I think your numbers are waaay off. Food stamps [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP], do NOT pay $120 per month per kid. According to the government charts I saw, it's around $30 per person, per month.
SNAP varies by state, from a low of $115.76 in New Hampshire to a high of $217.49 in Hawaii. The Average for the US is $133.07. Those are fiscal year 2013 numbers, and are slightly higher across the board currently.
Where you get a benefit of $3500 a month is beyond me - near as I can tell, it doesn't exist anywhere, even in Hawaii, where benefits run high because the cost of living is sky high.
He just used simple math. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. But, in Rhode Island, which is more or less typical, a single parent of two children starts off with $6,648 in unrestricted cash welfare benefits. Then you start adding it up, with an average of $6,249 per year in food stamps, $12,702 in housing subsidies, $11,302 in health insurance coverage, $275 in heating assistance, $300 a year under the Emergency Food Assistance program, and if you're pregnant, a new mother and/or the children are up to 5 years old, you qualify for another $1,156 in food under the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.
That's $38,632 a year, or $3219 a month. Yeah, nowhere near $3500. But that's for a parent and two kids. If you add another kid, you get an additional $325 in unrestricted welfare cash, another $138 in food stamps, the housing subsidy and heating assistance would stay the same, but health insurance benefit would go up slightly. All told, it's about another $500 in benefits for the third kid. So now we're at $3700 a month. Have a 4th kid and keep on adding it up.
These are real numbers. But what's even scarier (and more deplorable) is even looking at that $38,632 per year of actual average benefits, the government (that's us) spends an average of $60,000 per year in order to hand out that $38,632. That's $21,368 per year in wasted overhead (which doesn't even include the salaries of the administrators and pencil pushers handling the programs). It's out of control.
The "average" welfare family has no more kids than the "average" working family. In fact, they are often the same family. Taxpayers are feeding them because employers aren't.
The "average" welfare family has 1.9 children. The "average" working family has 1.86.
I realize .04 of a kid isn't much, it's like a couple of fingers or something, maybe a thigh bone, but it works out to a whole kid every 25 families, or, for ever 100 "working" families, there are an extra 4 "welfare" kids.
