Running head: THE CITIZENS WAR

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The Citizens War: How Private Charities Can Help Eliminate Poverty
Steven Myers
BYU - Idaho

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Abstract

Myers delves into the controversial welfare argument from a perspective promoting a marketbased private charity system in favor of the current government social welfare state. He proposes
that the federal government change its role from welfare control to welfare facilitation, providing
grants and regulations to assist private welfare companies in expansion in lieu of expanding
nationalized social welfare. He cites from, analyzes, and combines United States public records,
journal articles, a newspaper, the website of a successful private charity organization and their
financial audit and reports, and the CEE to show the benefits of changing the welfare system to a
primarily privatized market, and illustrates how private charities fill the holes caused by
weaknesses in the federal welfare system in terms of preventing corruption in government
positions, individual attention and positive attitude effects among donors, volunteers, and
recipients, and both financial and empirical effectiveness at treating and rehabilitating those in
need.

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The Citizens War: How Private Charities Can Help Eliminate Poverty
The Army had a saying: We cant make you do anything, but we can make you wish you
had (Ambrose, 1992).
World War II, the most destructive war in human history, killed between sixty and eighty
million people from 1939 to 1945 (The National WWII Museum, 2016). Nineteen years later,
President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a new kind of war, an unconditional war on poverty. In
doing so, he defined a new precedent for treatment of the impoverished in America, and in their
wake, dozens of federally controlled programs sprouted, each designed to provide assistance and
meet the basic needs of those unable to provide for themselves. Not everyone has approved of
these developments, however, and welfare has since evolved into a controversial and highly
divisive topic on the debate floors in our government halls. John C. Goodman (1987), founder
and president of the Goodman Institute for Policy Research, and former presiding founder of the
National Center for Policy Analysis, observes that though the Government does meet the needs
of its welfare recipients, some among these beneficiaries choose to remain in poverty and
continue receiving Government benefits instead of using these advantages to improve their lives
circumstances. Others, including Sanford F. Schram and Paul H. Wilken (1989), argue to the
contrary, that analysts continue to blame the victim or blame the program when explaining
poverty, and suggest that increasing welfare spending doesnt cause poverty more than it
alleviates it. The agendas behind each argument vary greatly, with many at odds over the balance
between the Federal Governments power and the ability to satisfy the national-scale needs of the
people. Almost every voice in the debate, however, stresses a single point: welfare needs reform.
While the majority of opinions rest on matters of internal policy to improve the efficiency of the
welfare state, such as budget changes or program additions, few consider returning to the

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foundation that President Johnson (1964) laid, to focus on povertys causes instead of its
symptoms. Even fewer have considered replacing the current federal welfare state with a marketbased welfare economy with the effects of private charities becoming paramount in caring for the
American impoverished. When examined, however, private charity organizations are found to
satisfy the aforementioned concerns of all parties, and this is because they act outside of direct
government control, thereby balancing federal power over welfare dependents and reducing the
risk of corruption, they positively affect the attitudes and unity of the general citizenry by
involving them in caring for one another, and, most importantly, private charity has better results
in terms of both cost and trueness to President Johnsons welfare foundation.
The parallels between expanded social welfare and government corruption lie in its
strong relationship with the private property rights of citizens. Concise Encyclopedia of
Economics contributor and emeritus UCLA economy professor Armen A. Alchian (2008) states
in his entry on property rights that the foundation of private property consists of three things,
(1) exclusivity of rights to choose the use of a resource, (2) exclusivity of rights to the services
of a resource, and (3) rights to exchange the resource at mutually agreeable terms, and
continues by stating the shared belief among many economists, including himself, that most
infringements on property rights are detrimental to society. Goodman (2008) states that [the
government] has put itself in the position of being the exclusive recipient of charitable
contributions taken by coercion (through the tax system) and of having sole discretion over how
these dollars are spent. By the action of setting itself up as the lone recipient of welfare
contributions, the United States Government has claimed exclusive rights of choice over the
distribution of these monies, and exclusivity of rights over welfare services, and thus greatly
diminished the private property rights of its citizens. Recipients of these services are crippled by

