“The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal.” – Michael Kinsley

Amid the constant feed of the radical left’s unhingedness over everything Donald (especially his gift to posterity of a 25,000-square-foot ballroom wrapped in a 65,000-square-foot East Wing refurbishment) came the following post from the Honorable Josh Shapiro, chief executive of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania:

Now, to leftists, the idea that more than 1.9 million Keystone Staters would suddenly lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, née food stamps) is a scandal.

But to channel the uber-cerebral Kinsley, the scandal isn’t the temporary unavailability of benefits. The scandal is that nearly 2 million of a population of some 13 million Pennsylvanians are so dependent on a welfare program for daily sustenance.

Nationwide, around 41.7 million people, representing a little over 12% of U.S. residents, are signed up for the program at any given time. Numerically, that’s an astonishing 142% vault over the year 2000 average, driven largely by the opening of the food assistance floodgates by Barack Obama (participation actually peaked on his watch in 2013).

Parallel to the flood of crocodile tears over pending nutrition deprivation is a hail of hyped-up hysteria over early-retired, six-figure-income Boomers and other assorted unworthies “losing their healthcare/health insurance” or “seeing their premiums skyrocket.”

Translated: Facing the end of “temporary” additional subsidies that had cloaked the true costs of their Obamacare plans as members of a cohort of at least 40 million Americans on subsidized exchange or Medicaid plans.

How did we get to this juncture? Very simply, the federal government has bastardized its constitutionally mandated role of “promot(ing) the general Welfare” into “providing welfare” – period.

In “The Great Transfer-mation,” the Economic Innovation Group’s Kenan Fikri, Sarah Eckhardt, and Benjamin Glasner declare that Americans received a staggering $3.8 trillion in government transfers in 2022, accounting for an incredible 18% of all personal income in the United States – with transfer income having grown three times as quickly as non-transfer income in recent decades.

Even worse, when those dollars are delivered, it’s in the form of:

• A retirement security program for 2020s needs that was enacted in the 1930s and dramatically expanded in the 1970s, and hence is overly depended upon yet inadequate because it underdelivers versus the markets.
• That tangle of health care programs literally designed to engorge massive health care systems and insurers while continually boosting costs and underdelivering care.
• And to return to where this analysis started, a gaggle of antipoverty programs that have done next to nil to reduce that condition since Lyndon Johnson launched his famous War on Poverty in 1966.

Don’t buy that last point? Take it from the far-left Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which acknowledges that “government assistance (is) the main driver of changes in poverty.”

Both the recent swings in poverty and poverty’s longer-term decline have been driven much more by changes in government income assistance than by changes in the private economy. Before considering government assistance and taxes, poverty has improved only modestly over the past five decades, falling from 28.5% to 23.7% between 1967 and 2022.

The reason: Uncle Sam – or in reality, Auntie Sammy, the Nanny State – is paying women in particular to remain single and poor. In 1970, 85% of children lived in two-parent homes; today, only 63% live in a home with married parents. And 40% of single female-parent households participate in the SNAP program compared with 12.4% of all households; those families represent 90% of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) homes.

Now contrast the period immediately preceding Johnson’s “war,” as discussed in a 1968 Census Bureau paper your correspondent happened upon:

The 1960s have witnessed a pronounced decline in the extent of poverty in the United States. Over the course of the 7-year period from 1959 to 1966, the number of persons below the poverty line was reduced from 39 million to 30 million while the total U.S. population continued to grow … As a result, the poverty rate … has fallen even more sharply, from 22% in 1959 to 15% in 1966.

Why this rapid – and real – plummet in poor households?

For both whites and non-whites, the elimination of poverty has proven to be more rapid among families headed by men than among those headed by women. The principal reason for this development has been the fact that the persistent expansion in the economy since 1961 has been accompanied by sharp employment gains in the male workforce …

Public assistance payments in a majority of cases are insufficient to raise families headed by females above the poverty threshold … despite the steady rise of transfer payments of all kinds, the number of poor families headed by women was the same in 1966 as in 1959 … On the other hand, the number of poor families with children headed by men declined sharply.

And what period paralleled this drop in the poverty rate under the growth policies of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years (including the massive JFK tax cuts of 1964)?  How about the pre-COVID first Trump term?

In its three years – which featured The Donald’s own pro-growth tax reform – real median household income increased nearly 10% with record income gains and levels in 2019 for blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. With 2.2 million more people working than in 2018, the poverty rate hit a record low of 10.5%.

The upshot? The shutdown is more than an opportunity to flip the script on health care, as this scribe suggested a couple of weeks back.

The fake freakout over food stamps and Obamacare should be responded to with an examination of the truly scandalous immensity and futility of the Dependency Society – and how to supplant it with a Wealth-Creation Nation (or as The Donald has expressed it, “Making America Wealthy Again”).

The critical step toward that goal – foreshadowed here, and building on recent suggestions by this site’s editors – will be the subject of this commentator’s next missive.

Bob Maistros, a regular contributor to Issues & Insights, is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.