The government sends out more than 80 million checks a month — a lot more
It’s no secret that a greater per capita number of these checks go to red states — what’s going to happen to the congress critters in those states when some of the checks stop coming?
I’ve been saying the federal government sends out 80 million checks a month, a number I got from the Bipartisan Policy Center. The president says the government sends out 70 million. Alec MacGillis says we’re both wrong:
The figures used by Obama and Geithner were, if anything, too low. They relied on Treasury Department figures from June that include Social Security (56 million checks that month), veterans benefits (4.5 million checks), and spending on non-defense contractors and vendors (1.8 million checks).
But those numbers do not include reimbursements to Medicare providers and vendors (100 million claims in June), and electronic transfers to the 21 million households receiving food stamps.
Nor do they include most spending by the Defense Department, which has a payroll of 6.4 million active and retired employees and, on average, pays nearly 1 million invoices and 660,000 travel expense claims per month.