Comment by akkat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akkat | Hacker News Reader

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> Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans

If you don't include that as "welfare and benefits of the poor" I don't know what you would include. I guess you're right in the sense that only a small portions of ones taxes go to pay people who never worked and never plan on working.

I double checked and you are right that most of SS and medicare go to retired people. They probably aren't considered "poor". Do you know of any unbiased (or low biased) place that counts what percentage of the budget goes to poor people (food stamps, housing projects, extended unemployment benefits, etc.) ?

Things that I would qualify as welfare and benefits for the poor would be things like TANF, SNAP, Section 8, CHIP, Medicaid, etc.

These are things where eligibility is determined primarily based on some criteria that try to determine need rather than based on having paid into the system to fund it.

Social Security is essentially a government run pension. Unemployment and disability benefits are effectively government run insurance programs. The size of payment you receive and your eligibility is based on how much you paid into the system. Medicare is kind of halfway between health insurance and a pension because the premiums are subsidized if you paid into the system earlier in life. Low income people do generally get slightly better payouts proportionally to what they pay in so you could argue that some portion of these programs is a welfare benefit for the poor, but low income people also tend to die earlier, so some have also argued that they are a net transfer from low to high income people.

All the links I see seem to be around 9% of the budget goes to "safety net" programs.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w...

I see.. Thank you for the information. I will have to rethink my take on the US division of taxes

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