As everybody knows, it's the poor people who are killing the damned country. Take away those welfare programs, we'd erase the national deficit overnight. Take away all those welfare deadbeats, we'd bring the country back to greatness.
Everybody knows this, or at least attempts to cash in on it. Phil Gramm, announcing his run for president, says he wants welfare frauds to get off the wagon and pull their own weight. Newt Gingrich, asked about food entitlements for kids, declares, "It doesn't say anywhere in the Declaration of Independence . . . that anyone's entitled to anything except the right to pursue happiness."
All over Capitol Hill, the nation's great thinkers sense a mood in the land, and look for ways to overhaul welfare and cut taxes and, not coincidentally, win votes. Except: What taxes? And what votes?
The new issue of Harper's magazine carries a fascinating little statistic. The average amount an American taxpayer spent on welfare last year, it says, was $26.
Not $2,600, nor even $260.
$26.
The figure, it turns out, comes from a study of poverty by Washington's Center for the Study of Policy Attitudes. Yesterday Steven Krull, president of the center, explained, "What's clear is that Americans greatly overestimate what is spent on bureaucracy and fraud. They think 31 percent of welfare money benefits the needy, and the rest is wasted. And yet, what's striking is that, even with that misperception, a strong majority still wants to increase spending."
How strong a majority? When told that the federal poverty line is $14,763 for a family of four, 58 percent thought it should be set higher, while 7 percent thought it should be lowered.
How misguided are Americans' welfare misperceptions? Asked, "How much do you imagine an average family with a single mother and two children on welfare receives each month?" the average response was $685. In fact, the national average for combined state and federal welfare payments is $366 a month.
Asked if the government "has a responsibility to try to do away with poverty in this country," 87 percent of Democrats agreed. So did 68 percent of Republicans. And 75 percent of white men, allegedly leading the charge to a leaner and meaner fiscal America, agreed.
But Washington now wishes to shift welfare responsibilities from the federal government to the states, and cut spending to the bone.
4 Spending which comes to $26 a year per taxpayer.
"Actually, $26 sounds a little low," says Sue Fitzsimmons, Baltimore City Department of Social Services spokeswoman. "But not by much."
Meanwhile, shall we talk about defense spending? Lawrence J. Korb is. He was assistant secretary of defense for Ronald Reagan. In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, in a piece titled, "The Readiness Gap. What Gap?" he writes:
"Today the U.S. spends more than six times as much on defense as its closest rival, and almost as much on national security as the rest of the world combined. . . . The Pentagon now spends more on readiness than it did in the Reagan and Bush administrations, when readiness hit all-time highs."
Such spending, Korb writes, allows the Pentagon "to serve its political agenda -- to maintain the cold war status quo . . . to contain a nonexistent Soviet empire. The 'nonpolitical' admirals and generals running the military are taking all of us to the cleaners, snatching up precious dollars to defend against a threat that no longer exists."
Somehow, though, we don't think of this as welfare, nor even as spending on deadbeats. The deadbeats are the poor. They're costing us $26 per taxpayer. Per year.
Yea, Newt. Yeah, Phil. You tell 'em about those poor people who are running up the debts and killing the whole damned country. You'll get us out of debt. Everybody can't wait.