Your monthly support provides voters the knowledge they need to make confident decisions at the polls. Donate today.
Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day for November 27, 2018
The Number of the Day columns published on Ballotpedia reflect the views of the author.
November 27, 2018: Each year, the federal government spends $9.5 billion on a public workforce system designed to help low-income and displaced workers find jobs. While that sounds like a big number, a new report cites it as evidence that federal programs benefit affluent Americans more than the working class.[1]
David Brooks of The New York Times summarized the tone of the report like this: “Government has welfare programs to serve the poor and they have programs like 529 savings accounts to subsidize the rich. But there’s very little for families making, say, $50,000 a year.”[2]
The report—“Work, skills, community: Restoring opportunity for the working class”—claims, “The government programs that address working-class problems are paltry and often all but invisible to the people they’re intended to help.” It adds that “the working class is angry—for good reason.”
Put together by a unique partnership between Opportunity America, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute, the report provides some startling comparisons. While spending less than $10 billion on a jobs program helping working-class Americans, the federal government spends more than $100 billion annually on federal financial aid for college students. That program primarily benefits middle- and upper-middle-class families.
The report defines the working class as “people with at least a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree living in households between the 20th and 50th income percentiles—roughly $30,000 to $69,000 a year for a household with two adults and one child. We include Americans of all races and ethnicities. A laid-off factory worker in Ohio or a Latina housekeeper in Los Angeles: when we look out across blue-collar America, we see more similarities than differences.”
Each weekday, Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day explores interesting and newsworthy topics at the intersection of culture, politics, and technology.
- November 26, 2018 – 1,007 dollars spent by average American during holiday season
- November 23, 2018 – 116 million Americans expected to shop today
- November 22, 2018 – 365 million pounds of turkey bought for Thanksgiving
- November 21, 2018 – 54 million Americans traveling this holiday weekend
- November 20, 2018 – 375 million workers worldwide may need to change occupations due to artificial intelligence
- To see other recent numbers, check out the archive.
Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day is published by Ballotpedia weekdays at 8:00 a.m. Eastern. Click here to check out the latest update.
The Number of the Day is broadcast on local stations across the country. An archive of these broadcasts can be found here.
Columns published on Ballotpedia reflect the views of the author.
Ballotpedia is the nonprofit, nonpartisan Encyclopedia of American Politics.
See also
Footnotes
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
