This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 24, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown. Welfare programs in the United States spend more than $40,000 for every poor man, woman, and child in America.

Yet poverty persists.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Michael Tanner is author of the new report,

The American Welfare State,

how we spend nearly $1 trillion a year fighting poverty and fail.

We spoke last week.

Well, most people when they hear welfare think of the cash payment program known as

temporary assistance to needy families used to be aid for dependent

children but that's just a small portion of welfare the reality is the

federal government currently operates a hundred and twenty six different anti-poverty programs.

And state and local governments operate additional anti-poverty programs on top of that.

In fact, federal and state governments combined spend just

under one trillion dollars every year on anti-poverty efforts. And how many

Americans are we talking about? Well if you you want to define the poverty level per se,

that's about 25, 26 million Americans who live at the poverty level are below.

But the people who are receiving benefits from these programs is in excess of 100 million.

Well that's right, because most of these programs are actually fairly badly targeted.

They reach people who are above the poverty level and they also don't reach people

who are actually poor.

The reality is that about 52% of all income in this country now comes from the government

either in the forms of transfer payments or or salaries from the government.

Economists when they talk about welfare are often heard to say well look let's just cut these people a

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