Limbaugh Bases His Rant Against Government Aid On Flawed Analysis

Written by David Shere

Published

Rush Limbaugh spent much of his radio show today railing against all varieties of “welfare” and government aid, in response to a CNBC piece headlined “Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third Of U.S. Wages.” He began his diatribe by predicting that “we are not going to survive as a nation, not the way we've been founded, with this kind of sloth and laziness and feeding at the public trough.” Limbaugh also said, “We all know that there's a lot of welfare. We all know that the Democrat Party is promoting it. We all know that -- but to see one-third. One-third of what we would all consider salaries, wages is welfare checks. I don't care what you call it. 'Unemployment compen--' I don't care. It's welfare checks. It's the redistribution of wealth, pure and simple.”

Rush even went so far as to say:


It's at 35 percent of American adults on the dole, to me, is the single reason why I have been doing this show since I started in Sacramento. Hoping that number would never be more than 20 percent, 25 percent. It's the single reason -- that number. Thirty-five percent.

In that case, Rush may have misspent his career, because the statistic he's citing is bunk.

Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review did the leg work on this in a blog post showing that the CNBC story “is just inaccurate.”

Among Chittum's main points:

  • “The immediate red flag here is that it seems rather artificial to do a ratio of government payouts to wages and salaries, rather than, say, GDP or even personal income.”
  • CNBC and the analysis “are only counting wages and salaries in the denominator ... while they're counting health care in the form of Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention veteran's pensions and job training, in the 'welfare' numerator. That's apples to oranges.”
  • “The study also doesn't include non-corporate business owners' income. Nor does it include rent or capital income, like, say, interest from your savings account or capital gains from your 401k.”
  • “CNBC accepts as fact the notion that programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance are welfare programs.”