The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs, review by Tyler Cowen

*The High Cost of Good Intentions* by Tyler Cowen
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/10/high-cost-good-intentions.html
Oct 14 2017

The subtitle is  A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs, and the author of this new and excellent book is John F. Cogan of Stanford University and the Hoover Institution.  It is the single best history of what it covers, and thus one of the best books to read on the history of U.S. government or for that matter American economic history more generally.

How did the American entitlement state get built?  In multiple, discrete pieces:

The House and Senate overwhelmingly approved a modified version of President Truman's Social Security proposals in June 1950.  The Social Security Amendments provided a mammoth across-the-board increase in monthly benefits.  The law's sliding scale of benefits...averaged 77 percent per recipient...The 1950 Act also rewrote Social Security's eligibility rules to enable hundreds of thousands of workers with little history of contributing payroll taxes to begin collecting benefits.

And:

...from 1969 to 1975, inflation-adjusted federal entitlements pending grew annually at a remarkable 10 percent, registering an 86 percent increase in six years...Total annual inflation-adjusted entitlement expenditures grew 20 percent faster under President Nixon than they had under President Johnson.

And:

The eligibility liberalizations from 1997 to 2008 produced sharp increases in the food stamp and Medicaid rolls.  From 1998 to 2008, the food stamp rolls increased to 28 million people from 20 million and the Medicaid rolls increased to 59 million from 40 million people.  The liberalizations enacted during the Great Recession have lasted well beyond the recession's end in 2010.  In 2016, the number of food stamp recipients ballooned to 44 million, and the number of Medicaid recipients rose to 73 million in 2016.

Here is a good sentence:

In 2015, 41 percent of the nation's nonelderly-headed households received entitlement benefits.

This book is well-written and has useful and important information on virtually every page.