Editor's Note: This is the first in a series about the unprecedented dependence Americans have on their federal government.
NEW YORK – Three years ago, when 44.7 million – or one in seven Americans – were on food stamps, former House Speaker New Gingrich dubbed Barack Obama the "Food Stamp President."
Indeed, the cost of the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has doubled under President Obama's leadership, indicating poverty has continued to grow despite administration claims the U.S. economy is recovering from the depths of the 2007-2008 recession.
The underlying concern is that the United States is transforming from a robust private-enterprise economy capable of achieving "full employment" to an unemployed, under-employed or unemployable population dependent on government programs for survival.
Food-stamp dependency soars
U.S. Department of Agriculture data showed 46.1 million Americans were receiving food stamps as of March 2015, the latest month for which statistics were available. One in five American families were receiving food stamps as compared to the 1970s, when about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps.
In February 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the number of children receiving food stamps remained higher than it was before the start of the recession in 2007, with an estimated 16 million children, fully one in every five in the United States, receiving food stamps. That's up from 9 million children, or one in every eight, prior to the recession.
During Obama's presidency, the cost to the U.S. taxpayer for the food-stamp program has doubled, from $37.6 billion in 2008, the last full year of the presidency of George W. Bush, to $74.1 billion in 2014.
But the program also doubled under Bush, whose term began in 2001 with just over 17 million receiving food stamps.
Still, the Obama administration promotes the idea the U.S. economy is in recovery.
"Tonight, after a breakthrough year for America, our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999," the president said in his Jan. 20 State of the Union address.
"Our unemployment rate is now lower than it was before the financial crisis," he continued. "More of our kids are graduating than ever before. More of our people are insured than ever before. And we are as free from the grip of foreign oil as we've been in almost 30 years."
Poverty and income inequality grow
Despite the trillions of dollars spent in anti-poverty programs since President Lyndon Johnson launched "The Great Society" in 1964, the U.S. under President Obama has just seen the highest spike in poverty since the 1960s, leaving approximately 50 million Americans living below the poverty line, defined as a family of four earning less than $23,021 a year.
As measured by the Census Bureau, median U.S. household income fell for the fifth straight year in 2012, to $51,759. It rose only to $51,939 in 2013, an increase the Census Bureau dismissed as "not statistically different" in real terms from the 2012 median, the lowest annual income adjusted for inflation since 1995. Consequently, income inequality intensified, with the top 5 percent of households earning 22.3 percent of the nation's income in 2012.
Today, there are more Americans on welfare than those working full time, according to Census Bureau statistics. There were 108,592,000 people in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, compared to the 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011, including both private sector and government workers. Some observers, however, consider the comparison unfair, because the welfare numbers include both children and senior citizens who cannot work.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported in October 2013 that nearly half (49.2 percent) of Americans in 2011 were receiving benefits from at least one government program, with 84,457,000 Americans, 26.9 percent of the population, living in households where one or more persons received Medicaid benefits.
The figures indicate money does not solve poverty.
Since Obama took office, the federal government has spent a total of $3.7 trillion on approximately 80 different means-tested poverty and welfare programs, excluding Social Security and Medicare. The sum is nearly five times greater than the federal government spent on NASA, education and all federal transportation projects over that time, according to research reported in 2013 by the GOP members of the Senate Budget Committee.
Prelude of economic and social collapse?
The Heritage Foundation has compiled a set of economic indicators into an "Index of Dependence on Government."
In 2013, the Heritage Foundation reported the index was reaching alarming levels. The percentage of the population paying no federal income taxes remained above 40 percent while the amount of federal spending devoted to dependence programs had risen to nearly 70 percent of total federal spending, including both discretionary and non-discretionary spending.
"America is increasingly moving away from a nation of self-reliant individuals, where civil society flourishes, toward a nation of individuals less inclined to practicing self-reliance and personal responsibility," wrote Heritage Foundation authors David Muhlhausen, Ph.D., and Patrick Tyrrell.
"Government programs not only crowd out civil society, but too frequently trap individuals and families in long-term dependence, leaving them incapable of escaping their condition for generations to come. Rebuilding civil society can rescue these individuals from the government dependence trap," they stressed.
"Virtually no issue so dominates the current public policy debate as the future financial health of the United States," the Heritage Foundation authors continued. "Americans are haunted by the specter of growing mountains of debt that sap the economic and social vitality of the country."
Unfortunately, the economic issues are interrelated, they said.
"The enormous growth in debt is largely driven by dependence-creating government programs," Muhlhausen and Tyrrell continued. "Only the painfully slow labor market recovery garners more attention, and many are beginning to believe that even that sluggishness is tied to the nation's growing burden of publicly held debt."
Related column:
Counterterrorism for July 4: Citizens with guns by Ted Nugent