Myth Buster

So, this guy wrote an editorial to my local paper, The Newnan Times Herald, making some pretty typical conservatives claims. I took the opportunity to correct him and wrote a letter in response that gave statistics (from the real world) to back up my claims. My rebuttal has not been printed and I don't know that it will be printed at all...and if it is, I don't know that it will be printed in it's entirety. In my response I cited the sources of my stats and also gave this blog address as a place readers could find a link to those stats. Whether or not my blog address can be printed or not (it contains the world "ass") is unknown as well, however, the stats are good ones and below I will give them with a little context, too.

One claim the author of the letter made was that most of the tax money that goes to government programs that provide money and services (welfare) to poor people comes from the middle and working class. This however is not true. According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, the top 10% of income earners paid 68% of all federal taxes and that the top 11-25% paid another 17%. That's the "lion's share" of all federal taxes. http://www.heritage.org/research/features/BudgetChartBook/charts_T/t4.cfm

The next claim he made, that I addressed, was kind of crazy. Though it was crazy it has a lot of traction with people where I live. He claimed that half the U.S. population works and that this working half supports another half that doesn't work at all. This is way, way, way off the mark, but he wrote it in all sincerity. Right now, the unemployment rate is about 5%. it's been that way for quite a while and has never gotten anywhere near 50% in recent history (the last 60 years).http://www.heritage.org/research/features/BudgetChartBook/charts_T/t4.cfm

In the same vein as the last point, I went on to show that approximately .65% (a little more than half of one percent) is all that was spent of the entire federal budget on TANF (Temporary Assistants to Needy Families; our "welfare" agency that was formerly AFDC) in 2006. I went on to say that the vast majority of "welfare" goes to the elderly, the disabled, and children, not people not willing to work.http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/RS22385.pdf (page 4).

This are all fairly popular myths among conservatives and I don't like to turn down the chance to dispel them, so, I tried!