Interesting article — thanks for posting. I wish you would rethink your application of the term “affordable”. From the perspective of welfare recipients, all handouts are “affordable”. $1 billion/day cash payments for each person? Quite affordable from the recipients’ viewpoint. But Illinois and PA are fine examples of states that are bankrupt. Is a vast expansion of Medicaid or any other net spending increase “affordable” for the taxpayers? The “savings” that the article discusses are actually just reductions in an enormous spending increase by bankrupt governments.
When we’re talking about waste in government there is plenty of it. Low income beneficiaries are not the problem.
There is a staggering amount of administrative waste, lax fiscal controls, no account of how and where money is spent and questionable expenditures.
Those are things we need to do to get spending under control and get government to do better the things it should do.
Unfortunately a lot of people resist common sense reforms. We need accountable and effective government in this country.