Food Stamp Growth: 75X Greater Than Job Growth

- Friday, November 2nd, 2012

According to Republicans in the Senate Budget Committee, statistics prove that food stamp growth is an astonishing 75 times greater than job creation since January 2009.

Data was compiled from the Social Security Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Agriculture.

The chart above reveals that approximately 194,00 new jobs have been created since that January of 2009. However, a shocking 14.7 million became new recipients of food stamps in that same time period. The Congressional Budget Office reported that the number of food stamp recipients increased 70% since from 2007 to 2011; and the number of recipients has only continued to rise throughout 2012. This news is disappointing at best...

How are we ever going to recover from this recession and get people back to work when we're spending so much time and energy on welfare benefits that often enable dependency instead of motivating our workforce into sustainable business via innovation and creation?

These numbers prove that this problem is growing faster than anyone anticipated. Entitlement and benefit costs are exponentally rising while job growth is pitifully stagnant.

In fact, another chart from the same minority group from the Senate Budget Committee reveals another gravely concerning chart reflecting enrollment in food stamps, Medicaid, and disability... enrollment in all of these programs severely overwhelms and outpaces job growth.

Take a look for yourself:

Right now, only about 133.76 million Americans are fortunate enough to hold full-time jobs. However, a staggering 46.8 million rely on food stamps to survive. Looking at these two numbers we can see how slowly employment payrolls are growing and how sharply food stamp enrollment is rising.

Since the start of 2009, employment as grown about 0.15 percent while food stamp rolls have expanded by an alarming 46 percent.

That being said, for every American who landed a job in the past four years, another 75 Americans landed a reliance on food stamps instead.

This is unacceptable for “the greatest country on earth.” And worse yet, the trend isn't expected to subside anytime soon. Welfare spending is only projected to climb from here on out; at no point in the next ten years will fewer than 1 in 9 Americans receive food stamps.

Of course our welfare system is in place for good reason – but we simply can't sustain these bad, abusive habits when our gross federal debt has increased 53 percent in just four years' time. We need to get Americans back to work and off food stamps... and we need to remedy this costly problem fast.

Otherwise, this problem will only push us closer to the ominous fiscal cliff looming ahead.

*Source: The Weekly Standard