Video: Michelle on the media’s ACORN “protection racket”

Will the msm report this?

CNN..TRANSCRIPT…9/16/09″ “And up next, the real cost of welfare in this country. It’s a hidden cost, but you can’t imagine how big it really is. We’ll have that for you, nextDOBBS: A new Heritage Foundation study finds that the Obama administration will spend more than $10 trillion on welfare programs over the next decade. The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, the co-author of the study, calls the president’s approach a plan for bankruptcy.
Robert Rector joins us now. Robert, good to have you with us. I mean this is — it’s an extraordinary amount of money and why is it not in plain view as we look at the budget numbers and what is being proposed?

ROBERT RECTOR, SR. RESEARCH FELLOW, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: This spending is largely hidden, because when you deal with similar programs like Medicare and Social Security, they are a single item in the federal budget. But when you look at aid to the poor, and that’s cash, food, housing and medical care for poor and very low income people, it’s spread out among 71 different programs and 14 different departments and agencies.
So you have to literally go through thousands of pages in the budget to uncover how much we spend on poor people. But when you do that exercise, what you find is that this year, we’re going to spend about $800 billion on poor and low-income people. And it’s about 5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. It’s the third largest category of government spending. Social security and Medicare come first, then public education, then comes aid to the poor or means tested welfare. And we’re now at a record level. Obama is going to increase it by about $300 billion over the next two years. But the increase isn’t temporary. It just goes on and on and on.
DOBBS: Did you say $300 billion over two years?

RECTOR: Yes, that’s the increase over the next two years alone. But then it doesn’t go down after the recession. It continues to remain high. Within a few years, we’re going to be spending $1 trillion a year on this stuff. And I’m not making these numbers up. They come right out of Obama’s budgets. And it’s an astonishing thing. We are marching towards national bankruptcy. He’s piling on half a trillion dollars of debt a year for the foreseeable future. We’re basically mortgaging our children’s future in order to spread the wealth today. And spreading the wealth might be a good idea, but we ought to at least be honest before we start doing even more of it about how much we’re currently spending on the poor.
Our current spending amounts to about $18,000 on assistance to the poor for every single poor person in the United States, every single year.
DOBBS: Say that number again. How much per person? RECTOR: It’s $18,000 for each poor person. That’s the total amount of spending on means tested welfare. Now you could even look at it more broadly, because some of the spending goes to people that are low income, but not necessarily poor. But even if you were to take that, if you were to take this money and spread it out through the bottom one-third of the U.S. population, everybody in the bottom third gets part of this money.

It comes to $28,000 for each family of four down in that bottom third of the population. It’s a huge amount of expenditure and it’s largely untouched, undescribed. When the Census Bureau talks about inequality or measures poverty, guess what? Of this $800 billion of spending, not a — virtually none of it is counted.
When we talk about how much the poor have and how much the rich have, we don’t count the welfare state. They pretend that this doesn’t exist. That’s an insane way to conduct a discussion about public policy.

DOBBS: Insane and insane that we don’t have a discussion of what is being spent in total. $10.3 trillion over the next decade. That is absolutely staggering. $28,000 per family in the lower third of income in this country per year. Again, staggering. And yet, poverty persists. And as you say, there is no acknowledgement of the money that is being redistributed by the federal government to these low-income people in this country.

RECTOR: What you find when you really examine the living standards of lower income people is that they’re doing much better than normal dialogue puts on. For example, if you look at families that census identifies as poor, they have cable and satellite television. What the problem with a lot of this spending…
DOBBS: Robert, I’m going to have to break here. We’re running out our time. And Robert, we thank you for being with us. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation.”

$28,000 TO A ‘POOR’ FAMILY OF FOUR..BUT LITTLE IS COUNTED AS INCOME..SO THE POVERTY PIMPS..WHO DO EXCEEDINGLY WELL IN THE USA…GET RICHER. AND YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A USA CITIZEN TO GET A LOT OF “INCOME TRANFERS” FROM THE :”RICH” TO THE “DESERVING POOR”. THE TRUTH IS THE TRUTH. A LIE IS A LIE. WE HAD BETTER START MAKING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO. AND MICHELLE OBAMA..JUST LIKE ROSYLN CARTER..AND HILLARY CLINTON..WAS ELECTED TO NOTHING. IF SHE WISHES TO MAKE POLICY..LET HER RUN FOR THE SENATE..LIKE HILLARY DID..THEN IT WILL BE FINE. THEN. WHEN SHE IS ELECTED.

marklmail on September 17, 2009 at 8:43 AM