RINO = Democrat lite... Even the poor white republicans in Mississippi are on welfare... It's a crazy world we live in.
http://www.politisite.com/2011/06/13...and-the-least/
Many folks think the Moocher states are all in the south because of lower wages and a large poor population based on national standards. Not so. The top recipient is Vermont. Now one can undersand why Vermont elects socialist Bernie Sanders to the Senate. The next states on the list are Mississippi, Maine, New York, Massachusetts, and Alaska. Hold it, aren’t most of them Democrat Governed and Union States?
Who are least dependent on public assistance? Florida, Virginia, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada.
The Center for Immigration Studies recently put out a study arguing that immigration has had negative effects on California. One of their measures was a comparison of how many people in the state were receiving some form of welfare compared to other states. I found that data (see Table 3 of the report) very interesting, but not because of the immigration debate (I’ll leave others to debate that topic). Instead, I wanted to get a better understanding of the variations in government dependency. Is there a greater willingness to sign up for income redistribution programs, all other things being equal, from one state to another? The “all other things being equal” caveat is very important, of course, since the comparison produced by CIS may simply be an indirect measure of the factors that determine welfare eligibility. One obvious (albeit crude) way of addressing this problem is to subtract each state’s poverty rate to get a measure of how many non-poor people are signed up for income-redistribution programs. Let’s call this the Moocher Index.
