Real Welfare Reform is Needed

With an increase in the number of welfare recipients there has also been an increase in the spending on those recipients.  With a $16.4 trillion national debt and trillion dollar plus annual budget deficits, it is time for serious controls on the expenditure of these and all expenditures.  For example, records indicate that there was a record number of people using food stamps last year (nearly 48 million participants).  In addition, the spending of welfare benefits has increased during this period of anemic economic growth.  A December 7, 2012 article in The Weekly Standard indicated that, “For fiscal year 2011, CRS [Congressional Research Service] identified roughly 80 overlapping federal means-tested welfare programs that together represented the single largest budget item in 2011—more than the nation spends on Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. The total amount spent on these federal programs, when taken together with approximately $280 billion in state contributions, amounted to roughly $1 trillion.”

As the Standard article also noted, President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget would increase these programs by an additional 30 percent over the next four years.  Welfare recipients have been wasting money as long as these programs have been around.  Paper food stamps were used for drugs and guns.  Now that food stamp recipients use Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, fraud is easier to track but it hasn’t gone away.  As The Daily Caller wrote on January 6, 2012, “An investigation into where welfare recipients are using their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards has revealed that some are withdrawing taxpayer money from EBT-friendly ATMs at strip clubs and liquor stores.”  One woman even tried to use her EBT card to buy an iPad.  This shows that while it is true that the welfare program is a block grant given to states to manage the money, both state and federal regulators should be policing the use of this money.

To add insult to injury, means-tested federal aid programs while expanding also spent more taxpayer money per day on beneficiaries than people who earn the median wage.  As the Standard article reported, “According to the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee, welfare spending per day per household in poverty is $168, which is higher than the $137 median income per day. When broken down per hour, welfare spending per hour per household in poverty is $30.60, which is higher than the $25.03 median income per hour.”

With the focus now on spending instead of taxes, Congress and the President should be working in earnest to find ways to control the costs of their runaway federal program.   In the document “Fiscal Year 2013: Cuts, Consolidations, and Savings,” the President outlined nearly $25 billion in spending cuts for 2013. None of these cuts dealt with anything related to these exploding federal aid programs.  The best way to get people off of welfare and reduce spending on these programs is for real economic growth fueled by lower taxes and lower spending.