Meet the New Class of Welfare State Getover Artists, Same as the New Class, And Otherwise Known as Bureaucrats

Glenn Reynolds has a great column
up at USA Today. It’s about what he calls “the New Class,” or
the bureaucrats, crony capitalists, and other flunkies who make
their living by administering the modern welfare state.
Reynolds—you love him as the interweb’s Instapundit—notes the main reason we
don’t give poor people cash to spend as they see fit is that such
an arrangement wouldn’t benefit well-connected folks.

A lot of programs officially aimed at the poor look suspiciously
like subsidies to the New Class, too. Among “means-tested”
programs, Food Stamps, now officially called SNAP, cover
about 46
million people up to 125% of the poverty
line (set at about
$16,000 for a single mother and child). Other programs, such as
the Earned Income
Tax credit, cover people at slightly higher incomes, up to 200%
of the poverty line. When federal spending on the dozens of
programs are added up and state and local contributions included,
the budget for assistance is about $1
trillion.

If we simply handed those people, perhaps
60 million of them, their share of the cash, that would be more
than $16,500 each. A single mom and her baby would get over
$33,000, twice as much as a poverty wage. A family of four would
land more than $66,000, $15,000 more than the average
family income.

So where’s the money going? To people who aren’t poor, such as
doctors paid through Medicaid or landlords paid through Section 8.
And to tens of thousands of members of the New Class, people like
social workers, administrators and lawyers who run more
than 120
different means tested federal programs.

Read the whole thing.