The Old Republican Bait-And-Switch

Means-testing for federal benefits leads directly to ruin. That's why FDR was adamantly, 100%-opposed to means-testing for Social Security. He knew better than anyone what heartless bastards the Republicans were, and even starting down that dark and evil road would be to offer too much, no matter what the seemingly-reasonable arguments might be. Thus, richer folks get larger Social Security benefits, and THAT is the key to its political survival. People instinctively defend Social Security because that it is THEIR money (and they are right)! Still, the GOP has tried for decades to get Democrats interested in means-testing. Some suckers, like Barack Obama, ARE very much interested. Resist at all costs! Follow FDR's example!

And how much does welfare really cost? As the GOP knows, it depends on your definition of welfare:

“Welfare” is commonly understood to refer to Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF), the block grant program that replaced Aid To Families With Dependent Children under the 1996 welfare-reform law. The federal government spends about $18 billion per year on TANF. Sometimes “welfare” is also understood to mean food stamps. The federal government spends $78 billion per year on food stamps. Combined cost: $96 billion. Annual expenditures on Social Security ($731 billion), Medicare ($486 billion), and defense ($718 billion) are each greater by a factor of five or more. (Throughout this column I’m using data for fiscal year 2011, the most recent available.)

Is Sessions a math dunce? No, he just subscribes to an unrecognizably maximalist definition of “welfare,” one that includes every single federal program that’s means-tested. He includes Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, usually described as health care programs, which account for nearly half his total. He also includes Pell grants, job training programs, and various other functions that are “welfare” in roughly the same sense that all government spending is “socialism.” By stretching welfare’s meaning until it has almost none, Sessions is able to calculate the total welfare tab not at an underwhelming $96 billion, but at $746 billion, which is indeed more than the tab for Social Security, or Medicare, or defense. Then he adds in the state-funded part of these programs so he can say the total exceeds $1 trillion.

As recently as 2008, the federal tab was one-quarter lower. What happened? Sessions blames the Obama administration for encouraging too much participation, but the obvious problem is the economy. The Great Recession and weak recovery were a catastrophe for low-income people, making it necessary for the government to provide additional assistance, mainly through the 2009 stimulus.

...But Democrats also worry that the more efficiently Medicare and Social Security target those who most need them, the more politically vulnerable these programs will become. With the GOP jamming every means-tested program under the “welfare” rubric to decry a trumped-up epidemic of dependency, this isn’t an abstract fear. Democrats would be fools not to suspect that, for Republicans, reform is a prelude to elimination (or at least drastic reduction).

...Never mind that the common worry that long-term cash benefits will breed welfare dependency is inapplicable to most of these other low-income programs. Medicaid recipients don’t get hooked on heart bypass surgery. Pell grant recipients don’t get hooked on midterm exams.

Republicans condemn all lower-income programs as welfare because they’re kind of welfare-dependent themselves. ... So they defined welfare down. They began by shifting their ire to food stamps; they experimented with redirecting it to unemployment benefits; and eventually they simply pathologized all means-tested benefits, even though most had never particularly troubled them before.