accounts for the proportion of working Americans compared with the number of adults in the country, is a lot higher than 8 percent. For now, 58.7 percent of American adults are working if the actual employment-population ratio is taken into consideration, leaving about 82 million, or almost 41 percent of people unemployed. Only 8 percent, however, are even interested in work, leaving 33 percent of Americans not only jobless -- but in no desire for work. "The ratio expresses more clearly how many people find working to be a 'good or attractive deal,'" Tyler Cowen, economist and director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, adds to CNN. If the numbers seem drastic, it's because they are. So rampant in fact is the country's seeming disregard for work that other just released statistics show that funding welfare programs for the American population was the most expensive endeavor undertaken in all of Fiscal Year 2011. Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee released findings this week showing that the government spent roughly $1.03 trillion on welfare programs last year, funding 83 separate efforts to provide assistance to Americans. Days earlier, a separate study out of Capitol Hill revealed that the number of people enrolled to receive federal assistance by way of food stamps has hit a new record high with roughly 47,000 million US residents. "These astounding figures demonstrate that the United States spends more on federal welfare than any other program in the federal budget," Alabama Sen. Jeff Session writes