The United States is one of the richest countries on earth. Most Americans—the precise percentage will vary depending on one’s definition of “enough”—make enough money for themselves and their families that the entire welfare state could be dismantled tomorrow and they would do just fine. And yet in 2002, as I was writing In Our Hands, the federal government alone spent about $1.5 trillion in transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, and all forms of corporate welfare. The states spent another few hundred billion dollars in transfer payments. And yet we still had millions of
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