Are you still thinking of that $548 billion that goes to the Department of Defense (DOD) with its 652,000 non-military employees paid from federal funds that come from taxes (that’s 32.6% of the Federal Government workforce), while the Department of Education (DOE) has only two-tenths [2/10] of one percent of the federal work force.
One thing we can bet on for sure, we will seldom hear complaints or these facts from a conservative source such as the Tea Party or conservative talk radio hosts such as Dennis Prager.
One example would be what Dennis Prager wrote at Townhall.com in “The Welfare State and the Selfish Society”.
In Prager’s essay, nowhere does he mention the number of people in the federal government that work for the DOD, the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Justice that combined add up to almost half of the federal work force and the largest combined slice of the federal budget pie dwarfing any so-called entitlement programs that help America’s most needy citizens to survive and thrive.
Entitlement Epidemic, Spoiled Rotten, People and Government
It appears that supporting wars, prisons and death is more important to conservatives such as Dennis Prager than offering help to Americans that need it to survive and live another day without hunger or shelter.
In fact, are minimum-wage jobs without health care benefits enough to survive on?
Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday September 13, 2011, the nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010, up from 14.3% (approximately 43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993.
Entitlement programs that people such as Prager complain about mostly help the unemployed and those living in poverty but do not offer to support these Americans without any effort from the individual who needs help.
In many cases, those people may be working low-paying jobs such as companies like Wal-Mart or fast-food outlets offer. In fact, many fast-food outlets works its people twenty or less hours a week to avoid funding federal entitlement programs such as money used for unemployment benefits.
In other words, in a purely capitalist society without any social programs or safety net (what conservatives have tagged as selfish entitlement programs), if you cannot pay your own way, starve and die but do it out of sight and don’t bother us.
Return to The US Federal Government – How BIG is “big”? – Part 3 or start with Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 
Barbara
November 14, 2011 at 18:12
This is somewhat off topic but wasn’t sure where else to put it: I belong to kind of a study group and noticed you worked @ Nogales 1975-2005. Did you work with a fellow teacher Angela Suleman (French Teacher) or remember her daughter Natalie Doud who is believed to have graduated in 1993? (AKA “Octomom). We are trying to fill in gaps in their family’s timeline. Angela received her teaching credential in 1971. Do you recall anything else about them? Very few people seem to remember except a few classmates of “Natalie”.
Thanks
Lloyd Lofthouse
November 14, 2011 at 18:52
Barbara,
I didn’t always teach at Nogales. In the 1980s, I taught at two of the Intermediate schools (first at Giano) and Natalie was a student of mine in 8th grade at Alvarado Intermediate (I think sometime between 1986 to 1989). She was a GATE student and very bright. Then when I taught at Nogales, yes, I worked at the school when Angela Suleman was there, we talked and I knew she taught French.