Well, you know, Cloward and Piven knew how to get one. Half of Americans on the dole.

49.1%: Percent of the population that lives in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011.

Cutting government spending is no easy task, and it’s made more complicated by recent Census Bureau data showing that nearly half of the people in the U.S. live in a household that receives at least one government benefit, and many likely received more than one.

The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of 2008.

Just a reminder…

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward (1926–2001) and Frances Fox Piven (b. 1932) that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”.

It is pretty much four easy steps.

1) Foster dependency on the government until the system is…

2) Overwhelmed with more costs than revenues resulting in collapse and…

3) Those who dependent on it are impoverished and hungry enough to…

4) Stage a revolution.

The plan is coming together nicely, isn’t it?