Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State

by William Voegeli

Since the beginning of the New Deal, American liberals have insisted that the government must do more—much more—to help the poor, to increase economic security, to promote social justice and solidarity, to reduce inequality, and to mitigate the harshness of capitalism. Nonetheless, liberals have never answered, or even acknowledged, the corresponding What would be the size and nature of a welfare state that was not contemptibly austere, that did not urgently need new programs, bigger budgets, and a broader mandate? Even though the federal government’s outlays have doubled every eighteen years since 1940, liberal rhetoric is always addressed to a nation trapped in Groundhog Day, where every year is 1932, and none of the existing welfare state programs that spend tens of billions of dollars matter, or even exist.

Never Enough explores the roots and consequences of liberals’ aphasia about the welfare state’s ultimate size. It assesses what liberalism’s lack of a limiting principle says about the long-running argument between liberals and conservatives, and about the policy choices confronting America in a new century. Never Enough argues that the failure to speak clearly and candidly about the welfare state’s limits has grave policy consequences. The worst result, however, is the way it has jeopardized the experiment in self-government by encouraging Americans to regard their government as a vehicle for exploiting their fellow-citizens, rather than as a compact for respecting one another’s rights and safeguarding the opportunities of future generations.

Genres: Politics, Economics, Nonfiction

280 pages, Hardcover

First published April 20, 2010

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Voegeli is a conservative but not a strident one. He describes the balance, a see-saw, of ever-increasing demands for more benefits which must be balanced against revenue. His main thesis is that benefit levels always rise, even under conservative administrations, which may only serve to restrain the rate of growth. Increasing benefits is hindered if taxes must be raised substantially, but there have been prosperous eras when taxes were not much increased. The book is especially valuable for its many tables. National Defense spending peaked at 37.5% of GDP in 1944-5, reflecting WWII, and reached 13.1% in 1954 (Korea) but was only 9.5% in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam war, and 4% in 2007 (Iraq, Afghanistan), thus, the author does not believe that recent wars have been a major impediment to improved benefits. Total federal spending as a percent of GDP increased from a wartime peak of almost 44% in 1944, settled into a fairly constant level afterwards, from 14% to 22%,and was 20% in 2007. Spending for human resources (other than veterans' programs) has risen steadily from 1-2% of GDP in the late '40's and early '50s to 12.3% in 2007.(Human resources = social security, federal employee retirement and disability, MediCare, health-education and training.) Persons proposing improved benefits often think that increased taxes on the rich can reasonably provide the needed resources. In constant dollars, all taxpayers have an improved income (both pre-tax and post-tax) when 2005 is compared to 1979, but the greatest gains are seen in the wealthiest. Raising taxes on the wealthy would provide some additional revenue but only the top 5% have pre-tax incomes exceeding the level ($200,000) now touted as middle-class by leading politicians, and only 1% have post-tax incomes exceeding that amount. Thus, the pool isn't very deep. When looking at spending options, we need also to look at revenue options.

[Alex MacMillan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is one-star book as a re-read of the book, 12 years after I initially gave it five-stars. The younger self in my Goodreads profile pic had a rave opinion (I give five stars to only the top 2-3% of books I read). I've changed a lot as a person, read a lot of other books, learned how to evaluate evidence for arguments in law school, and been out in the real world. Plus American politics has changed a lot since 2012. So this book reads very different today, like a time capsule from pre-Trump conservatism (and a time capsule into my own changed perspectives). I could see how the ideology and policy proposals in this book were duds from the start (i.e. the Paul Ryan "looming debt crisis" GOP from the early 2010's). Trump's GOP has largely moved on to supporting a "nationalist" welfare state: keep or expand the welfare state for their core constituents, while gutting public assistance to the poor.

I was considering a two-star rating, in the sense that this read is a case of "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point." I gave such a two-star rating earlier this year to Poverty, by America for being fundamentally flawed but interesting, and considered doing the same here. But then I remembered that the premise of this book is built-upon bad intentions: to create an intellectual foundation for doing things like taking school lunches away from children so that the donors who finance the author's Claremont Institute sinecure (the DeVos, Bradley, and Scaife families) can pocket the difference. The author deeply despises paying taxes, to anyone other than military veterans and military contractors, so much so that he creates a book of straw man to beat over the head with sloppy rhetoric.

The good: Lots of great empirical data on the growth of "welfare state" spending over time, with general trends between different presidencies. He also compares the USA's spending over time to that in other countries, including the European model that Democrats would love to implement. Key finding: voters in the United States have the greatest capacity, but lowest willingness, to pay taxes in service of the safety net.

Great data on how post-tax transfers to each income quintile have changed over time. Around page 322 his data clearly shows that the bottom 80% of Americans have a higher post-tax income due to the "welfare state" taxing of the top 20%. He hilariously strains for reasons to find this state of affairs to be abominable.

