Broke, busted & Poor
This government assistance program, formerly known as food stamps, provides monthly, income-based benefits to low-income households for purchasing groceries via an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card.
What is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)?
With this type of medical insurance, employee portions are usually deducted from paychecks on a pre-tax basis, lowering taxable income.
What is Contributory?
The number of members of this division of Congress is 435.
What is the House of Representatives?
These members of Congress were originally chosen by state legislatures.
Who are senators?
The "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska refers to the project in Ketchikan, Alaska that was meant to connect the town to its airport on sparsely populated Gravina Island.
What is Gravina Island Bridge?
This is an economic philosophy advocating for minimal or no government intervention in the market, often described as "free market" or "raw" capitalism.
What is Laissez-Faire?
The vast majority of spending for K-12 education in the United States comes from these two levels of government.
What is local and state?
This book, written by Upton Sinclair (1906), is a landmark muckraking novel that exposes the 20th-century Chicago meatpacking industry's horrific, unsanitary conditions and the extreme exploitation of immigrant laborers.
What is The Jungle?
The number of members of this division of Congress is 100.
What is the Senate?
This is an independent federal agency that enforces federal securities laws, regulates the financial industry, and requires public companies to disclose meaningful financial information to the public.
What is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)?
The so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" became a major symbol of this type of government spending.
What is Wasteful?
This theory holds that economic growth is best achieved by lowering taxes, reducing regulations, and promoting free trade to encourage investment and production.
What is Supply-Side (Reaganomics) Economics?
The Affordable Care Act's (ACA) individual mandate required most Americans to maintain minimum essential health coverage, or they would have to do this each year.
What is pay a tax penalty?
These are federal, law-mandated initiatives providing guaranteed benefits to individuals who meet specific eligibility criteria, such as age, income, or disability status.
What are Entitlement Programs?
This is the leader of the House of Representatives.
Who is the Speaker of the House?
In 1913, the ________ Amendment to the U.S. Constitution standardized the popular election of Senators nationwide.
What is the 17th?
This type of spending is federal funding authorized by permanent law rather than by annual appropriations, primarily covering entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
What is Mandatory Spending?
This policy is a government action that transfers income, wealth, property, or rights from certain groups to others, typically from the wealthy to the poor, to reduce inequality.
What is the Policy of Redistribution?
This is a refundable federal tax credit for low- to moderate-income working individuals and families, designed to reduce the amount of tax owed and increase refunds.
What is Earned Income Credit?
This is a political theory where elected officials act primarily as mouthpieces for their constituents, voting according to the people's wishes rather than their own personal judgment.
What is a delegate model of representation?
This is the process of distributing seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the fifty states.
What is Congressional Apportionment (or reapportionment)?
This ensures accountability, efficiency, and legality in government operations, often focusing on investigating waste, fraud, and abuse to inform legislative decisions.
What is Government Oversight?
This is the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries to give one political party or group an unfair advantage, often resulting in bizarre, non-compact shapes.
What is Gerrymandering?
If two people pay a 5% tax on a $1,000 television, each pays $50. This $50 represents a much larger percentage of a $20,000 income than a $200,000 income. The person with a $20,000 income is paying this type of tax.
What is Regressive Tax?
This is a phenomenon where women and children are disproportionately represented among the world's poor, experiencing higher rates of poverty than men.
What is the "Feminization of Poverty?
This is a contributory program funded through mandatory payroll taxes (FICA or SECA) paid by employees, employers, and the self-employed during their working years. It is an entitlement program, not welfare, meaning individuals must have contributed to it to qualify for it.
What is Medicare?
There are approximately this number of people in each House district.
What is over 700,000?
This president stated in his inaugural address that "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.
Who is Ronald Reagan?
A real-world example of this type of politics is the "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska, a proposed $398 million project to connect Ketchikan (pop. ~8,000) to Gravina Island (pop. 50) that was pushed by Senator Ted Stevens to direct federal funds to his state. It became a symbol of wasteful spending.
What is Pork-Barrel Politics?
This economist believed that government spending creates jobs and increases income, which in turn boosts consumption, ultimately generating a "multiplier effect" to stimulate economic growth.
Who is John Maynard Keynes?
This is a comprehensive U.S. health reform law that increases insurance access, mandates coverage for pre-existing conditions, and expands Medicaid.
What is the Affordable Care Act?
Entitlement programs (mandatory spending) account for roughly 60% of the federal budget, totaling over a trillion annually. These are the three largest entitlement programs that cost over 40% of the federal budget.
What are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid?
This member of Congress, who feels only loosely constrained by the policy preferences of their constituents and is empowered to make decisions based on their own judgment, is acting as this type of model.
What is a Trustee?
To boost a stagnant economy, these officials (the Central Bank of the United States) primarily use expansionary monetary policy, focusing on lowering short-term interest rates to make loans cheaper for consumers and businesses.
What is the Federal Reserve?
This is a metaphor for the appropriation of government spending for localized projects intended to benefit specific constituents or campaign contributors, primarily to secure reelection.
**It often refers to wasteful or unnecessary "pet projects" added to legislation by politicians to gain favor.
What is Pork Barrel?
This type of spending is the portion of the U.S. federal budget set annually by Congress for non-military programs, including education, transportation, health research, and national parks.
What is Non-Defense discretionary (NDD) spending?