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their being at the mercy of a single groups judgment for care, and contributors are crippled in
their ability to do with free conscience what they believe to be right with the money they earn, in
terms of charity or otherwise. With this increased power to the central government comes an
increased risk of corruption among those in seats of power.
An example of this risk can be seen in statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services. According to their site, 3.2% of Americans between the ages of 16 and 64
receive more than half of their income from TANF, SSI, and food stamps, three of the primary
government benefit programs (2008). Regardless of the reasons that each of the people in this
group are in the positions they are, the fact that they rely heavily on the government for food and
other necessities makes them vulnerable targets of corruption. Allowing the United States
Government to nationalize a welfare system and become the primary provider of basic human
necessities to these people, almost all of whom are of the age to vote, gives a relatively small
handful of government workers and officials a potentially oppressive concentration of power
over the lives of these individuals, which can be used to coerce their votes to enact policies that
stand against their consciences. Because of the volatile and highly exploitable nature of this
system, government welfare is not only a suboptimal approach in combating poverty; its also
unethical. An easy way to address this situation is to shift the governments role in welfare from
that of primary benefactor to facilitator. Private charity organizations fill in the gaps that such a
change would make, because they are independent entities from the government and would act
outside of government control. An objector would have two main concerns with this approach.
First, private charity organizations often rely on the charitable donations of individuals in order
to fund the operational costs of their service, and there simply may not be the sheer means
available in order for smaller charities to combat and eliminate poverty on a national scale.

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Second, private charity organizations, as non-profit organizations, can be just as prone to

corruption as the government itself, so the situation may not be improved by such a drastic
change. These are the concerns that the government should seek to address. According to Adam
Smith, the leading expositor of economic thought, the responsibilities to enforce contracts and
provide the infrastructure to facilitate exchange between parties fall under the natural role of the
government in a free market (Adam Smith, 2008). If corruption is noticed in a private charity
organization, they can be reported to federal regulators, audited, and prosecuted for their
indiscretions. Government grants to private charity organizations can help them obtain the
structure they need to begin and continue service to the people. Government awards give
recognition to organizations who serve the people in outstanding ways. Each of these ensures
that private charity service remains a viable, relevant, and ethical approach to treating the
impoverished with the support they need.
When considering the needs of those in poverty, many think back to remember occasions
during which they stepped out of their way to help a fellow human being, and how they
themselves were affected by the good deeds they rendered as much as those whom they helped
were. When volunteer service and donations given on the individual level enter the equation,
changes begin to develop in the attitudes of everyone involved, both volunteers and recipients
alike. Michael Tanner (1997), director of health and welfare studies for the CATO institute,
illustrated it thus in The Baltimore Sun:
There is no compassion in spending someone else's moneyeven for a good cause. True
compassion depends on personal involvement. Thus private charity is ennobling for
everyone involved, both those who give and those who receive. Government welfare
ennobles no one (para. 11-12).

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Giving welfare control to the government doesnt only impersonalize the way welfare is
perceived by people, but additionally expresses the thought that people no longer care enough to
become personally involved in actively helping each other through hard times, and instead see
the benefit of spending their own means towards self-interested motivations. This is a generally
accepted theoretical argument in favor of the government taxing its citizens for the relief of
poverty (Goodman, 1987), and it may even have been the primary motivation behind the
development of the government welfare system in the first place. That does not mean, though,
that a state welfare system is the best approach. On the contrary, it is the very nature of
government welfare as the alternative to active personal charity that it cannot be the best
approach in caring for the needy. Ezra Taft Benson (1977), former United States cabinet member
and President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stated:
Americans have always been committed to taking care of the poor, aged, and
unemployed. We have done this on the basis of Judaic-Christian beliefs and humanitarian
principles. It has been fundamental to our way of life that charity must be voluntary if it
is to be charity. Compulsory benevolence is not charity.
Benson and Tanner say nearly the same thing in their statements, despite the twenty-year gap in
their addresses. The differences come in the specific principles that they stress. While Tanner
speaks of the ennobling power of private charity, Benson says directly that charity is not possible
unless a benefactor is freely volunteering their own means. By this definition, it is impossible to
have real charity when the government mandates benevolence through the tax system. One issue
that demonstrates this is that those who surrender taxes towards welfare and those who receive
these government benefits rarely interact with each other outside of compulsory check-signing
(Tanner, 1997). Because of this, the attitude of these groups towards each other is often cynical

