The rise of the Welfare State

The Claremont Institute put out an excellent piece that chronicles the rise of big government since 1940.

One of the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) historical tables tracks annual federal outlays beginning in 1940, using enormous categories ("superfunctions") composed of smaller but still vast "functions." The two main superfunctions, National Defense and Human Resources, have together accounted for at least 61.7% of federal outlays in every year since 1940. The superfunctions that account for the rest of federal outlays are:

• Physical Resources (e.g., Energy, the Environment)
• Net Interest on the National Debt
• Other Functions (e.g., Science, International Affairs, Agriculture, General Government, and the Administration of Justice)

If we group those three final superfunctions as "Everything Else," we can see the changing makeup of the federal budget over the past 67 years in Chart A.

OMB's Human Resources superfunction is made up of the following six functions:

• Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services
• Health (excluding Medicare)
• Medicare
• Income Security (excluding Social Security)
• Social Security
• Veterans' Benefits and Services

Let's leave the final category off the list, since veterans' programs don't figure prominently in the arguments liberals and conservatives have conducted over the size and scope of government. What's left is an imperfect but useable approximation of the welfare state. (The chief imperfections are that we're looking only at federal expenditures, which leaves out state and local welfare state spending; and that the costs imposed by regulations, like the minimum wage laws, don't show up in the federal government's outlays.)

Anybody that says war is bankrupting our nation needs to take a good look at the chart above. Human resource outlays account for approximately 65% of federal outlays, while national defense outlays account for approximately 20%.

The long political advance of liberalism has coincided with the refusal of any prominent liberal politician or writer to specify or even suggest the welfare state's ultimate and sufficient size. Instead, liberals have denounced our shockingly insufficient welfare state every year since the beginning of the Progressive era. When Max Sawicky did so in 2004, real, per capita expenditures on Human Resources were more than twice as large as they had been in 1975.

Yet it would be absurd to argue that the sort of economic insecurities the welfare state exists to alleviate were twice as severe in 2004 as in 1975, or that America had been little better than a Third World country during Gerald Ford's presidency. The percentage of Americans who owned their own homes increased between 1975 and 2004 from 64.4% to 69.1%. Average life expectancy became 5.2 years longer. In 1975 the proportion of Americans aged 25 or older whose educational attainments included the completion of at least four years of high school was 62.5%, and 13.9% had completed at least four years of college. By 2004 the percentages were 85.2% and 27.7%, respectively.

Numerous consumption items that had been luxuries or Research-and-Development daydreams in 1975 were parts of the furniture of American life in 2004, even for millions of Americans with incomes below the median: e.g., color televisions receiving dozens of channels by cable or satellite, home computers accessing the internet, air conditioning in homes and cars, cell phones and microwave ovens. None of these developments give pause to liberals who say that a welfare state that doubles its outlays in the 29 years separating a prosperous era from an even more prosperous era needs to grow dramatically faster.

Nor do liberals ask hard questions about how the persistence of shocking and shameful poverty relates to this inexorable growth of the welfare state. Americans were jarringly reintroduced to their economically vulnerable and socially isolated countrymen by Hurricane Katrina. Ask any hopeful Democrat leaving an Obama rally what we should do about such poverty, and you'll be told that the federal government ought to spend a lot more money to help these people. What you won't be told is that a welfare state that grows 4% a year for six decades and still hasn't eliminated the nation's worst poverty might have problems that more money can't solve. Specifically, you won't hear serious consideration of the possibility that the benefits already dispensed by the welfare state are not so much scandalously inadequate as scandalously misallocated.

Our elected officials never consider doing a comprehensive review of any program, they just keep asking the taxpayer for more money. I am reminded of this every time I go to the polls and there's a bond measure on the ballot for schools, parks, bridges, hospitals etc. that I could have sworn I voted on in the prior election. No matter how much money is asked for, it never seems to be enough.

Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio is sponsoring H.R. 808 which would establish a Department of Peace and Nonviolence. There are 70 co sponsors, all democrats.

Department of Peace and Nonviolence Act - Establishes a Department of Peace and Nonviolence, which shall be headed by a Secretary of Peace and Nonviolence appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. Sets forth the mission of the Department, including to: (1) hold peace as an organizing principle; (2) endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; and (3) develop policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict.

Establishes in the Department the Intergovernmental Advisory Council on Peace and Nonviolence, which shall provide assistance and make recommendations to the Secretary and the President concerning intergovernmental policies relating to peace and nonviolent conflict resolution.

Transfers to the Department the functions, assets, and personnel of various federal agencies.

Establishes a Federal Interagency Committee on Peace and Nonviolence.

Establishes Peace Day. Urges all citizens to observe and celebrate the blessings of peace and endeavor to create peace on such day.

Yay, yet another government program that I will be obliged to pay for if it ever gets passed into law. What I want to know is how one enforces the rules that will surely be established by the Department of Peace and Nonviolence? Will they force people to conform to peace and nonviolence by using peace and nonviolence? It sounds positively Orwellian to me, or rather, sounds like a good job for Obama's Youth Brigade.

The single best idea I can think of for reforming the behemoth that is our government would be to establish a house in Congress whose sole function was to review and repeal laws and programs. For every new bill that was slated to pass, one would have to be repealed; and the bottom performing 5% of all government workers and any irrelevant positions would be eliminated every year.