Notice in the above slide, how someone earning $29,000 has the incentive to not earn more than that, through more hours, or a better job, or a raise, because earning $30,000 (just $1,000 more) would result in the loss of $8,000 in food and housing assistance, leaving them worse off. Notice too the nature of the help. Food and housing are necessities. That’s $8,000 that still needs to be spent, unless she keeps the job but opts for living on the street and eating out of dumpsters to avoid spending it.

Another cliff exists at $43,000 where someone has the incentive to not earn $44,000 (just $1,000 more), because that would result in the loss of about $13,000 in childcare assistance. Again, notice the nature of that loss. How can she keep the job that gave her a raise, if she’s no longer able to afford daycare so that she can go to work instead of watching her kid(s)? That’s a cliff that can force her to quit her job and find one that pays less, in order to get that assistance back. Is that the result we seek?

In case this is all too abstract, here’s a working mother in this exact situation:

“A system that works against the system’s own interests… it’s just so counterproductive.”

Our current system is not productive. It is not the fully functional safety net we need, especially as technology increasingly disrupts our day to day lives. If one day we can be a driver for Uber, and the next day Uber can buy a fleet of self-driving cars and fire all of us, that’s a world where we need a real safety net that doesn’t just drop away. We need more than a safety net. We need a floor set above the poverty level, so that regardless of any amount of disruption, we are still allowed to stand on our own two feet and start climbing again.

Don’t catch us and trap us with nets. We need a solid foundation that allows all of us a space in which to build our futures.

We also need to understand that those at the bottom aren’t the only ones receiving welfare. There exists a great deal of netting underneath the feet of all of us. We just don’t see it. It is the invisible safety net, lacking in any stigma.

“…the U.S. Government spent $24 billion on public housing and rental subsidies for the poor. But in that same year, it spent $72 billion in home ownership subsidies for the middle classes and the wealthy.”

Welfare for the Wealthier

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, when it comes to entitlement benefits, it is false to think those at the bottom receive most of the benefits. To the contrary, entitlement benefits are shared surprisingly proportionately according to population. Is this widely known? Do we talk about how our entitlement benefits are mostly distributed evenly to everyone?

Meanwhile, if we look at individual tax expenditures, it is the wealthy who represent a smaller percentage of the population and yet receive a disproportionately high percentage of total tax expenditures. Is this widely known? Do we talk about how the richest fifth of the country receives two-thirds of all tax expenditures or how the top 1% receives one quarter of it?

What exactly are some examples of this kind of welfare for the rich?

The Home Mortgage Interest Rate Deduction:

The most recent IRS data show few low- and middle-income taxpayers benefit from the home mortgage interest deduction. Those who filed tax returns with under $30,000 in adjusted gross income (AGI) in 2003 received just 9 percent of deductions for home mortgage interest, despite filing 52 percent of all tax returns. In contrast, 36 percent of home mortgage interest deductions were claimed by taxpayers with AGIs over $100,000.

This form of housing assistance is virtually identical to giving someone in poverty a housing voucher to help them afford a house, but instead they aren’t at all in poverty and we help them afford a nicer house (which is sometimes resold for a profit as soon as possible).

Capital Gains Taxes:

Over the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people; about half of all the capital gains have gone to the wealthiest 0.1 percent.

Warren Buffet has made this particular advantage famous in sharing how he pays a lower tax rate than his own secretary. Some would argue this lower rate for the rich is good for the poor, because it drives job creation, but is that really the case?

Jane Gravelle, a tax expert at the Congressional Research Service, says a rate cut could generate more government revenue for a year or two as investors take advantage of lower rates or a rising stock market, but she says that initial bump in tax revenue would fade. And the government, over time, would collect more overall if it kept the rate higher.

The fact that those few at the top are the ones earning the overwhelming majority of capital gains, and that those same people pay a lower tax rate on this income than anyone else, is undeniably a form of handout for the rich. It’s giving barrels full of money to those who already have trucks full of money.

Meanwhile, for billionaires who look upon those with trucks full of money as the relatively poor, we give them amounts of money so vast, it should be considered shocking.