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and doesnt represent well the intentions, personalities, or emotions of the people on the other
side of the transaction. It is an enormous strength of private charities that they require and accept
volunteer work from anyone to help those in need. The fact that they do this bridges the gap
between people of all different backgrounds, lifestyles, and social statuses, and brings humanity
back into charity. Private charity creates a scenario in which class distinctions can be brought
to reconciliation and the masks and constructs that societys cliques make for each other fall
apart, leading to more caring, open-minded, and responsible citizens, and a more unified society,
which all indicate a positively affected attitude towards charity.
The strengthened resolve of the general citizenry isnt only an indicator of the effect that
private charities have on the donors and recipients psychologically, but also a natural
consequence to the greatest strength of private charity organizations, that theyre simply more
effective than government programs, in both cost and in positive results. To be specific, this
means that they do a better job at treating the causes of poverty, and not just the symptoms.
Consider the following from President Johnsons 1964 State of the Union Address:
Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The
cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop
their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and
housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children
(1964).
Johnsons original intentions in declaring this war on poverty are unmistakably clear: he wants
everyone to have a fair chance to develop their own capacities, he wants education, training,
medical care and housing made available, he wants citizens to have decent communities for their
families, and he asserts firmly that the lack of these goods and services are the underlying causes

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of poverty. Because of his statements, an enormous number of government agencies and

programs now serve the needs of the poor at a premium to American taxpayers. The Federal
safety net, as stated by Robert Rector in his Testimony before Committee on the Budget to
the U.S. House of Representatives, is made of three basic parts, which are (1) Social Security and
Medicare, (2) unemployment and workers compensation benefits, and (3) means-tested antipoverty programs (2012). The Governments means-tested programs now number 79, providing
comprehensive food, housing, education, and medical benefits for the disadvantaged American.
This sounds like true progress until it is considered in light of its annual cost. The fiscal year of
2011 saw a total of $927 billion spent on means-tested aid alone (the whole budget is $2.3
trillion), with the Obama administration projecting the means-tested budget to increase to $1.57
trillion by 2022 (Rector, 2012). This action raises a significant critical question: why must there
be such aggressive expansion of welfare, when, as Rector put it, the current welfare spending, if
converted directly into a cash benefit, is already enough to put every household in the U.S. above
the poverty level twice over (2012)? Some may say that it is the number of impoverished people
growing, and they would be partially correct. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of people in
poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (2010), has increased from 33,899,812 to
44,852,527, a 32.3% growth in ten years, but this does not match the projected growth of 69.4%
for the means-tested budget over the same length of time (Rector, 2012). Therefore, strictly in the
context of welfare (though there are certainly other unknown factors to take into account), the
only answer to this question that matches the numbers is that though the needs President Johnson
highlighted as povertys causes may be accurate, the current method of serving those needs is not
effective at helping the impoverished rise out of their condition and become contributing

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members of society, and those proposing to expand these methods are trying desperately to solve
the problem of poverty by throwing more and more money at it.
There are better solutions. The Doe Funds Ready, Willing, & Able (RWA) program in
New York City is an example of a private charity operation on a scale large enough to compare
proportionally to the current government welfare system. According to their website, they spent a
total of $48.5 million serving a few more than two thousand unique homeless or parolee men
through six locations in 2014, providing housing, food, drug relapse prevention, career
development, social services, job placement, and occupational, educational, and life skills
training, which effectively mirrors 69 of the 79 means-tested welfare programs that Rector
outlines in his testimony (The Doe Fund, 2016; Rector, 2012). What makes this program
different from government welfare are the results. While the results of means-tested welfare
programs are indecisive, with only claims of help or hurt to quantify it, a defined 56% of the
RWA programs participants in 2015 graduated from the program with full-time, permanent
employment, independent housing, and lasting sobriety (The Doe Fund, 2016).
Opponents may argue that $48.5 million for around 2000 people costs $24,250 per
person, which is substantially more than the result of the $927 billion means-tested budget
(Rector, 2012) being divided among 45 million people in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010),
$20,600. However, the portion of the RWA programs 2014 budget that came from the federal
government was in the form of grants awarded to the equivalent of $5 million, which equates to a
microscopic $2500 per person in taxpayer money. For those in favor of welfare expansion, its
essential to note that the converted cash benefit of this private charity per participant, which
came at a fraction of the taxpayer cost, is greater than the converted cash benefit of all the
means-tested benefits per person combined. By supporting charities such as RWA, welfare

