While most government programs provide benefits and services across all citizens irrespective of economic class, welfare programs provide benefits exclusively to persons with lower incomes. Government welfare programs differ from most other government activities. Webster’s dictionary defines “welfare” as “aid in the form of money or necessities for those in need.” REF Replacing “those in need” with “those with low income,” we obtain a rough but reasonable definition of government welfare programs: aid in the form of money or necessities for those with low income. State welfare spending levels have been estimated using the state matching rates required by federal law and from data provided in earlier CRS reports or other federal government documents.
REFįor purposes of this report, all federal spending figures have been taken from the annual budget documents prepared by the OMB or departmental budget justifications other federal government documents were used for early years. REF The CRS report also includes a few small programs in which the expenditures flow mainly to middle-class rather than poor and lower-income persons these programs are not included in this Heritage report.
Veterans’ benefits are an earned benefit and therefore not regarded as means-tested aid under the definition employed in the current report. This is largely due to the CRS’s inclusion of some aid programs for veterans in its list. REF However, the federal means-tested spending reported by the CRS is somewhat higher than the totals provided in this report. The list of means-tested welfare programs covered here is nearly identical to those included in the CRS reports. The current paper also covers a much longer timeframe, from FY 1950 through FY 2016. The main differences are that the CRS report is limited to federal spending on lower-income persons, while the current paper includes both federal and state spending. The programs and spending covered in the current paper are very similar to those covered in the CRS report. REF Regrettably, CRS reports on aid to poor and low-income persons receive little or no attention. The most recent version was issued in 2016 and covers spending between fiscal year (FY) 2008 and FY 2015. This report, “Federal Benefits and Services for People with Low Income: Overview of Spending Trends,” is issued irregularly by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Only one largely unknown government report totals the cost of means-tested welfare or aid to poor and low-income persons. Its cost ranks below support for the elderly through Social Security and Medicare and below government expenditures on education but above spending on national defense. In fact, however, welfare or aid to poor and low-income persons is now the third most expensive government function. REF Means-tested welfare also includes billions of dollars in state government contributions to federal welfare programs, and this spending never appears in any federal budget document.īecause of these problems, the large cost of aid to the poor is mostly invisible to the press, decision makers, and the public. Spending levels for many programs can be discovered only by data mining the annual 1,300-page budget appendix produced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Whereas Social Security and Medicare appear as two distinct line items in the federal budget REF and defense spending appears on one line, federal welfare spending is spread across 14 government departments and agencies, nine major budget functions, and 89 separate programs. Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, government has spent vast sums on welfare or aid to the poor, but the aggregate cost of this assistance is largely unknown because the spending is fragmented into myriad programs.
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