Chicago: Poor families use 'supervouchers' to rent in city's priciest buildings

[InformedConsent]

Originally Posted by Storm Eagle

As long as you are working you are carrying your own weight.

Not true. The Chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard University explains...

"Because transfer payments are, in effect, the opposite of taxes, it makes sense to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus transfers received. For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):

Bottom quintile: -301 percent
Second quintile: -42 percent
Middle quintile: -5 percent
Fourth quintile: 10 percent
Highest quintile: 22 percent
Top one percent: 28 percent

The negative 301 percent means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned.

The most surprising fact to me was that the effective tax rate is negative for the middle quintile. According to the CBO data, this number was +14 percent in 1979 (when the data begin) and remained positive through 2007. It was negative 0.5 percent in 2008, and negative 5 percent in 2009. That is, the middle class, having long been a net contributor to the funding of government, is now a net recipient of government largess."

Harvard University's Greg Mankiw: Most Americans Are Making A Profit Off Of Government

CBO report cited:
CBO | The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes

60% are TAKING more than they contribute, making them a net drain on society. Only 40% of taxpayers are carrying the load for everyone else. And since the welfare-dependent population increases at a faster rate than the 40% who are supporting everyone else, the mathematical certainty is that the system we have now under which increasingly more are taking, is in fact unsustainable.