The American Welfare State How We Spend Nearly $1 Trillion a Year Fighting Poverty—and Fail

[Tony_the_mad]

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What American Welfare State; All I see is an American War State. What we spend in years against poverty we spend in months for wars. We outspend every other ‘defense’ program combined.

And why not; after all as that report suggests we should only spend money on what we are good at doing. We are not so good at eliminating poverty; we are really great at creating it in other countries by blowing them back to the stone age.

Efficiency demands that we take all of the money out of anti-poverty programs and blow up a few more countries.

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While I think it is very important that we keep government accountable for their spending of our resources. It is truly frustrating the percentage of these type of reports that target programs that benefit those who need the most help when such programs make up a small fraction of our discretionary spending.

We should try to learn as much as we can from such reports, but it is hard to trust them when such institutes do not tackle every aspect of the government starting with the most expensive (such as the size and overuse of our military) and working its way down.

The main problem I have with our government is that the parties decide their actions not based on evidence but philosophy. If you are a Republican all spending is bad unless it is for war, bailing out companies (unless of course it is a Democrat who continues the policies of his Republican predecessor then it becomes bad), and prescription medicine extension. The Democrats have similar illusions about other programs and philosophies.

Nobody seems to care about what actually works; don’t ask me what that is because we haven’t had a chance to see if any policy enacted by one party or the other actually does work. The Republicans come into power and dismantle all the programs instituted by their rivals, whether or not they work, with most of them not having enough time or funding to find out if they could work. They then institute their own policies and programs. But those too are not given any chance to work because the Democrat that follows quickly dismantle or neuters those programs. So it continues with nothing getting done and nobody learning anything.

Meanwhile, those of us who work for a living are forced to hold our nose and choose one party or the other. Shall I vote for the party that is slightly less likely to go to war with the wars it does choose being slightly more about justice than vengeance but also supports the ‘right’ to destroy our own children. Or shall I choose the party who is against abortion, but somehow doesn’t seem to find the pennies needed to take care of those more unfortunate than us.

Sorry for the rant and for going off topic. Bringing it back… I don’t be-grieve a single penny that our government spends on the poor (provided it is moral). Solving poverty is a hard problem made harder by the fact that we can’t decide as a nation how it is to be done. (We are too busy at each others throats over dueling philosophies. Even when one side gets a program started the other makes certain to sabotage it by underfunding, etc.)

Come back and discuss this again after we have covered the bloated military, bailout programs, and every other program that uses significantly more money than what we spend on those who most need it.

 

[Tony_the_mad]

Very relevant!

If the politicians were not busy trying to stuff money into the pockets of their cronies, the government would actually have more money to be able to do good things!

I just don’t see this as being a significant source of government waste. Most waste such as pork is done to appease voters and not cronies. And even that pork is small compared to the budget.

Almost everyone sees the government as being wasteful because they judge whether or not a program is ‘wasteful’ by how well it aligns with their priorities. Spending that aligns with someone else’s priorities are deemed waste. About half the government programs are aligned with democrats and half with republicans with too small of a fraction aligned with both or better yet the entire electorate. (The object of politics is to destroy the enemy not to cooperate with them.) In my opinion, that is what accounts for everyone thinking the government is full of waste.

 

[nordskoven]

The welfare cash doesn’t go to fight poverty. LBJ’s War on Poverty increased black unemployment, for example. It’s a bureaucratic scame, like the million dollars spent to tighten homes to help energy efficiency that got frittered away. Jobs end welfare. Familes end welfare. Subsidizing women with children and no husband at a higher rate crashes the economy of the poor. They know that. Earned Income Tax Credit crashes families and the IRS tracks this through computers to insure no daddy is giving his address as the same as a woman with children declaring as “Head of Household.” Out goes daddy, just as they did in the sixties with social workers checking under the bed to insure no daddy is in the house. This is racist plantation politics designed to knock people off the ladder of success and put them on the plantation plateau of poverty. Those southern democrats who refused to back Eisenhower’s Civil Rights bill and were outvoted by Republicans under Kennedy have gotten their racist agenda emplaced after all.

 

[BobCatholic]

I just don’t see this as being a significant source of government waste. Most waste such as pork is done to appease voters and not cronies. And even that pork is small compared to the budget.

I think you have a rather limited view of what a crony is.

There are politically connected groups whose votes were bought with our money. When we lost hundreds of billions of dollars in the bailouts because the democrats want to make sure the unions were able to survive at the expense of bondholders and other people who (if we had a nation of laws) were screwed over. Look at the Delphi retirees who got their pensions cut thanks to the union bailouts. I’m not just talking about government spending, I’m talking about other costs imposed on non-cronies to make sure cronies get cash.