 According to the usual news sources, Donald Trump's new budget proposal, quote, envisions steep cuts to America's social safety net, unquote, and will, quote, gut social programs, unquote. Most of the cuts were proposed to pave the way for more Pentagon spending. In truth, Trump's proposal doesn't matter and Congress will set to work piling on more deficit spending for both social programs and for the Pentagon. But the debate of gutting social programs will no doubt be used to perpetuate yet again the myth that the United States is ruled by libertarian social Darwinists who ensure that no more than a few pennies are spent via social programs for the poor. Hello, this is Ryan McMakin, and you're listening to the Mises Institute's Radio Rothbard. Now, setting aside the question of whether or not social programs are the best way to address poverty, the fact is that the United States government's spending on social programs is on a par with Australia and Switzerland and can hardly be described as laissez-faire. Moreover, government spending on healthcare per capita in the United States is the fourth largest in the world. Governments in the United States pour money into social benefits programs at rates typical to a Western welfare state. We can debate whether or not the way this is done is suboptimal or not, but the fact remains that if we're going to talk about social programs, the amount of spending in the U.S. is not low in a global context. According to the 2016 Social Expenditure Database at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, public social spending as a percentage of GDP in the U.S. was 19.4%. While it is true the U.S. is hardly the highest on this list, its social spending is higher than that of Canada, Australia, Ireland, and Iceland, all of which we are often told are far more generous countries in terms of their welfare states. Indeed, if the typical American leftists were asked if the U.S. should spend as much as Canada or Australia on social benefits, the response is very likely to be an emphatic yes. And yet, the U.S. outpaces all of these and has spending levels comparable to that of Switzerland. Indeed, the difference between Switzerland and the U.S. in this measure is four-tenths of 1%. The OECD averages 21.4%, a matter of 2.1 percentage points difference from the U.S. When we turn to the matter of healthcare, we find that the U.S. is a world leader in terms of governmental healthcare spending. According to the World Health Organization, only Luxembourg, Norway, and the Netherlands spends more government money on healthcare per capita. In the U.S., the sum is 4,153 per capita, and in Norway it is 5,154. In the United Kingdom, the total is 2,716. This presents a problem for advocates for more government control of the healthcare system, of course. Often their line of argument is that Americans are too stingy with social health benefits. When confronted with the fact that government spending is quite high, however, they switch tactics and then declare that if the U.S. adopted a more government regimented system, then spending would actually be lower. This was a tactic employed by Bernie Sanders. This latter claim may or may not be so, but the one thing we do know is that the U.S. already spends more per taxpayer on healthcare than most everyone else. So it seems hard to fathom that the problem, whatever that may be, is a problem of too little government spending on healthcare. If advocates for reform want to argue over how the money is spent, let them do so, but the debate should hardly include any proposals to increase government spending. In the U.S., government spending on healthcare as a percentage of total government spending is also one of the highest among wealthy nations, although by this measure the U.S. is equal with Japan and the Netherlands. I am not a defender of the U.S. government's gargantuan military budget, but even considering that huge expense, government healthcare spending still takes up an unusually large amount of government spending in the U.S. overall. There is no shortage of articles and publications like Slate and The Nation, stating that the American social safety net does not exist, and that the U.S. has a quote, stingy social safety net, unquote. Now, if by stingy one means poorly administered, ineffective, or counterproductive, then one would be on to something. But if by stingy one means underfunded, well, there's little evidence of that. Even many advocates for a reduced federal budget are likely willing to consider ideas that would spend taxpayer dollars more effectively. After all, if it's a given that one is going to pay a large federal tax bill, one often would rather see that money go to something like housing for a single mother and her children who are living in a car. But are federal dollars actually doing that? Critics of American stinginess are themselves quick to point out that all that American spending on social benefits isn't pushing down poverty rates. Even if one believes that governments are generally poor at accomplishing the goals they set out to accomplish, it seems that in this regard, the U.S. government is especially bad. There may be many reasons for this, but the fact that in terms of size, scope, and geography, the U.S. is nothing like the much-vaunted European welfare states seems to never get mentioned. After all, it should be considered worth noting that among the Western welfare states, the United States is by far the largest, with 320 million people. The next largest country isn't even half that size, and is Japan with 125 million people. And of course, Japan's geography, culture, and demographics are completely different from that of the U.S. Once we get to governments of the size and physical scope of the U.S. government, we're looking at something on a scale that can't possibly be considered responsive or accountable by any measure. It becomes nearly impossible to make changes in such an enormous apparatus, which itself cannot possibly take into account the vast number of different populations and conditions that exist across a place such as the United States. Thus, comparing the U.S. welfare state to that in a country like Finland, with 5 million people, makes no sense at all. If critics of the U.S. welfare state really wanted to be more like those found in Scandinavia, a good first step would be to immediately break up the U.S. administrative state into dozens of much smaller independent states. This would of course mean ending the federal government's welfare state as we know it. But that by itself isn't a magic bullet since we know that in California, which has its own supplemental welfare state on top of the federal one, poverty is higher than in any other state. Nevertheless, if we're going to hear constantly about what successes the Scandinavian welfare states are, we might as well use this as an excuse to create states on a more Scandinavian scale. Given that the largest Scandinavian nation state, Sweden, has a 10.1 million-person population, this means breaking up the American welfare state into at least 30 totally independent smaller pieces and going from there. These programs would then be under the control of local residents at least, as they are in say Denmark, and not something controlled by distant untouchable Washington bureaucrats and politicians. An even better size for each piece would be something on the scale of Norway, which has 5 million people and is thus the size of Minnesota or Colorado. At the very least, no government larger than a U.S. state ought to be in the business of social benefits. After all, when it comes to government programs, bigger has never been better. Thank you for listening to Radio Rothbard. Sources for the data used in this talk can be found in the written version linked in the description. And if you're not subscribed already, please subscribe to Mises Media on YouTube and subscribe to our daily email service under the subscribe tab at Mises.org. Have a great day.