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benefits to the needy actually expand, even when compared to the trillion-dollar budget that
federal welfare is running on, while costs still decrease. This is an obvious win-win situation in
results for welfare reform, both for those who want to see benefits to the poor increase and those
who want to see taxpayer costs for welfare decrease.
Another big objection, as mentioned before, is that individual Americans wont be willing
enough to provide the monetary support for private charity organizations on a nationwide scale.
This argument is not without merit. In RWA, a total of $13.2 million of the programs 2014
budget came from individual donors (The Doe Fund, 2016). Though this is significant for the
budget of RWA, when compared with the 8.4 million people living in New York City, its slightly
more than if each person donated $1.50, a pittance compared to the peoples potential to donate
and serve their fellow citizens. The beauty of the system, however, is that the RWA continues to
thrive in the urban region and provide almost $50 million per year to the support of the needy
(The Doe Fund, 2016). This is because the organization, though non-profit, runs as a business
would, continually acquiring opportunities and finding ways to creatively use those chances to
serve the needs of the people. An example of this is in their use of social service contracts. In
2014, RWA earned $19 million by undertaking social service ventures in city beautification, pest
control, and culinary services, and using them to provide relevant on-the-job training for
participants (The Doe Fund, 2016). 100 percent of those earnings went into paying the
operational costs for taking care of those enrolled in their program (The Doe Fund, 2016).
Additionally, a third party cost-benefit analysis of the program by Dr. Josefina V. Tranfa-Abboud
(2012) indicates that the RWA program runs almost entirely on its own funding, showing the
actual net cost of the program to be closer to $21 million per year, with the added benefit of

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reducing federal prison costs by reducing recidivism, or relapses by individuals into criminal
behavior, in its participants, another testament to its effectiveness over federal aid.
Finally, an objector may claim that a 56% success rate, an exceptional achievement for a
population dealing with long histories of homelessness, incarceration, substance abuse, low
educational achievement, and little to no professional experience, cant be replicated in other
parts of the country (The Doe Fund, 2016). Though this may be true for non-urban areas
without large quantities of people and without a large demand for social service, if the federal
government can shift allocation of funds from its own welfare programs to expand its grant
availability and non-profit organization support, programs built on philosophical principles
similar to those implemented in RWA can be permanently supported to provide individualized
housing, care, training, and true welfare to every needy individual in the United States, not only
its citizens, at a fraction of the budget currently levied by government programs.
Private charities balance the power of the Federal Government over the votes of welfare
beneficiaries, they teach volunteers, donors, and recipients the discernible good that an attitude
of true charity does for everyone involved, and they are more effective than their comparable
government counterparts. This makes a market system based around facilitating the growth and
development of private charity organizations an option unequaled in its ethicality, its ability to
unify an increasingly cracked American society, and its results in the lives of every individual it
reaches.
At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong,
and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and
won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful
(Ambrose, 2003).

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War has changed. Long gone are the cavalry charges, and the crowns and the empires and
the holy swords. Long gone are the kings and queens, and the knights and the armor and the
honor. We know war for what it is: ugly, and sorrowful, and merciless. It will consume and
destroy anything it can reach. But in the war on poverty, the Citizens War, we can work to make
the effects a little less ugly for its victims, and the cause a little more pure for its champions.
Supporting private charities, and creating a government system that increases the incentive of
private charity organizations to tailor individual care to our poor and cultivate active personal
charity in each member of our communities, is the ideal way by which we may see an end to
poverty in our fracturing nation, and heal not only the starving bodies of our children, but the
starving hearts of our society. The power is within each of us to lift and bear the legacy of
sacrifice our soldier forefathers built and effect change in the lives and futures of both the living,
and countless unborn. The choice to do so begins, sincerely and wholly, with you.

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References

"Adam Smith." The Concise encyclopedia of economics. 2008. Library of Economics and
Liberty. Retrieved from: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Smith.html
Armen A. Alchian. "Property Rights." The Concise encyclopedia of economics. 2008. Library of
Economics and Liberty. Retrieved from
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PropertyRights.html
Alchian briefly defines what property rights are, and what they mean to governments and
citizens. He further declares their importance to a capitalist economic society, and
explains the devastating effects of reducing them too greatly or abolishing them. He is an
emeritus professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has
made significant scientific contributions to the economics of property rights. This article
is used as an entry in David R. Hendersons Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2008),
highly acclaimed as the gold standard for basic economic science references. Its relevant
when discussing the way that government welfare has affected the property rights of
American citizens.
Ambrose, S. E. (1992). Band of brothers: e company, 506th regiment, 101st airborne : from
normandy to hitler's eagle's nest. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Ambrose, S. E. (2003). To america: Personal reflections of an historian. New York, NY: Simon
& Schuster.
Benson, E. T. A vision and a hope for the youth of zion. Retrieved from
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/ezra-taft-benson_vision-hope-youth-zion/
Ezra Taft Benson was Secretary of Agriculture to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and
served as a long-time leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, becoming

