willful ignorance, facts attached

the forthcoming crises

Tucked among stories of death and destruction in Asheville, a successful Washington Redskins/Commanders’ rookie quarterback, and an impending Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon was the most profound story of the week—and it’s only Monday.

The title, “Exclusive: Americans Are More Reliant than Ever on Government Aid” does not say “expecting” nor “wasting” nor “collecting” but “reliant [upon]” government aid. This runs smack dab into two behemoths of contradiction with current political rhetoric.

The article states up front that the type of assistance crucial for many is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, three components of the mandatory spending which constitute 45% of the federal budget. These programs, in case you haven’t really thought about it, provide health care to the elderly, those determined as low income (including children), offer low cost health care premiums to those who have no employment supported access (the Affordable Care Act), and the segment of the population qualifying for overall financial help to make ends meet, whether because of advanced age or some other reason specified in the Social Security Act. Frequently assumed to be “entitlements”, these are programs originally aimed Americans falling through the safety net, often onto the streets or worse.

Indeed, the article notes that merely 1% of the counties in this country relied on these programs as recently as 1970. Today, more than half of all U.S. counties—53%—draw at last 25% of their income from government assistance. A map makes clear that these counties are disproportionately areas outside of the major cities, although the authors specify the aid is not agricultural subsidies or military facilities. Rural Americans need these entitlements for visits to the physicians, for health care tests, hospitalizations, food stamps, medicines, and similar needs.

Arguably the most eye-opening data was a bar chart showing the voting preferences for president for the 2,000 counties most dependent on federal support between 2000 and 2020.

2000 Dem: 160. Rep: 260

2004 Dem: 170. Rep: 590

2008 Dem: 220. Rep: 995

2012 Dem: 215. Rep: 1215

2016 Dem: 175. Rep: 1445

2020 Dem: 240. Rep: 1980

Again, these are the counties where citizens receive substantial federal assistance.

The article provides more granularity to the concentration of this assistance having consequences for our nation’s politics. Arizona has 15 counties but fully 13% are home to residents heavily reliant on these income sources from the taxpayer: 87% of the state’s counties, in other words. Seventy percent of the North Carolina, Georgia, and Michigan counties are “significantly reliant on the government income” while the percentage in Pennsylvania only drops to 60%. Many of these counties are increasingly older people on “fixed” income, much of it from the government.

The authors are not obsessed with negatives, pointing out that some places such as Wake County, containing North Carolina’s capital, Raleigh, has a growing population, overwhelmingly younger and less dependent on federal assistance. Wake County voters give Biden 62% of their support four years ago as a result. A twist on the voter composition also occurs in Michigan where Leelanau County with a substantial portion of wealthier retirees less dependent on government help.

The article concludes with explaining which of the various federal aid programs have expanded in the past half century. The two of the three programs mentioned in the beginning—Medicare and Social Security—provide the most basic support to aging Americans, a group that grew from 10% of the nation’s population in 1970 to 17% today. Medicaid growth is slightly slower than the other two programs.

In other words, the bulk of the issue is the aging of America, as so many other countries are experiencing.

Projections are that a quarter of our overall population will be older than 65, eligible for the assistance, by 2060. Remember, for comparison sake, the Tian’anmen massacre and Berlin Wall collapse both transpired in 1989 which was thirty-five years ago so this climbing number of seniors is happening rapidly and steadily.

Why does this animate me strongly? Back to the Reagan era, a common narrative excoriated “welfare queens” unduly seizing these entitlements, rather than help getting to needs-based citizens. Too often as the anecdotes piled up, one ultimately could not ignore the racist undertones: minorities were not working but getting government handouts as if it were candy. The associated implication was that upstanding employed Caucasians were working but their tax dollars were going to support lazy minorities, especially people having large families with more mouths to feed.

The rhetoric repeatedly used in the budget brawls that increasingly animating Washington again focus on cutting the “wasteful spending” that undeserving folks are somehow milking from the system. Is there government waste? You bet but how you or Congressman Bizapp or Senator Mehaha or I define it is the key: the waste is invariably some program from which the individual bemoaning the program somehow is not partaking.

I have written multiple times of the fantasy, if not deliberate lies, about slashing social programs to reduce the federal budget deficit to solve the $31 trillion national debt. Those purporting to address this by ending these programs are either financially illiterate or preying on those already beaten down in society by invoking cruel mimes. Again, are there people receiving benefits who don’t need them? Yes, there are but many are those who vote against means testing for some government programs. Remember the old folks chasing Illinois Democratic Congressman Danny Rostenkowski into his car in a steakhouse parking lot when we talked about means testing years ago? The other question, rarely asked, is are there people who the Legislative and Executive Branches deemed deserving who need these benefits but aren’t getting support? Yes, there are in the millions as well.

