Tag Archives: Entitlement

News

Half of all Americans live in households that get government handouts

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From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

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.

[…] As of early 2011, 15% of people lived in a household that received food stamps, 26% had someone enrolled in Medicaid and 2% had a member receiving unemployment benefits. Families doubling up to save money or pool expenses also is likely leading to more multigenerational households. But even without the effects of the recession, there would be a larger reliance on government.

The Census data show that 16% of the population lives in a household where at least one member receives Social Security and 15% receive or live with someone who gets Medicare. There is likely a lot of overlap, since Social Security and Medicare tend to go hand in hand, but those percentages also are likely to increase as the Baby Boom generation ages.

[…]The more people who receive benefits, the harder it’s going to be to make cuts, and it’s never popular to raise taxes. In some respects that argues for letting a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that is set to automatically hit in 2013 take effect. There’s just one problem: the Congressional Budget Office says it would sink the economy into recession.

All of this dependence on the government is not good for us. How can we compete with the rest of the world when we just sitting around borrowing money from our kids and spending it?

News

How public sector pensions force children to pay for the prosperity of adults

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From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

People retiring from the private sector need to save £250,000 to buy pension income equal to the national minimum wage – currently, £12,646 a year – or a total of £518,000 for a pension equal to national average earnings of £25,900.

These are among many eye-stretching facts in a new analysis of how unfunded promises to pay index-linked pensions to public sector workers are way beyond what most private sector savers can hope to achieve – and how these debts will burden children who have not yet left school.

The Intergenerational Foundation (IF) think tank used freedom of information requests to find out that 78,000 former public sector workers enjoy pensions of more than £25,900; and more than 12,000 get more than £50,000 a year. Three quarters of the latter are doctors and this index-linked income is irrespective of any private work or savings.

While many public sector workers pay into pension schemes, benefits usually outstrip employee contributions and the difference – or deficit – must be funded by future generations. Taxpayers’ total liability for public sector pensions, according to the report: ‘Are Government Pensions Unfair on the Younger Generation?’ is equivalent to £45,000 for every household in Britain and totals £1.2 trillion or £1,200,000,000,000.

An IF spokesman said: “This demonstrates the true scale of pension apartheid in the UK with news that 88pc  of public sector workers are currently entitled to pensions related to their final salaries, which are typically the most generous type of pension, compared to just 10pc of workers in the private sector.”

Don’t be fooled – this sort of thing happens in the United States as well, where teachers and government workers live high on the hog today and pass the bill to their children, who will be forced to pay for it all tomorrow. Is that fair?

News

Unemployed college graduates resort to unpaid internships

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From the liberal New York Times, a story about how Obama’s young supporters are being forced into unpaid labor because there are no jobs.

Excerpt:

Although many internships provide valuable experience, some unpaid interns complain that they do menial work and learn little, raising questions about whether these positions violate federal rules governing such programs.

Yet interns say they often have no good alternatives. As Friday’s jobs report showed, job growth is weak, and the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds was 13.2 percent in April.

The Labor Department says that if employers do not want to pay their interns, the internships must resemble vocational education, the interns must work under close supervision, their work cannot be used as a substitute for regular employees and their work cannot be of immediate benefit to the employer.

But in practice, there is little to stop employers from exploiting interns. The Labor Department rarely cracks down on offenders, saying that it has limited resources and that unpaid interns are loath to file complaints for fear of jeopardizing any future job search.

No one keeps statistics on the number of college graduates taking unpaid internships, but there is widespread agreement that the number has significantly increased, not least because the jobless rate for college graduates age 24 and under has risen to 9.4 percent, the highest level since the government began keeping records in 1985. (Employment experts estimate that undergraduates work in more than one million internships a year, with Intern Bridge, a research firm, finding almost half unpaid.)

“A few years ago you hardly heard about college graduates taking unpaid internships,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic Policy Institute who has done several studies on interns. “But now I’ve even heard of people taking unpaid internships after graduating from Ivy League schools.”

Youth unemployment in America is about 20% for teens and college graduates. It’s the capitalists who provide those jobs – the same capitalists who the young have been taught to hate. The same capitalists now shifting their capital abroad because of Obama’s anti-business taxes, regulations, inflation and cronyism – which the young support. It’s anti-business socialism that causes outsourcing – if you tax and regulate and insult businesses here, they just shift their production somewhere else.

Recall what happened in 2008:

Strong support from young and minority voters propelled Barack Obama on the road to the White House, exit polls showed Tuesday.

Voters in the 18 to 24 age group broke 68 percent for Obama to 30 percent for John McCain, according to the exit polling. Those in the 25 to 29 age bracket went 69 percent to 29 percent in Obama’s favor.

The only age group where McCain prevailed was 65 and over, and that by just a 10-percentage-point margin, 54 percent to 44 percent, the exit polls showed.

Since the election, Obama has been piling up 5 trillion of debt for these poor ignorant fools to pay off. They will be working until they are in their 90s to pay off the retirement benefits and health care of their parents, but when it’s their turn to get Social Security and Medicare, the money will have run out. That’s what Obama offers young people. And surprisingly, they take it. What else can they do? All they know about the world are the slogans that their secular leftist teachers have taught them in school. America is evil. Tax the rich. Stop global warming. Chastity and marriage are sexist. These teachers are the ones who are relying on their little slaves to make them rich – not the corporations. The slaves rally believe in slavery, and they want to be slaves. They want to save the planet by voting for bigger government benefits for their unionized teachers.