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the President of the Church a few years before his death. In the Church, he was the
primary supervisor for the distribution of goods and welfare supplies throughout
Germany and in parts of Poland. He had an extensive welfare background both in the
Church and during his political service, and, though controversial at times, is both well
sourced and methodical in this speech, originally given as an address to students at
Brigham Young University in 1977. Its relevance is in relation to the attitude that
personal charity requires of a benefactor.
The doe fund. (2016). Retrieved from http://www.doe.org/index.cfm
The Doe Fund is the official web page index for The Doe Fund, the organization
responsible for the Ready, Willing, & Able program in New York City. Its various pages
document its methods, facilities, leaders, and financial reports, and feature the stories of
individuals, all either homeless or formerly convicted men, who successfully used the
program to lift themselves out of poverty and begin making lives for themselves. The
information I used comes from either the FAQ page, the Financial Reports page, or the
2015 Annual Report page, and is purely factual evidence drawn directly from them. Their
finances are verified by a third-party CPA, their success stories are well-documented, and
their participants presence in social service contracts as The Blue Men are well known
to the city of New York, therefore I see no reason not to trust the information they host
on their page.
Goodman, J. C. (1987). Privatizing the welfare state. Proceedings of the Academy of Political
Science, 36(3), 36-48. doi:10.2307/1174095
John C. Goodman was the founding president of the National Center for Policy Analysis,
the current president of the Goodman Institute for Policy Research, and a published

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author with an extensive background in the economics of healthcare. In this article, he

uses a series of documented studies to demonstrate numerous problems in the methods
used by the federal government to furnish welfare for its citizens. He then illustrates
some of the successes of private charities in reducing problems that the current federal
welfare system has perpetuated, and points out the obstacles that prevent private charity
from expanding in the United States. His approach is deliberate and methodical, and he is
very well-sourced. So well, in fact, that even though one of his sources is attacked and
debatably disproven by Schram and Wilkens Its No Laffer Matter, his arguments
remain primarily valid and his good intentions are apparent to readers. As a proponent of
private charity, his article is one of the most relevant sources for my argument.
Johnson, L. B."Annual message to the conference on the state of the union.," January 8, 1964.
Retrieved from http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=26787
Lyndon B. Johnsons 1964 State of the Union address was the first public presidential speech
made in the United States outlining an executive plan to combat poverty with the goal of
eliminating it from the lives of its citizens. He uses the iconic words war on poverty to
summarize his projected action. He states what his administration believes to be the
causes of poverty, and how he intends to combat them. He follows with the benefits that
the programs he proposes will render for the American citizenry as a whole, and that the
benefits will be available to American citizens regardless of race. He closes by promoting
the faith of Americans in each other to care for their neighbors. Johnson is the President
of the United States making official executive statements in a logical manner, and
because of this, I find this official statement to congress rhetorically reliable. I draw

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factual quotes from his speech to show his intent in making the speech itself, and to base
the title and theme of the essay on.
The national WWII museum. (2016). Retrieved from
http://www.nationalww2museum.org/index.html
Rector, R. (2012). Examining the means - tested welfare state: 79 programs and $927 billion in
annual spending. Retrieved from
http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/rectortestimony04172012.pdf
Robert Rector is a Senior Research Fellow for Family & Welfare Studies in the Heritage
Foundation, but gives an independent testimony to the House of Representatives that the
governments welfare spending allocation is simply too high to remain sustainable. His
document is almost exhaustively well-researched, digging deeply into research on all 79
means-tested benefit programs and into the Obama administrations budget projections.
All of that research work is tabled and documented after the conclusion of his testimony,
and it is comprehensive of the full amount of government spending on welfare. The
strength of his research work and the strong logical argument he puts forth lead me to
believe the document is reliable.
Schram, S. F., & Wilken, P. H. (1989). It's no 'laffer' matter: Claim that increasing welfare aid
breeds poverty and dependence fails statistical test. The American Journal of Economics
and Sociology, 48(2), 203-217.
Sanford Schram, Ph.D., is associate professor of political science, and Paul H. Wilken, Ph. D., is
director of institutional research, at the State University of New York College at
Potsdam. Their article focuses primarily on rebutting a study made by Lowell Gallaway
and Richard Vedder claiming that poverty spending beyond a certain point actually

