of getting a handout from Uncle Sam.
These patterns, I would submit, speak to a profound, even radical, change in mentality in the United States. That’s why I called my book Nation of Takers.
read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment