The welfare state is bad news. It’s bad for taxpayers and it’s bad for recipients.
It’s also bad for the economy since prosperity is in part a function of the quantity of labor that is productively employed.
As such, government programs that lure people into dependency obviously reduce national economic output.
We can get a sense of how the nation is being hurt by reviewing some of the scholarly literature.
Writing for the Cato Journal, Lowell Gallaway and Daniel Garrett explore the relationship between redistribution spending and poverty reduction.
They start by pointing out that more welfare spending used to be associated with reductions in poverty. But when President Johnson launched his so-called War on Poverty and dramatically increased the level of redistribution, the link between welfare spending and poverty reduction substantially weakened.
…the real per capita cost in the United States of federal public aid rose…