> America is a lot more poor than these statistics let on when compared to the rest of the first world.
Source?
Source?
When you measure that, the poorest 20% of Americans have a superior level of welfare to the average person in most OECD countries.
You can see on table 6.5 in the study linked below that lowest quintile households (by income) consumed an average of $57,049 goods and services per household, which is just under $22k per person. Putting the lowest 20% of the US in the top half of OECD countries for that year.
The US spends more on its social welfare programs, as a share of GDP, than Canada does, and it matches what Australia and Switzerland are spending. The US is close to the OECD middle and a bit behind the UK (OECD figures below):
https://i.imgur.com/5GnDdTp.png
And when it comes to improvements in poverty thanks to our vastly expanded social safety net, you can see that very strikingly represented when you drop out those programs from the calculations (childhood poverty shown below, with and without government aid):
https://i.imgur.com/hqTS3Ck.png
https://i.imgur.com/9aEi2sL.png
The same thing shows up in our homelessness improvement figures from the past 20 years. The housing first program implemented by the Bush Administration and sustained by the Obama Administration - aka a government program - was almost solely responsible for the huge decrease in US homelessness.
The US social safety net has expanded rather massively in the past 40 years. Structurally the biggest problem the US has when it comes to its social safety net, is it's all haphazard and often poorly administered. The US isn't very good at running social safety nets, it's chaotic and critical parts of it are managed in very different ways state to state. We're not getting enough bang for our buck on that spending, we need to do better. We're spending a lot of money and the results are often not good enough (which we frequently see with government spending in the US). For example, if the US were spending per capita on our healthcare system what the UK is, we could nearly double - maybe up to 40%-45% - the number of people we're covering with free healthcare at minimal additional cost.
US GDP is 21 trillion, social program spending is under a trillion.
Social expenditures are here: http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2016-Social-Expenditure-Upda...
As defined by the OECD, social program spending includes social security, Medicare, and education (each of which are $700-900 billion expenses).
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted.
Typically, when someone is complaining about the lack of a social safety net in the US, they mean in terms of services received, rather than money spent.
As the above quote shows, you obviously know that because of various insane inefficiencies (often caused or abetted by perverse incentives at the interface between the public and private sectors) the point you're making of how much is spent in terms of % of GDP doesn't actually refute the complaints (about how little is being done for those in need) that you are objecting to.
So. We spend a heck of a lot, and we don't have a decent social safety net.
It's also worth noting that where social safety net programs are being poorly run by the government, this can sometimes be traced to politically motivated shenanigans and deliberate mismanagement.