June 01, 2026

What Percent Of U.S. Households Headed By Illegal Immigrants Receive Welfare Benefits?

June 01, 2026/ Francis Menton

As you are probably aware, in most circumstances and for most categories of handouts, illegal immigrants in the United States do not qualify for welfare benefits.
As I’m using it here, the term “welfare” does not include Social Security or Medicare, which are not restricted by income status; but the term “welfare” does include all of the large number of what are called “means-tested” programs, which in the aggregate consume nearly $1 trillion annually of federal spending (and well over $1 trillion if state contributions are included). The biggest of the “means tested” programs are Medicaid, SNAP (“food stamps”), and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, otherwise known as classic welfare); and there are dozens more. Illegal immigrants are specifically excluded from participating in those three big federal welfare programs, and from most (but not all) of the others.
And yet there was the New York Times, in its Sunday (May 31) print edition, with a lead front page headline that may set a new record (if that is possible) for anti-Trump spin: “Trump Cuts Off Life Necessities for Immigrants.”‍ ‍
When I saw that, my first reaction was, how can Trump “cut off” illegal immigrants from government benefits (whether or not the benefits are “life necessities”) when they are not eligible for those benefits in the first place?

May 08, 2026

As Annual Medicaid Spending Approaches $1 Trillion, How Much Of It Is Legitimate?

May 08, 2026/ Francis Menton

Medicaid is the joint federal/state program that provides free medical care to the poor and near-poor in the U.S. Who could be against that?
A website called Statista collects data on various subjects of interest and presents them in useful charts. One subject is the total federal plus state spending on the Medicaid program by year since inception of the program back in the 1960s through the latest year of 2024. Here is that chart:
Looking at the chart, a few things leap out. One is rapid and unbroken growth year after year from the beginning up to the most recent year. Another is two particularly rapid periods of growth, first in the 1990s (Bill Clinton was President), and then again in the most recent period of 2020-2024.

November 12, 2025

November 12, 2025/ Francis Menton

If you want to run for office as a Democrat, there is a new catchword that you need to make as your main promise: “Affordability.”
As anybody paying attention knows, the cry of “affordability” was the central theme that carried the Democrats to victory in all the big races this year, most notably those of Zohran Mamdani for Mayor in New York City, Abigail Spanberger for Governor in Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill for Governor in New Jersey. The same theme also carried two Democrats to victory as Public Service Commissioners in Georgia — the first victories by Democrats in statewide elections for state office in Georgia since 2006.
But here is the question: Is the promise of “affordability” by these politicians something that has any prospect of being delivered through their proposed policies? Or are the proposed policies instead more likely to be useless, or even counterproductive, thus making the promise of “affordability” a scam from the outset?

July 15, 2025

July 15, 2025/ Francis Menton

Javier Milei (pictured above) was elected President of Argentina in October 2023, and took office in December of that year. He promised large cuts to government spending, bureaucracy, and regulation as the means to revive a long moribund Argentine economy crippled by government over-spending, over-regulation, excess unionism, and corporate cronyism.
But would Milei’s program work?
I last wrote about Milei’s implementation of his program in this post in November 2024. That post reported that Milei had succeeded in putting through substantial cuts in government spending and bureaucracy, but that the economy had experienced a recession during his first year in office in 2024. Likely much of that reported recession was not real, reflecting instead the removal from the GDP accounts of wasteful government spending that perversely had been counted as an addition to the economy. But would the economy then revive in 2025 as a result of the new program?

May 24, 2025

May 24, 2025/ Francis Menton

On Thursday (May 22) the House of Representatives passed, by a narrow margin of 215-214, what is referred to as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — a massive compendium of taxing and spending measures that can now seek to avoid the filibuster in the Senate on grounds of being a “budget reconciliation.” The BBB is well over a thousand pages long (go here for full text), and covers a huge range of subjects.
Most summaries of the BBB that I have seen never get to the important subject of subsidies for so-called “green” energy — wind turbines, solar arrays, grid-scale batteries, hydrogen production, and so forth.
That is understandable given the large number of important issues covered in the bill. However, the green energy subsidies are a gigantic issue. They consist of generous tax credits for wind and solar facilities that have been around for a long time, plus a barrage of subsidies and handouts created by the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
In a post that I wrote at the time of enactment of the IRA, I linked to an analysis that estimated the green energy handouts of just the IRA alone at approximately $370 billion (although I noted that the IRA handouts were un-capped and could end up being far more than that).

May 16, 2025

May 16, 2025/ Francis Menton

Down in the swamps of Washington, D.C., our Congress is said to be hard at work hammering out a budget for the coming fiscal year. With a crisis of massive deficits looming, supposedly they are going to come up with some major areas where government spending can be cut.
One of the areas under consideration for significant cuts is the program formally known as the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” or SNAP, and informally known as “food stamps.”
According to the latest data from the Department of Agriculture, as of February 2025 the SNAP program had some 42+ million “participation persons,” with the cost of the program running at just under $8 billion per month, which is close to $100 billion per year.
Is it possible to achieve meaningful savings in this program?