Well-To-Do Americans Getting More Benefits Than The Poor

[dajoki]

Well-To-Do Americans Getting More Benefits Than The Poor
by Sherwood Ross | August 7, 2011 - 8:52am
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/37755

All the Federal welfare checks, food stamps, and unemployment benefits don’t begin to add up to the more than $1-trillion in indirect tax breaks awarded annually to America’s middle- and upper-classes.

Whereas social benefits such as “welfare” are paid in the form of checks, “tax breaks function by allowing recipients themselves simply to keep more money, reducing the amount they would otherwise owe,” observes Suzanne Mettler in the current issue of The Washington Monthly.

“As a matter of budgeting, however, there is no difference between a tax break and a social program: both have to be paid for, either by raising tax rates or by adding to the deficit,” Mettler points out.

In short, “In the case of social tax expenditures…the most expensive of these subsidies shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans,” writes Mettler, a professor of government at Cornell University and author of “The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy,” coming this fall from University of Chicago Press.

Her message: “Beneath the surface of American government lurks a system of social programs for the wealthy that is consuming the federal budget.”

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[indepat]

1. This is the genesis of my frequent chant on this board: so the uber-wealthy and large corporations

can continue to suck fervently at the public welfare teat: stuff this obscene cannot be made up. :patriot:

[cutlassmama]

2. K&R