Try this sometime: apply for Medicaid, SNAP, or unemployment insurance and see how far you get in a week. You’ll fill out forms that ask about every dollar you have and every asset you own. You’ll wait on hold. You’ll get a letter asking for documentation you already sent once. You might get denied over a paperwork error even though you actually qualify, and then you start the whole thing over.
Now watch how fast Washington moves when a bank needs rescuing, a war needs funding, or a corporation wants a subsidy. No asset test. No work requirement. No six-month recertification. Just a bill, a vote, and a wire transfer. Economists have a name for this kind of help when it goes to a business instead of a person: corporate welfare. We just don’t call it that on the news.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this site writing about the gap between what our government says it can afford and what it actually funds. The pattern is always the same. When people need help, we build a maze and call the maze accountability. When corporations, banks, or the Pentagon need money, we call it an investment and cut the check the same month. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a choice about who this country’s social safety net is actually built for, and I think we’ve gotten the answer backwards.
When You Need Help, You Get a Maze
In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a budget package that rewrote the rules for two of the country’s biggest safety net programs, Medicaid and SNAP. If you’re on Medicaid through the ACA expansion, you now have to prove you worked, volunteered, or attended school for 80 hours a month, and you have to prove it again at least every six months. States have to build entire new verification systems to check your hours against payroll data, unemployment records, and SNAP or TANF files. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services didn’t finish writing the detailed guidance for how any of this actually works until June 2026, almost a year after the law passed. States don’t have to fully enforce it until January 2027, though a few, Nebraska among them, started early.
Here’s the part that should make everyone angry, not just people on Medicaid. When Arkansas and Georgia tried versions of this work requirement before, the paperwork didn’t mostly catch people who weren’t working. It caught people who were. In Arkansas’s earlier attempt, 95% of enrollees subject to the requirement were already working or qualified for an exemption, and roughly a quarter of them still lost coverage anyway, because they missed a filing deadline or the state’s system couldn’t match their hours to a database. The Congressional Budget Office expects the new national work requirements to be the single largest source of Medicaid savings in the bill, worth an estimated $326 billion over ten years, and expects millions of people to lose coverage as a result. Most of that isn’t fraud getting caught. It’s people getting buried.
SNAP got the same treatment. Work requirements now stretch to age 64, they now apply to parents of teenagers, and the exemptions are narrower than before. Feeding America estimates the changes will pull close to 6 billion meals a year off the table for families who are already eligible.
When Banks or Businesses Need Help, It Shows Up Fast
Compare that timeline to what happens when the people writing the rules decide a bank or a business needs saving.
Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008. Eighteen days later, on October 3, Congress had passed and President Bush had signed a $700 billion bank bailout, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. No bank had to prove it had exhausted its own savings first. No executive had to document 80 hours of work a month to keep the money flowing. It was underwriting a crisis, and it moved like one.
Twelve years later, the same speed showed up again, and this time it happened in the very same bill as the exact opposite experience for regular people. The CARES Act, signed March 27, 2020, created the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses and expanded unemployment insurance for laid-off workers. Businesses could largely self-certify their way to a loan, and the first $349 billion went out the door in under two weeks. The Small Business Administration’s own inspector general later estimated that at least $200 billion of the roughly $1.2 trillion disbursed through PPP and its sister disaster-loan program was potentially fraudulent, a direct result of the agency loosening its controls specifically to move money faster.
Meanwhile, in that same crisis, under that same law, a third of Americans filing for unemployment insurance in mid-2020 waited more than three weeks for their first check, up from just 7% before the pandemic. Nearly 400,000 people waited more than 70 days. People who had just lost their jobs burned through savings and sat on hold for hours while businesses down the street had already spent their PPP money.
Same emergency. Same law. Two completely different levels of trust.
