#safety-net

Both James Kwak and Mike Konzcal make excellent points in response to the recent (and also generally good) New York Times article "Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It". From Kwak's response (which contains a link to Konzcal's piece):

"The idea that politicians have expanded the safety net is just not true, with the exception of the Medicare prescription drug benefit and an expansion in Medicaid that hasn’t taken effect yet. Spending on social programs has increased for a few obvious reasons: the baby boomers have started taking Social Security benefits, increasing that program’s expenditures; the recession boosted unemployment benefits, disability claims, and eligibility for poverty programs; and most importantly, health care has gotten much more expensive.

But those programs themselves haven’t gotten more generous (except, again, for Medicare Part C), nor have they expanded to cover more people. Instead, as Mike Konczal shows in detail, the federal government took an axe to the safety net back in the 1990s (remember welfare reform?). Remaining programs such as TANF have declined in real value. What has happened is not that the safety net has gotten more robust, but that the same real benefits have gotten more expensive because of demographic shifts and excess health care cost growth.

In short, the middle class is getting a larger proportion of “safety net” payments not because that net is expanding from the poor to the middle class, but for two other reasons: one is that we’ve cut the programs for the poor; the other is that health care is getting more expensive.