Number of People in Federal Programs Has Grown Faster Than U.S. Population

More than 41 percent of the U.S. population is “enrolled in at least one federal assistance program,” adding tens of billions of dollars to the national debt each year, according to new research by The Heritage Foundation’s Patrick Tyrrell and William W. Beach.

That means that a startling number of people in the United States draw income from money their family earns as well as money transferred to them from U.S. taxpayers via some form of federal assistance spending, according to the report from the Center for Data Analysis at Heritage.

The rate of growth of those receiving federal assistance spending grew 62 percent from 1988 to 2011.

Those government expenditures help drive the deficit and add to the perilous federal debt, now approaching 100 percent of GDP, the authors said.

In their Backgrounder issued earlier this week, the authors outlined the alarming rate of growth in the number of people receiving federal government benefits. From 2000 to 2011, that number jumped by 34 million, from 94 million people to 128 million people, or 41.3 percent of the total U.S. population.

Read more here: http://blog.heritage.org/2013/01/12/chart-of-the-week-growth-government-assistance-adds-national-debt/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FoundryConservativePolicyNews+%28The+Foundry%3A+Conservative+Policy+News.%29