The Same Law That Cut Taxes Also Added the Paperwork
The 2025 bill I mentioned earlier didn’t just add work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP. It’s also the bill that made the 2017 tax cuts permanent, passed through the budget reconciliation process specifically so it wouldn’t need 60 votes in the Senate, with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The individual tax cuts, the higher standard deduction, and the business tax provisions all took effect for the 2025 tax year immediately. Nobody receiving a bigger paycheck or a lower tax bill had to file extra paperwork proving they deserved it, log their hours, or wait on a state agency to build a new computer system to check their eligibility. The Tax Foundation estimated the individual cuts alone reduced taxes by $129 billion in 2025 alone.
The Medicaid and SNAP provisions in that same bill needed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and individual state agencies to write new rules, build new data-matching systems, and train caseworkers, a process that’s still not finished as I write this. The tax cuts started paying out the same year Congress passed the law. The infrastructure to make poor and working families prove they deserve food and health coverage is still being built eighteen months later.
If you want to know what a government actually values, don’t listen to what it says. Watch what it makes easy.
Nobody Asked the Pentagon to Prove It Needed the Money
Zoom out further and the pattern holds. Researchers at Brown University’s Costs of War project put the total cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere at roughly $8 trillion, once you include interest on the borrowing and the future cost of veterans’ care. Nobody asked the Department of Defense to prove it had a household budget under the poverty line first. Congress appropriated the money because the request came from the Pentagon, not because anyone made the Pentagon fill out a form proving need.
War isn’t the only place this shows up. The Cato Institute, which is about as far from a pro-welfare-state think tank as you’ll find, tallied up direct federal business subsidies in 2025 and found the government hands out $181 billion a year in corporate welfare across energy, agriculture, semiconductors, broadband, aviation, and more. That’s not a talking point from the left. That’s libertarians looking at the same federal budget I’m looking at and calling it what it is. None of that money comes with a work requirement, an asset test, or a six-month recertification. It comes with a lobbyist and a good relationship with the right committee.
We’ve built two different vocabularies for the same behavior. When a person needs temporary help, it’s a handout that requires proof, oversight, and eligibility limits. When a business or an industry needs the same thing, it’s an investment, an incentive, or economic development. Same transaction. Different word. Different level of scrutiny.
“Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps” Was Never Supposed to Be Possible
This gets at something I think about every time I hear a politician talk about self-reliance. The phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” has been floating around American culture since at least 1834, when a newspaper called the Workingman’s Advocate used it to mock a man for claiming he could do something physically impossible. An 1888 physics textbook used the same image as a textbook example of a task that literally cannot be done, the same way you can’t lift a chair while you’re sitting in it. For most of the 19th century, that was the entire point of the phrase. It described something absurd.
Somewhere in the early 20th century, as a story about rugged individualism took hold in American culture, the phrase flipped meaning. By the time James Joyce used it in Ulysses in 1922, it had started to describe people who succeeded through unaided effort. Today we use it completely straight, as sincere advice, with none of the original joke attached.
I bring this up because I think the joke was the more honest version. Nobody pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. It’s not possible, and it was never supposed to be. The people who founded this country understood that much: the Constitution’s preamble says the government exists in part to “promote the general welfare,” not to stand back and watch while people attempt the impossible on their own. Somewhere along the way we decided that helping a person was suspicious, but helping a corporation was just good economic policy. I don’t think that’s an accident of language. I think it’s a choice about who gets to ask for help without shame attached to it.
Why Your Health Insurance Depends on Where You Work
Here’s something most Americans have never been told: the reason your health insurance is tied to your job isn’t because anyone sat down and designed it that way. It’s an accident of World War II wage controls.
During the war, the federal government froze wages to control inflation. Employers who wanted to compete for workers couldn’t just pay them more, so they started offering health insurance instead, since it technically wasn’t a wage. The War Labor Board went along with it in the early 1940s. Then in 1954, Congress wrote the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance permanently into the tax code, removing a cap that had limited how generous the tax-free benefit could be. Coverage went from a fringe perk covering roughly 20 million Americans in 1940 to the backbone of health insurance for well over 150 million people today.
