Government Spending and Poverty Programs Revisited

Susan Stabile kindly responds to my post documenting the massive size of current government programs and the enormous expenditures on social programs already in place. She challenges the significance or meaning of some of the data that I provided and concludes that they fail to demonstrate a "serious commitment to the human flourishing of the poorest."

While the Hodge chart that I included in my prior post does include government pensions in the description of skyrocketing social spending (as compared with defense spending) over the past 60 years, I carefully separated out government pensions when noting that the categories of welfare, health care, and education spending by government constitute 40 percent of overall government spending and some 15 percent of our entire national economy. Now even if we were to assume that only half of health care spending by government and only one quarter of education spending by the government provides benefits to the poor, with all spending on welfare obviously being directed to poverty programs, government spending on programs for the poor in 2007 exceeded $1 trillion. If a trillion dollars of government spending on poverty programs, not even accounting for the many more tens of billions contributed by Americans each year to charities that serve the disadvantaged, does not demonstrate a "serious commitment to the human flourishing of the poorest," then apparently the sky really is the only limit.

I also offer this further defense of the reliability of the data that I provided: As evidence that the figures supposedly are hard to pin down, Susan says that Census Bureau statistics indicate that defense spending in 2007 was 20 percent of government outlays rather than the 13 percent figure that I used. In fact, the figures on government spending are readily available in some detail in Census Bureau statistics. The 20 percent figure that Susan identified is the share of defense spending as a part of the federal government budget viewed in isolation. As I'd noted in my post, and as the heading in the pertinent chart confirms, I was presenting the figures for government spending at all levels: federal, state, and local. The federal government is not the centerpoint for all governmental activity and programs in this country. State and local spending on poverty programs and education is considerable and should not be neglected. Defense spending indeed is only 13.4 percent of overall government spending and less than 5 percent of GDP, a level of defense spending that is lower today than before the Clinton Administration and much lower than it has been at many periods during the past half-century. And while defense spending as a share of GDP has been stable or declining, social spending as a share of GDP has nearly doubled in the past 40 years.

I stand by my earlier observation that those who advocate more government spending, new government poverty programs, and higher taxes to pay for it all have a great burden in proving that government consumption of more than a third of economic production in this country and government exaction of the product of nearly a third of our work lives to pay the taxes is negligible and insufficient.

Greg Sisk