Without the government safety net, the poverty rate would be almost double what it is now:
From House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicare-ending budget plan tomultiple proposals from the GOP’s presidential candidates, conservatives have sought to extract massive cuts from important programs, even while supplying the wealthiest Americans with massive tax cuts.
But Americans continue to rely heavily on safety net programs to stay afloat, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). Without the permanent safety net programs (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various assistance programs) and temporary programs included in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (which Republicans have falsely claimed didn’t work), more than a quarter of the country’s population would have fallen beneath the poverty line in 2010, CBPP says:
Our report also shows that if the government safety net as a whole — these temporary initiatives (all were featured in the 2009 Recovery Act) plus safety-net policies already in place when the recession hit — hadn’t existed in 2010, the poverty rate would have been 28.6 percent, nearly twice the actual 15.5 percent.
Yet and still the Republicans get lots of support from people with little wealth who should know better? Fear of Socialism is a powerful weapon wielded expertly by conservative propagandists.
yeah, but being poor isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be, so there is always more room to shove people down to the bottom. If you think that you are poor now, you ain’t seen what really being poor can be. You got a TV? Wait till you got a dirt floor and a coal stove.