Nobody voted on tying your family’s health coverage to your employer. It happened as a side effect of wartime price controls and a tax decision made seven decades ago, and then it calcified into something we now treat as natural law. It’s the reason people stay in jobs they’ve outgrown for the insurance. It’s the reason losing a job can mean losing your family’s health coverage at the exact moment you can least afford a medical bill.
There’s also a real cost to running health care this way. Estimates of Medicare’s administrative overhead usually land around 2%, compared to somewhere between 12% and 18% for private insurance. Critics of that comparison, including the Heritage Foundation, argue it’s not entirely apples to apples, since Medicare covers an older and sicker population, which mechanically shrinks the administrative share of total spending. That’s a fair point worth taking seriously. But even accounting for it, nobody seriously argues private insurance is more efficient dollar for dollar. We built the most expensive way possible to deliver health coverage, tied it to your employment status by accident, and now argue about whether people “deserve” it if they don’t happen to have the right kind of job.
Childcare Now Costs More Than Rent in Most States
If healthcare is the accident, childcare is the afterthought. The United States has never built a public childcare system the way most wealthy countries have. What we have instead is a private market that gets more expensive every year.
The national average price of childcare hit $13,184 per child in 2025, according to Child Care Aware of America, up 23% since 2021. For two kids, a toddler and an infant, that’s an average of $28,168 a year, about 35% of the median household income. In Massachusetts it’s $47,012, or 44% of that state’s median income. In every state with data, center-based care for two children costs more than median rent, and in most states it costs more than a mortgage payment. In a majority of states, infant care alone costs more than in-state public college tuition. The federal government’s own benchmark for “affordable” childcare is 7% of family income. No state meets it.
Texas, where I live, sits at the federal minimum wage floor of $7.25 an hour, the same rate it’s been since 2009, the longest stretch without an increase since the minimum wage was created in 1938. Do the math on what a full-time job at that wage means next to a $13,000-plus annual childcare bill, and you’ll understand why so many parents, mothers especially, end up leaving the workforce entirely. It’s not that they don’t want to work. It’s that working doesn’t pencil out once you subtract what it costs to have someone watch your kids while you do it.
What About Waste, Fraud, and Abuse?
I want to take the other side seriously here, because it deserves a real answer, not a dismissal.
Yes, fraud is real, and it costs real money. The Small Business Administration’s fraud task force, under the current administration, recently referred over 562,000 suspected fraudulent PPP and disaster loans, worth $22.2 billion, to the Treasury Department for collection, loans the prior administration had flagged but never pursued. That’s a legitimate accountability story, and credit where it’s due for finally acting on it.
But notice what that story actually shows. The fraud happened because the program was designed to move money fast with minimal verification at the point of disbursement, a deliberate choice to prioritize speed over scrutiny for businesses. Nobody is proposing that Medicaid or SNAP applicants get to self-certify their eligibility with no documentation and sort out the details years later. If anything, it’s the opposite: we’ve built more verification into a few hundred dollars a month in food assistance than we built into six-figure and seven-figure business loans.
Oversight matters. Taxpayers deserve to know their money is spent well, whether it’s going to a family, a bank, or a defense contractor. What I object to isn’t accountability. It’s accountability that only seems to show up once the recipient is poor.
What I Think We Owe Each Other
I don’t think any of this is really about money. We’ve watched this country find $700 billion in eighteen days, $8 trillion over twenty years for wars nobody voted on directly, and $181 billion a year for businesses that never have to prove they need it. The money has never been the real obstacle. The obstacle is a decision, repeated over and over across both parties and multiple administrations, about who has to earn the benefit of the doubt and who gets it automatically.
I think a government’s basic job is to make life better for the people who live under it, especially in a country with the resources this one has. Not as a favor. Not as an act of charity we can revoke the moment someone calls it socialism. As the actual point of the thing. Health care shouldn’t depend on whether your employer happens to offer it. Childcare shouldn’t cost more than rent. And getting help when you actually need it shouldn’t require more paperwork than a business needs to collect a federal subsidy nobody’s going to double check.
We already know how to move fast when we’ve decided something matters. I’d like to see us decide that people matter that much too.
