Almost half of all Americans live in a household where at least one member received government benefits in the first quarter of 2011, according to a new report.
Data from the Census Bureau revealed that 49.1 per cent of the population live in a household which gets at least one kind of government benefit with many likely to receive more than one.
The figure marks a steep rise in the amount of people claiming benefits, in the early 1980s only 30 per cent of the population were in a household that got government hand-outs, reported the WSJ.
