How much money has been spent on welfare last year?

Answer 1

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2807

9 Trillion or about $225,000 per person currently living in American poverty. The above answer is accurate only if you define "welfare" as including all means-tested programs. This would include Medicaid, food stamps, student lunch programs, scholarship aid to college students, etc. This also includes Medicaid spending for the elderly in nursing homes or subsidized Medicare coverage, and for the disabled. Only about 16% of all Medicaid spending is for health care to poor, non-disabled families, so the answer varies depending on how you define "welfare". (Center for Budget and Policy Priorities) And, of course, the answer to this question changes with each passing day. Using information from 2001 (the most recent numbers I could find) which was provided by the conservative Heritage Foundation, I was able to do the following math and find out how much we spent on welfare in that year as a percent of the budget: -Combined spending on cash, food, and housing assistance (which I think is what most people consider to be "welfare") was $167 billion in 2001. 72% of this amount was from federal funding; the rest was from states/locals. Doing the math then, about $120 billion came the federal government. -The 2001 Federal budget was about $1.835 trillion. These programs were therefore about 6.5% of federal spending in 2001. Numbers for states vary, but from what I've seen, their spending on these kinds of cash assistance programs was betwen 1% and 4% of the state's annual budget. -Note: these numbers reflect what we are spending on welfare programs that including the cost of welfare office operations and their employees' compensation. This is not the amount that is sent out in checks to poor households. In researching the topic, this amount (between 5-10% of the overall federal budget and 1-5% of state budgets) seems to be a pretty consistent level of spending on these programs from year to year.

Answer 2

60,000 per family in poverty