by Dan Mitchell | Feb 7, 2026 | Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
I wrote recently about how government handouts are creating dependency (perhaps deliberately) for low-income Americans, and I elaborated on this topic for Austin Peterson’s show. The real issue in this debate, as discussed in my two-part series...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 2, 2026 | Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Today’s column features a very depressing chart from a report published last year by the Congressional Budget Office and it shows that poor people now get about three-fourths of their “income” from handouts. That’s far different from the data in 1979, when poor people...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 18, 2025 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Government is far too big today and it will become an even bigger burden in the future because of demographic changes and poorly designed entitlements. There’s no way to fix this problem without a major effort to shrink the redistributive...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 23, 2025 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
At the start of the year, I pointed out how politicians used the pandemic as an excuse to increase the long-run trend line of government spending. Today, let’s look at how one component of the federal budget has contributed to America’s perilous fiscal...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 21, 2025 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Let’s take another look at America’s extravagant welfare system. In Part I of this series, I shared a map showing which states provided the biggest TANF handouts (just one of many welfare programs). In Part II of this series, I shared a comparison of total...