Free Republic

Thirty years ago last month, Congress replaced the open-ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) entitlement, the largest state-run, federally funded cash welfare program, with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant. This imposed stricter fiscal discipline on states running TANF, but Congress failed to extend similar restraints to other programs. Consequently, many states circumvented TANF’s budget constraints by shifting spending and enrollment to other, still open-ended entitlements. Following the 1996 welfare reforms, states moved some recipients off TANF and onto the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Today, state legislators are shifting costs onto federal taxpayers by...

A $5.5 million waterfront home in Darien, Connecticut, with five bedrooms and a swimming pool seems an unlikely recipient of your tax dollars, but it is. The owners applied for and received a $150,000 grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development years after they paid for repairs in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The Darien home is just one among thousands owned by wealthy people with expensive waterfront properties subsidized by you, the taxpayer. These proprietors are not committing fraud. They are merely taking advantage of programs Congress authorized and federal agencies tweaked to deliver federal largess to...

The PIGs are at it again. The acronym stands for "Public Interest Groups," the major associations that represent the collective interests of state and local officials in Washington. Two of the largest PIGs are the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) and the National League of Cities (NLC). They have been hard at work lately, snorting at Congress to deliver more financial assistance to hard-pressed states and cities to pay for security upgrades in the post-9/11 world. A recent USCM report claims that cities have spent $2.2 billion this year beyond regular expenses to beef up security, and the organization’s president,...