blackaeronaut Wrote:Ayiekie, just because you lived 'on the other side of the fence' does not mean you know what's going on here. Until you've actually lived in a US city that is having these problems, then everything you have to say is based on hearsay unless you can present some concrete data to back it up.You asserted that legions of welfare moms too lazy to work who are stealing your taxes exist. The fact the U.S. pays a lot on welfare and also has a high violent crime rate are, to say the least, extremely tangential to that point. Other countries with far better social safety nets than the U.S. also, by and large, have far lower crime rates (see Sweden, Canada, France, etc, etc). Those with worse social safety nets (see Russia, Brazil, etc.) have higher crime rates. So, even given it has nothing to do with what you originally asserted, the point your graphs make is not at all the one you want them to make.
For my part, here's my concrete data. Sources are http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ and http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/
Here's one for defense spending (a frequent target of yours) vs. welfare spending. Remarkable, isn't it? On average, the welfare budget has always been about half of what our defense budget is. And considering how big the defense budget is, that is no small chunk of change.
Now, contrast that with the following graph.
Uh-yup. That welfare system of ours sure is turning out some mighty fine citizens, ain't it?
Incidentally, in the U.S., actual welfare benefits have been declining steadily since it's peak in the late 1970s (see: http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/indicators08/apa.shtml , graph TANF2). This coincides very nicely with the high rise in crime on your own graph. It is currently plateaued at a lower point than welfare benefits in 1960. Violent crime, by your own graph, is over four times what it was in 1960, though still much lower than it was in the Reagan-Bush I years.
The US spends less on welfare than virtually any other first world state other than Japan and South Korea (19.4% of GDP including education, versus 23.1% for Canada, 22.5% for Australia, 33.2% for Germany, 34.9% for France, 38.2% for Sweden, etc), so looking at it in absolute dollar terms isn't really helpful for grasping the state of U.S. welfare. Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Germany, France, the Switzerland, Canada, Belgium and the United Kingdom all have lower percentages of their population beneath the poverty line than the US. Australia (barely) and Italy have higher percentages of the population below the poverty line. Many studies have shown that there is no correlation between welfare spending and overall economic performance or social development.