The perfect example: Seven of every ten dollars spent to build CenturyLink Field in Seattle came from the taxpayers of Washington State, $390 million total. The owner, [billionaire] Paul Allen, pays the state $1 million per year in “rent” and collects most of the $200 million generated. If you are wondering how to become, like Allen, one of the richest humans on earth, negotiating such a lease would be a good start. In New Orleans, taxpayers have bankrolled roughly a billion dollars to build then renovate the Superdome, which we are now supposed to call the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Guess who gets nearly all the revenues generated by Saints games played in this building? If you guessed all those hard-working stiffs who paid a billion dollars, you would be wrong. If you guessed billionaire owner Tom Benson, you would be right. He also receives $6 million per annum from the state as an “inducement payment” to keep him from moving the team.

The common counterargument to facts like this, is to point out how much revenue it generates for the people of the city who publicly bankroll such massive private capital investments. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City put an estimate on that value.

…The net present value of the jobs and tax benefits may be no more than $5 million from hosting an NBA or NHL team and no more than $10 million from hosting an NFL or MLB team. Even using the upper-bound estimates from the analysis above suggests that the public outlays on current sports facility projects far exceed any associated jobs and tax benefits.

In other words, taking New Orleans (my own city) as an example, it’s entirely reasonable to suggest that economically speaking, the value returned to the city in the form of taxes and jobs for building a billion dollar stadium for billionaire Tom Benson is about equivalent to what the city pays him every year just to provide him further incentive from ever leaving.

But that’s all still not the biggest example of welfare for the rich. Such an extreme example requires looking at the richest family on the entire planet — The Waltons of Walmart — who each earn more than $1.5 million per hour from their dividend checks alone and have a total net worth of $150 billion equal to about the bottom half of the entire United States. How much welfare do they get?

Read the report: http://www.americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Walmart-on-Tax-Day-Americans-for-Tax-Fairness-1.pdf

It has also been estimated, that if Walmart just raised their prices by merely 1.4 percent and put this added revenue into increased wages, their employees would no longer need welfare assistance, and therefore Walmart would no longer receive welfare assistance either. That they refuse to do this and instead choose to enjoy a free $8 billion or so a year, should make it clear they want to be on welfare.

But is that what the working Americans who work for them want?

Driving on Spares

It may have seemed a small detail and one possibly gone unnoticed, but it’s possibly the most important detail of all in our automotive parable.

“Unfortunately there’s no spare. We had no choice but to drive on it.”

It’s not that we made the unwise choice to go driving around without a spare tire. It’s that we could not make the wise choice, because our car had already suffered a previous blown tire and there was no money in the budget for a new one. After replacing our blown tire with our spare tire, we could only hope nothing else would happen until there was money for a new tire.

But something did happen. That’s the nature of unfortunate surprises.

It is this fact we must recognize, possibly above all. No one wants to suffer a flat tire, and no one wants to have no options but to call for help when we do get one. And we see this reflected in what we have done for decades now, as we have faithfully sought all possible avenues of increasing our incomes.

We went from one earner per household to two.

We asked for more hours and sought second, third, and even fourth jobs.

We got credit cards, took out second mortgages, and are now even tapping our own retirement funds.

It’s a small number that’s part of a much larger picture: The Internal Revenue Service collected $5.7 billion in 2011 from penalties, meaning that Americans took out about $57 billion from retirement funds before they were supposed to. The median size of a 401(k) is $24,400 as of March 31, with people older than 55 having $65,300, according to Fidelity Investments. Those funds can disappear quickly in retirement, and the early withdrawals indicate that the coming retirement crisis could be even more acute than expected.

This is what it looks like for a country to be driving on its spare tire.

As citizens, we are doing everything we can. Some of us are even tragically dying in our attempts to struggle on, while over 10,000 others have already grown too tired of the struggle to even continue living. As long as wages continue to not rise, and as long as jobs continue to be eliminated due to advances in technology, we have nowhere else to turn but our own safety nets. It is for this reason, it will only become ever more increasingly important for us to look with open eyes and minds at our system of public assistance and how it functions for all of us, poor and rich alike.

If so many of us are already driving on our spare tires, and we recognize the road ahead is only going to get bumpier and more dangerous, then we must together make sure that we either make it quick and painless for us all to get right back on the road when we need assistance, or finally guarantee that no matter what, there will always be another spare tire for all of us.