While changes and reforms to the U.S. safety net continue to be a major focus for Congress, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Pope argues in his new book that a more fundamental review and refresh is in order. “The American Way Of Welfare: Providing For Those Who Can’t Provide For Themselves” makes the case that entitlement programs have become too focused on middle-class beneficiaries and don’t sufficiently serve the low-income Americans they were created to protect. Spotlight spoke with Pope recently about the book; the transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why don’t we start with your idea for the book and what prompted you to write it.
My objective for this book really was to help organize people's thinking on what could be a really complicated and misleading topic. We have so many welfare programs, so many healthcare programs, so many retirement programs. They each have different names, they have different eligibility criteria, different purposes. It's a lot of work for an expert to keep track of things and I don't know how the lay person is expected to understand all this.
So, what I was trying to do in this book was really to try and create a way of thinking that can be applied across all these programs to really assess their merits, their purpose and their effectiveness, a way of making it easy for people who are lay people, which is all of us when we're engaging in a new subtopic on the issue of the welfare state, to think about systematically and critically about these programs.
And what would be some of the key principles that you would advise for people to do that?
I begin the book with a famous quote from Abraham Lincoln, which is the idea that the role of government is to do for people what they can't do for themselves. And it's been a very popular quote with politicians of both parties over the past century or so because it's fundamentally a pretty sound way to think about the welfare state, about entitlement programs, about healthcare, about retirement. It gets people asking the right questions and it's politically appealing. But also, I think it's a much more helpful ideological frame than the traditional sort of small government Libertarian or big government Democratic social objectives.
I think those kinds of ideologies really aren't close to what policymakers are thinking about in Congress, in D.C. The intuition that this was the right way to think about things kind of grew up for me when I was on Capitol Hill working for a committee and I realized that the actual policymakers and committee staff were really thinking in these terms. This was almost the touchstone that they were internally thinking about and then they'd go back to ideological rhetoric to sell things to their bases. But what seemed funny to me is that the internal committee staff debate was actually much closer to the intuitions of the general public. It’s really unfortunate when we have this great disengagement and polarization and actually the dirty little secret is that the insiders are asking pretty much the same questions that the outsiders are interested in.
So, as voters are approaching the midterms, what are some of the questions that you think that they should be asking? I mean, if you follow the popular narrative, the focus is on work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid. Are those, to you, the issues that people should be focusing on? Or should they be looking at larger issues, such as the health of Social Security, the health of Medicaid going forward, that sort of thing?
These programs are obviously very, very substantial. And for a lot of people who are beneficiaries or taxpayers, there is a big, big impact on their life. But I think that politicians in elections, especially midterm elections where we're looking at the possibility of a divided government, will be tinkering around the edges. I don't think that there is an enormous amount of reform by either party being proposed right now. I think even the One Big, Beautiful bill, which was enacted at the beginning of the Congress, has very modest changes. On work requirements, for instance, the states have an enormous amount of discretion in implementing those.
I think this book is not meant really to speak to the midterm elections. I think that that's very small ball. It's meant to speak to the bigger question, which is that we have these trillion-dollar programs that are on auto pilot to get much bigger if nothing happens. It's really intended to ask some broader questions. One, why were these programs created? Two, are they doing a good job? Three, can they be better structured given the objectives that we have? Some of my concerns are obviously with the means-tested programs, but the enormous bulk of the welfare state is mostly middle-class retirement benefits. And its justification has been loose and poorly scrutinized, and that's where the money is.
Is one big takeaway from the book then to focus on the people who need aid the most?
If we take a step back from everything and were building this afresh, that would be how we would think about it. We would say we have potentially three or four trillion dollars in entitlement spending and is that going to the place where it's most needed and most effective?
And what’s a main reason for why we have ended up in a place where that isn’t happening?
People underestimate the impact of World War II. When we sort of think about policy making in general, we think about elections, we think about ideological divides. But the left and the right are really entrenched. They're really camped in. They've been planning to stop the other side from moving for decades. Even great policy changes that are deliberate make very little difference in the grand scheme of things. But World War II really was an enormous change. And during the war, not many people were thinking about welfare policy or entitlement policy. And it completely revolutionized the country because the needs changed radically. The political constraints were completely loosened. The opposition was all over the place.
World War II, especially in Europe, but I think also to a substantial extent in the United States, really completely transformed the nature of the welfare state from a fairly well-targeted set of programs for the poor to being very focused on retirement benefits. I think a big reason for that was partly because the Second World War created this enormous tax windfall, as the percentage of the population taxed rose from about 7% to 70%. But secondarily, inflation was very substantial during the Second World War. And so, we had a lot of savings and private investment vehicles that had been relied upon to provide for people in old age that were completely wiped out, especially in Europe.
And this led to just a massive transformation in the welfare state and a massive expansion of government to fill in what private resources had previously done. Governments created pay-as-you-go pension systems, and we got burdened with these enormous middle-class entitlements.
And is Social Security perhaps the best example of the programs that you're talking about?
One of the chapters kind of goes through the creation of Social Security. And there were two titles of Social Security. The first title was called Old Age Assistance, which was essentially a means-tested benefit for low-income seniors. And that was very popular. But what we now think of as Social Security was Title II of the legislation, which was this payroll tax combined with benefits such that it mostly goes to the middle class.
Initially, we spent much more on the means tested benefit than on the middle-class benefit. It was only after 1950 legislation that Title II became much more substantial. The war really revolutionized Social Security.
And Chris, what would you hope that policymakers take away from the book or perhaps potential presidential candidates in 2028 who are beginning to think about platforms and hopefully are beginning to think about some of these issues.
I guess I sort of have a message for both Democrats and Republicans. I think for Republicans, there has been a lot of confusion about what the purpose of the welfare state is. So, for them, the book provides an understanding that the welfare state that we have, you can actually reform it, you can reduce spending, you can make it much more focused, and there's a systematic way to do this that's going to improve the effectiveness of entitlement programs but also reduce the cost of government.
For Democrats, the message of the book would essentially be pick your battles. There are unmet needs there. And when you're wanting to expand programs, make sure that those expansions are well-focused, because if they're not well-focused, most of your spending's not going to actually fill unmet needs. It's just going to serve to crowd out private resources. It's mostly going to go to the affluent. And you're not going to get the outcomes that you're hoping for.