The chief business of the American people is Welfare

Welfare, Not Full-Time Work, Is Now America's No. 1 Occupation

"Is Welfare The New Normal?" we wondered in an editorial last Thursday, and we didn't have long to wait for an answer. On Friday an answer came back in depressing new data from the Census Bureau.

CNSNews.com's indefatigable data hound, Terence P. Jeffrey, dug into a few routine Census releases recently and discovered something shocking: More people in America today are on welfare than have full-time jobs.

Calvin Coolidge (1925):

“After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.”

Barack Obama

After all, the chief business of the American people is obtaining handouts from the government. They are profoundly concerned with kicking back, listening to some tunes, smoking a lot of choom, and using their EBT cards. The Democrat party and I are strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will find these the moving impulses of our life.

Cracker Barrel Philosopher (with a hat tip to Margaret Thatcher):

"It'll be quite a party until they run out of other people's money."

Check out the abandoned shopping carts from Saturday's EBT outage

EBT (the generic name for USA's welfare credit card system) had some technology problems in a number of states on Saturday and the undeserving poor were mighty upset. The best part for me however were the photos posted on Instagram of the abandoned shopping carts.

No rice & beans or ramen noodles for this crowd! My first reaction was that I can see why the USA has the fattest poor people in the world, but a friend says I am out of date. These shoppers loading up on meat and Jimmy Dean Croissants are reselling the loot to cheap restaurants, bodegas and convenience stores for cash so that they can buy some really fun stuff. It certainly gives me a warm feeling to know that our taxes are so well spent.

Don't think of it as welfare. Think of it as a career.

From the always interesting Zero Hedge - When Work Is Punished: The Tragedy Of America's Welfare State:

for increasingly more it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income - to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work. This is graphically, and very painfully confirmed, in the below chart from Gary Alexander, Secretary of Public Welfare, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (a state best known for its broke capital Harrisburg). As quantified, and explained by Alexander, "the single mom is better off earnings gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045."

I have to observe from the chart that there doesn't seem much point to even working at all since $0 income plus welfare works out to about the same as earning $55,000 without any government benefits.

That point hasn't been lost on the citizenry either:

But perhaps the scariest chart in the entire presentation is the following summarizing the unsustainable welfare burden on current taxpayers:

• For every 1.65 employed persons in the private sector, 1 person receives welfare assistance
• For every 1.25 employed persons in the private sector, 1 person receives welfare assistance or works for the government.

I like to think of it as uninvited guests at the nation's dinner tables. If you have a job and your spouse has a part time job, when you sit down to dinner you have a welfare moocher or a government bureaucrat sitting down with you. Pass the potatoes Barack, and don't scarf all the chicken!