But those are not the behemoths I mentioned in the beginning. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation roadmap to remake this nation into a never-before Christian place, aims to cut precisely these programs, while savaging of government as we have known it. The people who would be hardest hit by any such cuts are not the elites so vilified in the “culture war” hyperbole of Project 2025 but those Republican voters currently dependent on these very sources of income. I am not making that up as a partisan statement: Zitner, Kamp and McGill are journalists for the most establishment, business, conservative publication, The Wall Street Journal.

Should the authors of Project 2025 become empowered to carry out their plans, the immediate impact would be upon those who rely on this funding. Too many of those recipients may not understand, when they decry “Guv’ment trying to steal my Social Security!”, that government rather than some cloaked entity somewhere is providing your and my tax dollars to them as assistance, but the 2025ers know that exquisitely. The 2025ers simply don’t care because their goal is to pare back the Roosevelt New Deal and Johnson social safety net enacted far behind the rest of the developed world. The 2025ers want to cut out the support for hundreds of millions of Americans, diminishing women in the work force, and further constraining public education and thought for those who have no options but public institutions. Some of those targets are families which have been here for centuries rather than immigrants thought to be recently arrived to acquire illegal benefits. Project 2025 is far more ambitious by intending to squash the state’s ability to support those aspects of citizens’ lives that differ from the 2025ers’ priorities.

This agenda would have an almost immediate effect on those in the 2000 counties where citizens—and voters—are so dependent on this aid. In this era of unmitigating doubt about public figures’s facts and fictions, this might not matter in an off-year election but once these programs decreased substantially would there be no backlash against the party enacting these steps? Seriously? The already amorphous basis to the Republican coalition would disintegrate.

This does not mean the Project could not have far reaching consequences, even without success in its stated goals. It could cause unrest in an already disillusioned, distrusting society where everyone but me seems to own a gun. With trust in institutions so low, how would we go about recovering from this breech of faith or financial viability? People talk about civil war occasionally but it was history, right? Was it in a society with such profound differences in access to address basic needs?

The second behemoth is the debt. My husband and I saved throughout our long careers and are now able to pay the high taxes we owe the government. No one loves to pay taxes; no one likes to pay taxes. But someone has to pay for these programs. Instead, we hear utter nonsense about addressing a growing debt by slashing what are going to be sacrosanct programs—regardless of what Project 2025 hopes— that are vital for such as substantial portion of the population leads me to ask how does any hope of addressing the burgeoning debt work if we don’t raise taxes? Our debt is now roughly the same as our gross domestic product. We aren’t going to cut the “mandatory programs” because they are indeed the financial foundation today for hundreds of millions. It’s simply a math problem: we are spending way way way way more than we are taking in and have the unrelenting interest on the debt to prove it.

Yes, but Cynthia, we could raise the retirement age to assure we keep people working, taxing their incomes, and the like. Really? Seriously? Those on the financial assistance programs today are not, for the most part, ready for the new economy where technical skills, based on STEM agility, are the key. Most Americans simply are not up to that—PERIOD. Sure, seniors want to keep their minds engaged with crossword puzzles, reading, and pickleball but they are not interested in learning new computer languages, coding for AI, or working in the deepest aspects of cyber.

Put another way, I am more optimistic that we could solve world peace than I am that we can address the debt on our current trajectory based on the data we have at our fingertips.

Our politicians mirror us, as we expect representative governance to do. We don’t want to face reality so they don’t make us face reality. This is a bipartisan cowardice of the highest, most dangerous order. Yes, confronting these things is terribly so touchy and tough; I fully understand and accept that. But to not do so only continues the paralysis we are experiencing in virtually all important aspects of our society. Yes, it is paralysis as we keep blaming someone else for our own problems.

We are engaging in willful ignorance, with some genuine financial illiteracy thrown in. Neither are characteristics of a great power. On the other hand, our approach to acting in a manner to assure we are great appears to be pretty superficial these days.

Thank you for reading Actions today. I expect most of you have rebuttals or comments so I welcome them as this is intended to be a dialogue. Please do send me your thoughts. I especially thank those of you who are subscribers who put your money behind this newsletter.

We are sailing these days into the shrouded unknown these days.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?”, cbpp.org, 18 July 2024, retrieved at https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go

Aaron Zitner, Jon Kamp, and Brian McGill, “Americans More Reliant Than Ever o Government Aid”, WallStreetJournal, 30 September 2024, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/americans-government-aid-social-security-medicare-unemployment-34e92b19