He makes a great point that the Democratic Party advocates for expanding programs with an awareness that the public is unwilling to pay more taxes for said expansions. He then also points out that the Republican Party cuts taxes while knowing that the public is unwilling to cut existing benefits, and that tax cuts do not actually pay for themselves. He proposes both sides get together and compromise, by agreeing to set limits to what social support the federal government is responsible for. (Historical footnote: at the time this book was written, most Americans mistakenly thought the bond market would imminently lose its appetite for US treasuries and there would be a debt crisis). However, he never advocates for the GOP ever agreeing to tax increases in exchange for spending cuts, as he believes that any spending in the "welfare state" bucket (i.e. anything he believes the GOP voter does not receive a net-benefit from) is illegitimate in the eyes of the founding fathers or other such nonsense. So he's not really being the adult in the room here.

The bad: He never really gets into specifics or the merits of cutting particular programs. Keeping things in the theoretical plane is easier than having to get down in the weeds and forthrightly explain why certain programs should be abolished. But that's what democracy is all about in the real world: constituencies and lobbyists expand or contract various programs over time as the public's opinion shifts.

He also never gets specific about which Americans are "undeserving" of help (although his racial dogwhistling is obvious). Instead of reading this book, I recommend Cato's Downsizing the Federal Government, which advocates in good faith for specific cuts without this book's mean-spirited and reactionary baggage.

He never establishes a 1:1 relationship between the size of the welfare state in various countries and their rate of economic growth (hint: because there is none), which is foundational to his "rising tide lifts all boats, so we can remove the life rafts" argument.

He never discusses George W Bush's big expansions to the "welfare state" (Medicare Part D, CHIP...), even though that all happened shortly before this book was written. I guess that gets in the way of the straw man "liberalism" versus straw man "liberty" dichotomy throughout the book?

The ugly: The theoretical Chapters 2 and 3 are abominable argument and should be skipped. He liberally cites to lame op-eds or cherry-picked anecdotes to support strange arguments that a safety net equals totalitarianism. But an op-ed by a friendly ideologue is not factual support. I took the time to look up and actually read some of his key citations, to decades-old newspaper clippings: the factual reporting citations do not back up his wilder claims, while the op-eds he cites to wildly misconstrue what happened.

And his cynicism towards, and barely-contained hatred of, other Americans can be breathtaking at times, to put things mildly. - 12/6/24

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is balanced despite its provocative title. His argument is that conservatives, specifically economic libertarians, need to reconcile themselves to the fact that voters have made it clear that they do not want Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid repealed. On the other hand, he says that liberals must define realistic limitations for not only these programs, but all social spending. The book is balanced because the author is equally critical of Republicans (e.g. George W. Bush) for allowing social spending to increase at such a significant rate over the course of the past fifty years.

[Lisa Tangen · Rating 5 out of 5]

phenomenal book on the chasm between conservatism and liberalism...liberals have no unifying philosophy except evolution - that we're all "getting better" as humans - they don't believe in timeless principles like inalienable rights...very readable book...exhaustive detail

[Paul Sand · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

But the subtitle on this book reads "America's Limitless Welfare State" and if it contained a buttoned-up, elegant woman snagging erotic and romantic attention, she was very well hidden.

William Voegeli's book came out in hardcover back in 2010, but the paperback and Kindle versions only last month. (I snagged the paperback.) It earned rave reviews from a host of conservative pundits, and deservedly so. It manages to be both insightful and depressing, especially when read in tandem with the recent campaign and election results.

Voegeli does some impressive number-crunching, tracing the increasing size of welfare spending over the past decades, also making international comparisons. He makes a compelling case that welfare programs naturally expand, invariably well beyond the promised limits claimed by their initial designers. (It's difficult to think those promises are made in good faith.)

Liberals, Voegeli says, have never had a principled theory of welfare; their ultimate goals are vague even in their own minds. Hence the book's title: there are always more schemes to implement, more "unmet needs" to meet, more dollars to be taken from Peter to give to Paul. The only limit is the mathematical one of 100%.

Being unprincipled in theory leads to being unprincipled in practice. Much welfare spending is designed for political viability, which in practice means that the beneficiaries expand well beyond the truly needy. Voegeli recalls the late William F. Buckley's picture of "the skies black with criss-crossing dollars." So much money flying around serves to obfuscate what's going on. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is so passé; the modern welfare state largely robs Peter to pay Peter, while the robber takes a decent cut off the top for himself, and tells Peter that he's being done a great favor.

Voegeli believes that the primary viable strategy for conservatives to limit the welfare state is to implement means-testing on most outlays; no more sending Social Security checks to Warren Buffett and Mike Bloomberg. In his view, conservatives need to make peace with the fact that the welfare state is here to stay, it's an inevitable feature of modern democracies, and the only hope is to figure out a feasible and equitable way to put some brakes on the juggernaut.

