If you are opposed to the Affordable Care Act, consider these numbers the next time you protest your tax dollars going to welfare and tax credits to help people buy health insurance:
- Obamacare subsidies – about $100 billion per year
- Home mortgage deduction – $105 billion in 2011
- Subsidized pensions – $111 billion in 2011
- Subsidies to employer contributions to health insurance plans – $177 billion 2011
So, if you have ever complained that only lazy people get helped by the government, consider the fact that 77 percent of the mortgage deductions went to people earning more than $100,000 per year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
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Also, if you get health insurance from your employer, the government is giving your company a tax break too.
Suzanne Mettler, a professor of government at Cornell University, describes these tax breaks as part of the hidden benefits that many people don’t even consider government benefits.
The final group of policies, what I call the “submerged state,” is largely invisible because its benefits are channeled through the tax code and subsidies to private organizations. These include the home-mortgage-interest deduction and the exemption from taxes on employer-provided health and retirement benefits. Using “submerged” benefits is nearly as common as using more visible policies.
Many people don’t even know that they are getting a financial break from the government, thanks to these programs.
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A 2008 poll of 1,400 Americans by the Cornell Survey Research Institute found that when people were asked whether they had “ever used a government social program,” 57 percent said they had not. Respondents were then asked whether they had availed themselves of any of 21 different federal policies, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home-mortgage-interest deduction and student loans. It turned out that 94 percent of those who had denied using programs had benefited from at least one; the average respondent had used four.
The graph above is from a 2010 analysis by Mettler that considers how President Obama has put the spotlight on these hidden benefits during his presidency.
A post by Joshua Holland on the Moyers and Company blog goes into more detail about this confusion about who is getting a break from the government and who is not.
In other words, many of those hardworking “taxpayers” outraged at the idea that they’re now being asked to subsidize health insurance for people with modest incomes themselves enjoy mortgages, health insurance, retirement accounts and other social goods that are being subsidized by other taxpayers, including those at the bottom of the income ladder.
The final data point that shows poor people are not getting more from the government than the rich and the middle class? State and federal government spending on welfare: $31.4 billion in 2012
