[TheRealThing]

Let's see, world population circa 2013...7.125 billion, of which around 4.5% live in United States. Now, around the mountains of Appalachia, the New Deal surely did produce cyclical poverty and a fair amount of folks who view "work" as figuring out how to live off the government. True enough. However, poor people often work, mopping the floor Bill Gates walks across, making the bed Zuckerberg sleeps in at a five star hotel, etc. No sin or shame in that. A married couple who both work full time at Walmart (if possible as Walmart likes "parties") will barely escape the poverty line of the have a few kids, etc. And, in broader perspective, as the world doesn't end at Pikeville, the overwhelming majority of the world's populace are poor not because some Appalachian small business owner makes a couple hundred grand a year with seventeen employees, but because the flow of resources and allocation of resources is skewed and because corruption is rampant and because a hundred other reasons that include " too sorry to work" as a miniscule fraction of the whole.

We have here in this land the following. Equality of opportunity (except in cases where affirmative action has skewed vocational success and the access to free education). One can therefore, achieve his slice albeit perhaps a thin one, of the American dream through work. Or, they can go the route which sidesteps personal responsibility and claim foul by virtue of race or whatever. Your fraction must be the work product of new math I guess. Because this is the actual equation according to Forbes; "Thus, perhaps 52 percent of U.S. households—more than half—now receive benefits from the government, thanks to President Obama. And Mr. Entitlement is just getting started. If Obamacare is not repealed millions more will join the swelling rolls of those dependent on government handouts."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatth...16c3456233

In other words, more takers than providers.