Interestingly, he makes some pointed criticism of libertarian critiques of the welfare state. Libertarians suffer from the flip side of "never enough": they have no principled limit to how small they would make the welfare state. Their contribution to the debate (Voegeli says) is inherently futile and unhelpful.

(Interestingly, Voegeli makes no mention of the proposal Charles Murray put forward in his 2006 book, In Our Hands[image error]: just replace all programs with a modest yearly stipend to all adult citizens for them to spend as they want. Unfortunately, this proposal went nowhere; guess it made too much sense.)

[John Maniscalco · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Voegeli initially sought to write a book about what the ideal welfare state would look like - when the resources and scope of the welfare state would be a size in which liberals would be satisfied. He found out he couldn't write that book, because proponents of the welfare state will always argue for its growth.

In this brilliant critique of the welfare state, Voegelli finds that liberalism has no limiting principle nor an ideological goal that can ever be achieved. As a result, Americans are saddled with a welfare state that grows even as society becomes more prosperous and it becomes clearer by the day that it cannot be sustained. But this is not simply an attack on liberalism. Voegelli concludes that the libertarian and supply-side impulses of conservatism have never been able to roll back the welfare state and, at best, can only temporarily slow its growth. He argues that doctrinaire libertarianism cannot win at the polls and that the inability of supply-side economics to provide significant tax savings to the majority of the electorate will lead to inevitable defeat and thus conservatives must engage with liberals to enact a more efficient and fair welfare state that provides benefits only to those that truly need it.

At a time when America's fiscal health is at the top of the political agenda, this book provides a wealth of information that are absolutely necessary to understand how the welfare system currently works, why it will inevitably grow, and how it is leading the country off a financial cliff. This book should be read by every serious student of American politics.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched and an interesting thesis (though perhaps not entirely original.) Voegeli is an intellectual, not a pundit, and as such that is the quality and tone of the writing throughout and I think even those who might shy away from this book for political reasons would be interested in a few of the insights within. One of those is that, yes, some of the lack of support for the welfare state springs from the sense that the aid is not going to "people like us" whereas, say Iceland, can have a well-funded welfare state and not encounter remotely the same resistance because the entire nation is 300,000 people with a strong and fairly continuous identity as a people. This brings to mind the research on diversity and social capital (though some of the data may not be as significant from Putnam's work, there are other scholars who have drawn out a very clear set of problems with diversity, from whatever perspective, and social capital and cohesion.)

Perhaps the central thesis of the book is that postindustrial developed societies/economies are pretty much guaranteed to have relatively substantial welfare states with their attendant entitlements and benefits. The goal, Voegeli argues, should not be the pipe dream of some grand anarcho-capitalist state, but providing for benefits which do not corrode the character of the polity or the individuals who receive them, while also not bankrupting the state. His is a reasonable perspective, one that only the most reactive of ideological opponents would inveigh against, I'd think, but then one should never presume too much when it comes to touchy sociopolitical issues.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a stunning first few chapters outlining the flaws in the progressive mindset and political agenda, Voegeli goes on to present his idea of a solution. However the unfortunate truth is that Voegeli does not see the previous 200 pages of problems as an inherent flaw in liberalism, but merely a problem that the zeal of modern liberals has imposed upon itself, solvable by a glass of temperance. What a disappointment, particularly after such a perspicacious look at the issues during the first two-thirds of the book.

Voegli basically takes a pragmatic view toward the "conservative" position, as if the sides of the political spectrum are chosen just for fun using dice instead of being based on a person's deeply held beliefs, whatever they may be. His final solution, his conclusion of the book, can be summed up in one word — surrender. Basically, just quit fighting and pull up a seat at the table and eventually the other side will do the same. You finish the book with your mouth agape, feeling like you were just a victim of one of Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts.

Out of charity I'll give it 4 stars, but when you make a stunning case, and then turn around and sell the foundation out from under everything you just said...what can we say? How can such brilliance be so blind?

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part history, part commentary, and part political strategy, I found this book to be a very engaging look at the country's welfare state. I rated this 4 stars relative not so much as an absolute rating against all books I've read, but relative to others in the genre. Although written by a conservative, I appreciated the perspective that neither side can realistically to reach their goals (stated or perceived). Voegeli includes a couple of dense sections of statistics -- GDP numbers, tax %, etc. -- that I did not research for accuracy. I confess that the statistics were secondary to me. Much of the conversation around each approach for government involvement surrounds the underlying principles, which is what I focused on throughout the book.

[Curtis Edmonds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Explains, at length, and with charts, what we already knew - all other things being even, utopian socialists promising candy and puppies for everyone will always beat stodgy dumb Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans promising spinach. Does not explain what, if anything, Republicans can do about it.

[penny roth]

It is a history lesson and an eye opener.

[Alberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written, but doesn't contain anything particularly original or insightful. Ultimately not as good as it could be because it offers neither solutions nor predictions. Might even be 3 stars.