The purpose of this website is to aggregate and summarize pertinent information on U.S. poverty and the welfare programs of the federal government. The website is generated and run by Bob Pfeiffer, a CPA, and entrepreneur who became frustrated as he tried to understand poverty in the U.S. and the federal programs that fight it. The goal of the website is to put the Federal Safety Net into an easy-to-understand format.
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The website relies on government, think tanks, and expert data and reports. All data is footnoted as to its origin. The aim of the website is not to generate new research but to cull the vast amount of research and data into a manageable and understandable analysis.
Robert S. Pfeiffer (Bob)
For an accountant the federal budget is the holy grail of budgets. It is the big budget with all the zeros. I was working as a CFO for a small oil and gas company and one day I visited the federal bookstore in downtown Denver. There it was, the 1993 federal budget in all its hefty glory. I couldn’t help myself. I bought it and thus started an unusual accounting hobby of tracking federal spending and trying to understand our government through numbers.
Later I also bought a statistical abstract of the United States. It was a most marvelous book of all kinds of wonderful statistics on people, income, jobs and poverty. My accounting hobby had now strayed into economics. One night while looking through the budget I wondered what we spent each year on welfare. It sounded simple enough. I’d merely find the department of welfare and see what it spent. But it doesn’t work that way. Welfare is spread throughout the budget in several agencies. The problem is that the agencies do other things too so finding welfare meant searching, studying and adding it up.
My conclusion was that welfare cost us $170 billion in 1993. My statistical abstract book said there were 35.7 million people in poverty and told me how much additional income they needed to be out of poverty. I did the math and it showed me that we spent twice the amount on welfare that we needed to pull every poor person in America out of poverty. I was dumbfounded. How can that be? I checked my math, studied the budgets and still the relationship held true. While amazed I had no idea what to do with my new found discovery. I simply went back to work and back to raising a family. The late night revelation sat on the shelf for 17 years.
It was revived in 2010 when I took an early and partial retirement. By then everything was on the internet, so I thought it would be easy to revisit. Still, it took me weeks of study to ascertain if the relationship was still true (see more information on the (Poverty Gap Page). It was. I was amazed that in many respects not much had changed. I started to ponder why that was and what it meant to both users and taxpayers. But overriding that question was a feeling of frustration and annoyance that understanding the welfare system in America is too complicated and mysterious. I felt like the citizens deserved better. Over time, I became committed to the thought of sharing my work with others purely as a public service. So I put up this website and published my findings. No fees, no advertising; just information culled from the vast array of reports, budgets, books and experts.
Six years later FederalSafetyNet.com is one of the top web sites listed in a Google search of U.S. welfare, federal safety net, welfare issues, welfare fraud and other welfare and poverty topics. People are longing for simple and summarized information.
I hope the site is a public service to you and thanks for taking the time to learn more. An educated citizenry is the first step in winning the war on poverty. A good place to start is the Safety Net Program Page.