Bullshit Statistic of the Week

WSJ’s Phil Izzo:

49.1%: Percent of the population that lives in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011.

Cutting government spending is no easy task, and it’s made more complicated by recent Census Bureau data showing that nearly half of the people in the U.S. live in a household that receives at least one government benefit, and many likely received more than one.

The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of 2008.

Not counted: Millionaire tax breaks, millionaire tax brackets, Social Security/Medicare limitation, mortgage deductions, corporate subsidies, federal sweetheart contracts…

Number of the Week: Half of U.S. Lives in Household Getting Benefits [WSJ]
5 Comments

The response is, of course, “so what”? It’s what the government is for, asshats.

@Tommmcatt May Just Have Some MJ In His System As Well, So What?: The premise is that we have to cut guvmint bennies because all those po’ folk are sucking at the teat. (See also: The Poor Don’t Pay Income Taxes.) It’s a meta-revival of the old Welfare Queen meme, which was successfully used to transfer wealth upward.

And it’s insidious, because, well, these are honest-to-gosh Census statistics: Wealthy Welfare conveniently falls in a different category. As we used to say in philosophy, if you grant the premise, you’ve lost the game.

The unsaid statistic of this and every week is 100%, the number of US households that will gladly take any government benefits they can get.

Nojo and the WSJ left out the benefit to capital owners of state and federal government efforts to eviscerate the labor movement and cut those costs.

Let’s not forget the antidumping and countervailing duties against foreign manufacturers of everything from steel to plastic forks. Allows them to charge more for nearly everything you buy.

Speaking of Our Boring Campaign…

Now that I’m finally getting around to importing the Hamster Archive, four years ago at this time Swampsow was musing about a Unicorn assassination and challenging the Florida delegates, which led me to resort to Kitties and Shooting a Dog, which Mommy wouldn’t let me post because the Cynics Party didn’t have balls.

Maybe boring is better.

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