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Matthew Lewis of Sweet Water, Alabama, asks: "Why does Alabama have more people on welfare than people who are employed?"

Recent attempts by President Donald Trump and Republicans to scrap the Affordable Care Act, the crown jewel of President Obama's eight years in the Oval Office, underline that very conflict of how involved the government should be in helping people. In addition, Trump's effort to heavily curtail the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has also brought the fight over welfare into recent focus.

The misconception leading to Lewis's question, which he saw watching Fox news, can be traced back to a Forbes article from Nov. 25, 2012, entitled "Do you live in a death spiral state?" The article basically claims that you should not buy a house in state where private sector workers are outnumbered by people dependent on government. In the article, author William Baldwin describes this as living in a state with "more takers than makers," a trope that can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan's era.

"A taker is someone who draws money from the government, as an employee, pensioner or welfare recipient. A maker is someone gainfully employed in the private sector," Baldwin notes. He said that such states are in a financial tailspin because they aren't generating enough money. Alabama is one of them.

Four days later, and then again on Dec. 3, Fox News ran segments where Baldwin's report was recast, incorrectly, to suggest that 11 states had more people dependent on the government than were employed, not simply employed by the private sector like Baldwin's original argument. Blogs, Facebook and discussion groups began to carry Fox's message. Then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot (now governor) also tweeted it out.

Death Spiral? I saw a report saying 11 states have more people on welfare than employed: CA NY IL HI NM ME OH KY SC MS AL. — Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) January 7, 2013

Nearly five years, people are still talking about it.

"My thing is I come from a very hard working family and it annoys me when people don't work when they can," said Lewis in a follow up interview with AL.com. "I think that people who are down on their luck, out of work but looking, deserve welfare, but not forever and not if you're not looking to get a job."

"If you've given up, why should I pay for you?"

Tweet at Lewis below.

When I first read this question, I initially thought it was mathematically impossible for more people in Alabama to be on welfare than employed. After all, Alabama is experiencing record levels of employment in recent years. Since September 2016, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate has dropped from 6.0 percent to 3.8 percent to September this year.

What's more, it's not easy to work out what people mean by welfare. "Most people are talking about TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] when they talk about welfare," said Carol Gundlach, a policy analyst on tax and budget issues for Alabama Arise, a statewide nonprofit policy think tank. "But it's really an urban myth that more people collect welfare than are employed."

But the problem with making a calculation of welfare recipients against those that are working is there is a large amount of crossover. There are a lot of people in Alabama that work and still receive some kind of welfare.

So let's take a look at the math.

Alabama's has 2.06 million people in work out of a possible 2.15 million who can work, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That leaves approximately 2.65 million people of varying ages and statuses. For example, approximately 1.08 million people in Alabama are children, while a further 772,800 are over 65, according to a July 2016 report from the U.S. Census Bureau.



The working number mostly discounts children, pensioners, disabled people and anyone else unable to work. So for this question to hold weight, more than 2.06 million people would need to be collecting some kind of welfare. Baldwin's argument that a "taker is someone who draws money from the government, as an employee, pensioner or welfare recipient" is sort of ridiculous as it would include teachers, UAB doctors, college professors and staff, police officers, firemen, and other public sector workers. These people cannot be described as welfare recipients for the purposes of answering Lewis's question.

Let's start here. There are currently 82,678 people out of work in Alabama, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. However, that figure does not include those that have stopped looking for work, who are not included in the unemployment rate. And it's also not safe to assume that every one of those unemployed people in the state is collecting unemployment benefits. Last week, 12,320 collected unemployment benefits from the state of Alabama, according to an email from state's labor department.

"The number of payments for the month of September were down 28.2 percent from August and 15.3 percent from September 2016," said an email from the department of labor to AL.com. "The number of beneficiaries is down 20.6 percent over the month, and 14.5 percent over the year."

The discrepancy between those not in work and those receiving a weekly payment may be because they haven't filed for benefits, they have exhausted their benefits, were never been eligible, said the email.

What about other types of welfare?

There are approximately six types of major welfare programs in the U.S. outside of unemployment. One of the biggest is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. In FY 2016, 851,000 people in Alabama claimed food stamps, according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Approximately 40 percent of the figure is people that are working. So that brings the number down to 510,600 of food stamp recipients that are not working.

Then we have Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which helps approximately 21,000 people in Alabama, of which 16,000 children, according to the Alabama Department of Human Resource's monthly report for August 2017. TANF is a federally funded grant program that allows states to create and administer their own assistance programs for families in need.

Next we have Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, which is designed to help low-income children, pregnant women, adults, seniors, and people with disabilities in Alabama. That figure comes in at 874,000, according to a June 2017 report from the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, a leader in health policy analysis and journalism. Again, this figure is slightly misleading since children, some seniors and people with disabilities are not all eligible to be included in the possible work force. According to the report, 66 percent of recipients are in families with one worker, which brings the figure down to 349,600.

Next is the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which helps people that are 65 or older, blind, or disabled. That program assisted 167,349 people in Alabama as of Dec. 2016, according to data from the Social Security Administration, but few of the recipients are able to work, so it wouldn't be fair to include them in the totals.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) assisted 516,000 Alabamians in 2015, according to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, but the credit is for low-to-moderate working individuals and couples, so again it would be unfair to count these people as they are actually working.

The last major welfare package used in the country is Housing Assistance, of which 93,000 families in Alabama took advantage of in 2016, according the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Of that figure, 26,970 are elderly and 15,810 were disabled. The report mentions that 77 percent of the non-elderly and non-disabled were working, which works out as 38,669 people. That means the remaining 11,550 people that were accepting housing assistance are unemployed but could work.

That's a lot of numbers, I know. So where does that leave us with Lewis' question. Remember, 2.06 million people were holding down jobs in Alabama of a potential workforce of 2.15 million.

By my loose calculations, there are 12,320 people claiming unemployment, 510,600 on food stamps, 5,000 claiming TANF, 349,600 getting Medicaid, and 11,550 on housing assistance. That comes to 889,070 claims of various types of welfare in Alabama. However, it's likely that a bunch of welfare claimants are claiming more than one of the six types, bringing the number of individuals on welfare in Alabama down further.

So what's the answer to Matthew Lewis' question "Why does Alabama have more people on welfare than people who are employed?"

There aren't. By any conservative or liberal measurement, the claim simply isn't true and is a misinterpretation of an argument made in Forbes five years ago, and later skewed by Fox news.