Cloward-Piven Strategy in motion.

CNS News:

Federal and state welfare assistance has grown almost 19 percent under President Barack Obama, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

All in all, there are 79 means-tested federal welfare programs, at a cost approaching $1 trillion annually, said Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector.

Rector conducted a comprehensive analysis of spending for government assistance programs, ranging from food, education and childcare programs to housing and medical care.

Since Fiscal Year 2009, federal and state welfare spending has risen from $779.9 billion to $927.2 billion, an increase of 18.8 percent. That fiscal year includes spending from Oct. 1, 2008 to Sept. 30, 2009.

In his report, Rector said the increase in federal means-tested welfare spending during Obama’s first two years in office was two-and-a-half times greater than any previous increase in federal welfare spending in U.S. history, after adjusting for inflation.

Rachel Sheffield, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, told CNSNews.com that this kind of pay out can not be maintained.

“It’s a huge amount of money we’re spending on these programs and our debt is growing,” she said. “It’s not sustainable.”

According to the report, titled “Examining the Means-tested Welfare State,” in FY 2011 the federal government dolled out $717.1 billion on welfare programs, while states spent $210.1 billion.

The 79 federal programs include:

— 12 programs providing food aid;

— 12 programs funding social services;

— 12 educational assistance programs;

— 11 housing assistance programs;

— 10 programs providing cash assistance;

— 9 vocational training programs;

— 7 medical assistance programs;

— 3 energy and utility assistance programs; and,

— 3 child care and child development programs.

Daily Caller:

Left-leaning economists often argue that the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was too small and that more stimulus is needed to get the economy going again. The real amount of fiscal stimulus pumped into the economy, however, may be much higher.

Tom Firey of the libertarian Cato Institute estimates that the U.S. has dumped at least $2.5 trillion of fiscal stimulus into the economy since 2008.

“If you sum it all up, we’ve pumped an awful lot of fiscal stimulus into the economy since this recession started. Far more than anyone wants to acknowledge,” Firey told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.

“I’ve been watching the debate over stimulus measure since ARRA, since early 2009 … and it seems like each time a measure was passed, it was like nothing had preceded it and nothing would come after it,” he continued. “And so I started tracking them.”

Firey tracked fifteen pieces of legislation that were passed since 2008, including the 2009 stimulus bill, unemployment insurance extensions and the payroll tax cuts.

Some of the bills tracked by Firey were measures explicitly aimed at stimulating the economy, like the 2009 stimulus bill, by borrowing money to spend now, while paying it back down the road.

Other bills, like the bills extending unemployment insurance, were not explicitly intended to be stimulus measures, but Firey argues that they were in effect stimulus measures because they borrowed and spent money now, rather than redirecting money the government already has.