From 1975 to 2015, social spending by federal and state governments quadrupled in constant dollars, to more than $1 trillion. America now spends enough to give every person in poverty more than $20,000 per year. And yet lamentations for a collapsing safety net are rising in both volume and pitch.

Because of Medicaid, the safety net feels weaker as it grows heavier, exposing bigger gaps even as it spreads.

In the past year, an essayist for The Economist told of how, after the 1970s, “the welfare state ceased its expansion and began to retreat.” A staff writer for The Atlantic warned that the net is “thin and getting thinner,” the New York Times’s economics columnist bemoaned a “tightening of the screws,” and The Week titled a column “The Grotesque Injustice of Starving 1 Million Unemployed Americans.”

Because of Medicaid, the safety net feels weaker as it grows heavier, exposing bigger gaps even as it spreads. Bad design and political pressure have allowed this one program to dominate our ever-expanding anti-poverty system. Medicaid now accounts for most of what we spend to aid the poor…

Read this entire piece in the recent issue of National Review (Sept. 12, 2016)

This article is republished with permission from our friends at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.