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increases the poverty level in the United States. They highlight factors that were
overlooked, problems in what were then current means of observation and measurement,
and issues in the function that Gallaway and Vedder produced to represent the correlation
between poverty spending and poverty rates in their statistics, dismissing the study as one
of blaming the program in the scope of welfare. The citations are many and relevant to
their case, and their logical insight on Gallaway and Vedders work is both valid and
sound. The relevance of their work comes by its being a model example of an objection
to my argument. They suggest that welfare spending does not increase poverty by their
article, suggesting that there is not a problem with the current system of federal welfare
programs, and that expanding government welfare spending will not be detrimental to the
health of the nation, instead bringing quantity and quality of government service to the
impoverished.
Tanner, M. (1997). Why private charity works better. Retrieved from
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-07-02/news/1997183108_1_ministry-governmentwelfare-private-contributions
Michael Tanner promotes private charity in his article by recognizing Gospel Rescue Ministries,
a successful private charity organization, as an example of the good that private charity
can do in comparison to the results and effects of government-based welfare. He
highlights that private charities give individual attention to their subjects, that they focus
more on helping the people to become self-reliant than government programs do, and that
they change the attitudes of those involved towards each other, themselves, and the
charity system itself. His sources are not cited traditionally, but that is to be expected of
its medium (its a newspaper article). However, he does cite a handful of sources to back

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up his claims, has strong logical arguments, and is highly qualified to be writing on the
subject, as he is the director of health and welfare studies at the CATO institute.
Tranfa-Abboud, J. V. (2012). The value of investing in the doe funds ready, willing & able
program. Retrieved from http://www.doe.org/documents/RWA-Cost-BenefitAnalysis.pdf
Tranfa-Abbouds article is a cost-benefit analysis of the Ready, Willling, & Able program. As an
independent entity of The Doe Fund, she gives a comprehensive accounting analysis of
the RWAs costs. She additionally shows the trend in reduced recidivism among the
RWA programs participants. She shows by evaluating the net cost of the program that
the institution is more than capable of supporting itself almost without grants or private
donations. She works as Principal in the Litigation and Corporate Financial Advisory
Services Group at Marks Paneth, LLP, an accounting firm established in 1907. Because
of her extensive qualifications (Im not trained to critically analyze financial accounting
reports), I find her data trustworthy.
United States Census Bureau. (2015). Poverty rates by county: 1960-2010. Retrieved from
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/
The Census Bureau report on Poverty Rates by County is an interactive graph
spreadsheet documenting poverty rates between 1960 and 2010, where individual
counties can be selected for analysis, or the full national poverty rates can be viewed. I
used the graphs at the national scale to gather information on the number of people in
poverty in 2000 and in 2010, and to get an idea of how government welfare programs
have affected poverty. These reports are a matter of public record, and because of this, I
assume the data is reliable.

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U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2008). Indicators of welfare dependence:
Annual report to congress 2008. Retrieved from
https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/53021/report.pdf
This report made by the Department of Health and Human Services documents welfare
dependence, which is defined by the Department as the proportion of all individuals in
families that receive more than half of their total family income in one year from TANF,
food stamps and/or SSI. It goes to great lengths to describe the comprehensive
observation, measurement, and calculation processes to arrive at the conclusions that it
has, and the report compiled consists of the Departments best work to make an official
statement for U.S. legislators to trust and work with. For this reason, I consider the
document to be accurate. The relevance of the document to my argument has to deal with
how the people that find themselves within the demographic of welfare dependence are
easy targets to be taken advantage of by special interests in the government, and could be
used as a tool to fuel government corruption. The statistic I used in the report, 3.2% of
Americans between the ages of 16 and 64 being welfare dependents, comes from Table
IND 1a. I averaged the two indicators for men ages 16-64 who receive more than half
their income in benefits, and women ages 16-64 who receive more than half their income
in benefits to obtain this statistic.