Housing programs are also often unavailable, if you were lucky enough to have got in years ago and stay in compliance with the requirements, then good for you. Most people who need housing assistance will never receive it.
Food support (SNAP, EBT & WIC) is essentially only for families, single people & couples get minimal assistance.
Were I to quit my job tomorrow, I would not receive unemployment as this goes to only those who lose their job through no fault of their own.
Health insurance, even with ObamaCare, would be based on my last year's income taxes. Thus no health subsidies - 100% out of pocket.
Welfare is probably similar in most states. Section 8, the same. So unless I had a nice stash in the bank, I'd be homeless.
The one exception, I believe, would be SNAP benefits. So I guess I wouldn't starve.
The Scandinavian countries clearly have far more generous social safety nets.
There are estimates NYC spends >$40k/year/homeless-w-mental-illness with no evidence their situation has improved. In fact, it might be getting worse!
Social safety and healthcare in America is broken. The War on Poverty has spent 10s of trillions, and our healthcare costs are the most outrageous in the world. That doesn't mean we have a good social safety net.
Proclaiming it's often insufficient is a comically loaded premise. How often? In which states? Under which circumstances? I've got the perfect response for that: it's often sufficient.
According to the OECD's numbers, the US poor live better than almost any other poor people on the planet save for those in a select few countries (eg Canada, Norway, Sweden, Australia). [1][2]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonish...
[2] https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/05/04/the-aver...
> The reality, expressed mathematically, is: Total Spending On “Welfare”/Those who receive benefits = $24.77 per day. That's a lot less than $168.
I'd be interested to know where your numbers come from.
There are approximately 16 million households that qualify as poor in the US. Households that exceed the poverty line do draw some benefits as well obviously, so it's not strictly those 16m poorest households pulling against the $1 trillion (which is to say, those 16m households are not each claiming ~$61k in annual benefits).
If you instead distribute that figure among the bottom quarter of adults - in terms of income - under the age of ~65 (over 65 most are drawing on Medicare), you get to something in the neighborhood of $20,000 per adult averaged. Per household you're going to be closer to $36k to $40k (eg the bottom 25m households * $40,000 per year).
Just the various healthcare programs utilized by the poorest 16m households - including Medicaid, CHIP, etc - is likely to be over $25,000 per year per household (not per person obviously).
The maximum welfare benefits a poor person in the US can draw annually, then reasonably aligns with the median state figure the Washington Post was quoting at ~$28,800 (again, it varies by state, some are far higher than others).
As I learned from the US healthcare debate, an astonishingly high percentage of the money goes into overhead. For example, you pointed out SNAP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista... says: "SNAP benefits cost $70.9 billion in fiscal year 2016 and supplied roughly 44.2 million Americans with an average of $125.51 for each person per month in food assistance."
So, $55.5 billion goes to Americans, meaning %15.4 billion or 20% is overhead.
How much of the other money is also overhead? Consider a charity which takes in $100M to "build homes for the poor", and ends up building 100 such homes. Your analysis suggests the poor are receiving $1M homes. On the other hand, if 95% of the money is spent on overhead, they are only getting $50K homes.
We know there's overhead elsewhere, though not 95% - that was used to make a point. For example, your Medicaid example is directly connected to the absurd health care costs in the US. As Wikipedia tells me: "In 2011, there were 7.6 million hospital stays billed to Medicaid, representing 15.6 percent (approximately $60.2 billion) of total aggregate inpatient hospital costs in the United States.[74] At $8,000, the mean cost per stay billed to Medicaid was $2,000 less than the average cost for all stays."
So part of that Medicaid spending is on an overpriced medical system. Another part of that spending is simply wasted in carrying out means testing and administrative overhead. These are costs which don't exist in the healthcare system of most other rich countries, and in neither case should it be viewed as money going towards poor Americans.
Furthermore, means tests requires that applicants do extra work to file the right forms, stand in the right lines, and in general deal with the bureaucracy. This can include taking time off of work (so getting paid less), trying to find a baby sitter, etc. These are monetary costs which are hidden in your analysis, which only looks at the government costs, and there are human costs of extra stress and hassle - and issues related to loss of respect and humanity aren't easy to quantify monetarily.
To get back to your text, you use numbers like "There are approximately 16 million households that qualify as poor in the US" and "you instead distribute that figure among the bottom quarter of adults". However, as DanBC pointed out from the Forbes article, the denominator "the number of people who claim benefits", gives $24.77 per day.
That suggests that there are many more people who claim benefits than your estimates suggest. I can see one place already. You limited the denominator to the "bottom quarter of adults .. under the age of ~65 [because] over 65 most are drawing on Medicare." However, https://www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/RowlandandLyons.pdf points out that 9% of the elderly draw on both Medicare and Medicaid.
About 185M people are between 18-65 years old. (Adding up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State... ). 1/4th of that gives about 46M, which close to your estimate of 50M ($1T/50M people=>$20K/person)
About 46.3M people are enrolled in Medicare due to age. 9% of that is 4M, so that's 8% missing from your earlier numbers.
In addition, children in "[a]ll states - except Tennessee - have additional disability-specific eligibility criteria, which allow some children with disabilities to qualify for Medicaid even if their parents’ income exceeds the state-established threshold." https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/repo...
I think this would also affect your numbers by increasing the denominator and so lowering the overall per-person payments.
To go back to DanBC's point, why aren't you using "the number of people who claim benefits" as your denominator?
CATO's numbers also match the Post's. They did a 2013 follow-up study to a prior 1995 study they did of work vs welfare trade-offs on a state by state basis. There is probably no more comprehensive source than their study, that I'm aware of.
"this study seeks to determine the approximate level of benefits that a typical welfare family, consisting of a single mother with two children, might receive"
[34 states come in above $25,000]
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_wo...
Here are two articles that dig into how the Cato numbers are technically possible but not useful for having a real dialogue about the benefits people wind up receiving in real life:
http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2015/feb/0...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/12/...
Way to propagate an ignorant myth. The US has a massive welfare state and social safety net. The average poor person in the US can typically draw $25,000 to $30,000 in benefits per year depending on the state they live in. Those benefits include free healthcare, housing, food, work training, etc. For some states, such as Hawaii, it's nearly $50,000 per year.
Just drawing on several of the most common welfare benefits programs in the US, gets you near $20,000 per year.
According to a fact check by the Washington Post in 2014, the median total individual welfare benefits package in the US was $28,800.
Let's put it another away. These welfare benefits numbers are so high, they exceed the median income in all but a few very wealthy nations.