How Much Does Our Social Safety Net Cost? $742 Billion a Year and Rising

With roughly a sixth of the U.S. population living in poverty and many more struggling to stay out of it, the federal social safety net has evolved in recent years into an extraordinarily costly and wide-ranging assortment of spending and tax measures.

A new study by the Government Accountability Office provides a detailed inventory of federal welfare and social service programs identified 82 federal programs and assorted tax expenditures totaling $742 billion in fiscal 2013, the latest data available. An estimated 106 million people living in the U.S. – or about a third of the overall population – received benefits the previous year from at least one of eight programs for low income and very poor families that came in for special review by the GAO. Some of these programs are available to illegal immigrants.

With so much money at stake at a time of continued congressional concern about spending levels, these programs are certain to be scrutinized by the Republican-controlled Congress in the run-up to a new fiscal year on October 1. GOP leaders have already targeted many of these programs for cuts in the coming years, as they push for further sharp reductions in the deficit.

Thank you for referencing that article BradtotheBone. Please bear in mind that the following critique is directed at the article and not at you.

”… the federal social safety net [emphasis added] has evolved in recent years into an extraordinarily costly and wide-ranging assortment of spending and tax measures."

FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument

Constitutionally speaking, there is no such thing as a federal social safety net imo. Social Security, one of socialist FDR’s biggest constitutional frauds, was based on the Constitution’s General Welfare Clause (GWC), Clause 1 of Section 8 of Article I.

Helvering v. Davis

The problem with using the GWC to justify Social Security is the following. The three branches of the federal government wrongly ignored that James Madison, Madison generally regarded as the father of the Constitution, had officially clarified that the GWC was not a specific delegation of power to Congress, but basically an introductory clause for the delegatory clauses that follow it in Section 8.

"To refer the power in question to the clause "to provide for common defense and general welfare" would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them, the terms "common defense and general welfare" embracing every object and act within the purview of a legislative trust. …” — President James Madison, Veto of federal public works bill of 1817.

Note that Madison had clarified that the GWC was not a specific delegation of power in the constitutionally required veto letter to the 14th Congress which had tried to justify the public works bill of 1817 with the GWC. So the 74th Congress which drafted the Social Security bill made the same mistake in interpreting the GWC that the 14th Congress did. (You would think that they’d be teaching Madison’s veto letter in the law schools, but evidently not.)

Also, if FDR was so popular, why didn’t he establish his New Deal spending programs within the framework of the Constitution by encouraging Congress to propose appropriate amendments to the Constitution to the states? (The law schools aren’t just overlooking Madison’s veto letter but evidently also the Constitution’s Article V.)

The main reason that the feds aren’t respecting their constitutionally limited powers is the following imo. The post-17th Amendment ratification Senate is not doing its job to protect the states, as the Founding States had intended for the Senate to do, by not killing House appropriations bills which steal not only 10th Amendment-protected state powers to tax and spend for social spending programs, but which also steal state revenues associated with those powers.

In fact, note that the Supreme Court had clarified limits on Congress's power to appropriate taxes, Congress able to appropriate taxes basically only for things it can justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.

“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

The ill-conceived 17th Amendment needs to disappear, and corrupt senators and a tsunami of unconstitutional federal taxes along with it.

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