Are 60% of households getting more in benefits than taxes?

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Had to shorten because of text limits, but full title should be, "Are 60% of households getting more in benefits than they are paying in taxes?"

I see this quoted a lot by right wingers, and they have this full on graph with a CBO source from Tax Foundation:

https://taxfoundation.org/60-percent-ho ... A#_ednref1

Wow looks scary right!!

Well when you open the data sources from the CBO, it looks a lot different.

Here is the breakdown of transfers (%):

Social Security: 49.8

Medicare: 28.4

Medicaid: 7.6

Other Cash: 13.5

Other In-Kind: 0.6

All of this in their sources by the way, but you have to open them and look through it.

Basically, about ~78% of total transfers are money to old people. What we think of as "welfare cash payments" at most can be 20%.

The Tax Foundation downplayed the percentage that is money to old people because their target demo for crap like this is old people, but they did list the gov't transfers:

"Government transfers are described on p. 24 of CBO’s report a “cash payments from Social Security, unemployment insurance, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (and its predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children), veterans’ programs, workers’ compensation, and state and local government assistance programs. They also include the value of in-kind benefits, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program vouchers (formerly known as food stamps), school lunches and breakfasts, housing assistance, energy assistance, and benefits provided by Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. "

Note how Medicare is down at the bottom - its popular so they wanted to de emphasize that even though that is 28.4% of the transfers and #2 overall. But they mentioned everything else that sums up to a paltry 14.1% - and this was in a recession year where unemployment benefits were unusually high.

Note how they put TANF - by definition a temporary response to the great recession of 08-09 at the top above Medicare. They put Food stamps, which counts as "other in kind" (.6%) above Medicare. Why? Because Medicare is popular and they want people mad at what they imagine they think the typical government money recipient is like - a poor (probably black) person receiving free money for nothing while they pop out kids.

Don't get me wrong, I do think there is a problem up ahead. But lets not dance around the issue - the problem is we are paying more money to old people and to old people health care from a smaller worker base and they are living long.

If they phrased it like that, old boomers wouldn't be as mad at government transfers.

I redid the chart without social security and medicare, and it looks a lot different:

https://imgur.com/irmoIw1

Note how it now because we aren't counting social security, the wealthy look like they are making out worse because their biggest government transfer is social security and medicare. But suddenly the lower income groups now appear to be paying more as well.

Even if it's true, I don't see anything wrong as such with it being that way. Maybe it's just that more than half the population need positive financial intervention.

I mean, its not true though thats the thing.

Graphing it by income is dishonest and not an accurate way to analyze it.

A better way would be age. In general, people are "takers" when they are young, pay into it in their prime working years, and then become "takers" again when they get older.

Thats called a society.

Doesn't mean I want more benefits or am not open to cuts. But lets be honest about what is going on here.

^
Sure, it's probably deliberately misleading in the first place. I was just looking at it from a different angle.

Well, when roughly half the country isn't compensated well enough to be subjected to federal income tax, that's going to happen. We're talking about benefits programs rather than simply benefiting from the existence of the government, so it's a bit surprising it's not a lot higher as an increasingly small portion of the population gets all the proceeds of the economic activity.

Yeah, I have three nonverbal autistic children that I worry about. It seems like they could be engineers or they could be grocery store clerks. Nothing in between.

Right now I'm assistant bakery manager. It's overall not bad work, but it drives me nuts how many arbitrary changes they've been making lately. I expect that will slow down in the near future, but it was the straw the broke the camel's back in terms of my not knowing that the "you're not autistic, wink, wink" actually meant that I'm autistic, but there isn't enough evidence to put it in my file alongside schizoaffective and OCD. Hindsight is 20/20 for a reason.

Anyways, I'll be starting my own business in part so that I can structure it around my needs. I'm personally able to speak enough of the time that I need to that it's not a major concern, but there are a lot of jobs that one can have that don't require speaking, and I mean like at all. Especially ones that are online, so I do think that there will be more options in the middle as time goes by. especially if we do the work to create them.

I have become increasingly aware that if it's an online business, that there's probably a bunch of tasks that people in the community could do that aren't really able to handle most in person jobs due to having to speak or mask the entire time at work.

Yeah, good luck!

From what I understand, autism itself doesn't reach the threshold for getting disability, but autism + speech apraxia does. However, I don't want it to come to that. I'd prefer it if they could work.

I think they will be ok though.