Well, no, it doesn't naturally increase everything else. It may increase raw numbers of things like crime, welfare recipients, and births, but it won't increase the crime rates or the birth rates, for example, nor will it increase the percentage of the population on welfare. Crime rates and birth rates are per 100,000 population, not total raw numbers. That's why it's called a rate.
The problem is not more people therefore ergo thus there are more people receiving welfare, but substantially higher percentages of the population who are receiving it. And they are percentages that could not occur just from statistical error or from normal variations.
For example, in 2000 there were 17 million people on Food Stamps. Today it's 47.2 million. That's a jump of 278 percent. The population didn't increase by anywhere near that amount in twelve years. In the four years between 2006 and 2010, federal housing assistance increased by an insane 42 percent. And it wasn't because 42 additional percent of people were out of work, it's because the federal government expanded the rules of eligibility, and people got in line to gots to gets me some a dat. Why work your butt off when you can sit back and live on the federal dole?
In 1965 just 1.7 percent of Americans were on welfare (of some kind). In 1990 it was 5.2 percent. Today, it's 1-in-5, or 20 percent. That's 1.7 to 20 percent in one generation.
Since January of 2009 welfare spending has increased by 41 percent. No amount of new babies or unemployment can account for that. What does account for it, however, is an increased number of welfare programs (11 different welfare programs in 1966, 63 in 2004, 128 in 1012), and widening the criteria for who is eligible to receive it.
It's all in the name of fighting poverty.
In 1965 the national poverty level was 14.7 percent. The following year LBJ declared war of poverty, and since then an absolutely insane amount of money has been spent to reduce poverty. How well does throwing money at the problem work to reduce poverty, you may ask? What's the poverty level today? 15.1 percent. <saaaa-nort>
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Do that day after day and before long he thinks your fish are his fish.
