The hottest Welfare Policy Substack posts right now

Having more children is both practically beneficial and morally important: a larger population fuels innovation and social goods, and parenthood provides meaning, so current sub-replacement fertility is seen as a real problem with an ideal fertility rate higher than today’s.
Government action can raise births—expanded child tax credits and direct cash subsidies appear to increase fertility and can be cost-effective, and such support should offset parents’ opportunity costs rather than unduly burden employers.
Solving the fertility decline needs a cultural shift that raises the status of parents and frames having children as a social good, even if that requires changing norms and working across uncomfortable political lines while protecting reproductive technologies and rights.

The $140,000 "poverty line" claim is nonsense because it conflates median spending with minimum needs and misuses averages, so it doesn’t accurately measure who is truly in poverty.
Still, many families feel financially squeezed because required costs and social expectations have risen, and more households now need two incomes to maintain a typical middle‑class life.
A real policy problem is benefit cliffs and phase‑outs that create high effective marginal tax rates and can trap people, so fixing how transfers are designed matters more than viral big‑number claims.

The official U.S. poverty line is based on a 1960s rule that multiplied a minimal food budget by three, so it doesn't reflect modern living costs.
Expenses like housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, and college have grown much faster than that old benchmark, so many middle-income families feel squeezed — in some places $100,000 barely covers necessities.
The safety net is so narrowly targeted that you either must be nearly destitute to qualify for aid or rich enough to ignore rising costs, leaving a large group stuck without support.

Long-run poverty is often blamed on irresponsible behavior—especially strong present bias or high time preference—so many solutions focus on getting people to behave more responsibly or changing incentives.
Scholars dispute the key psychological root: some single out time preference, while others prefer a broader concept like impulsivity or low conscientiousness as the main behavioral cause.
There's a sharp divide over tractability: one view sees poverty as entrenched and hard to fix, while another believes tougher incentives and policies can gradually make irresponsible behavior more responsible.

The proposal to raise the poverty line to $140,000 rests on flawed assumptions and cherry-picked evidence.
It mixes up the cost of merely participating in modern American life with a proper poverty definition, and that misuse of concepts and data weakens the argument.
There really are affordability problems in the U.S., but redefining poverty this way doesn’t clarify those problems or offer a useful solution.

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Public money belongs to taxpayers, so its use should be controlled to protect taxpayers' interests and prevent misuse, including restricting transfers out of the country.
When governments or public pension funds invest on behalf of taxpayers, the top priority should be maximizing risk-adjusted returns and meeting liquidity needs, not pursuing DEI/ESG or virtue signaling.
People and private companies can spend or invest their own earned money according to their values, while public companies are accountable to shareholders who expect financial performance.

Higher health-care spending per person often doesn't lead to better health outcomes. That means much medical spending is likely wasted.
Large government health programs create big opportunities for fraud and rent-seeking because third-party billing is easy to exploit. Directly giving money to beneficiaries reduces those opportunities.
Foreign aid can become a target for rent-seeking and help entrench corrupt governments, sometimes contributing to coups and extremist violence. This 'aid curse' shows aid can worsen, not fix, governance failures.

Only a small share of immigrants strongly share western cultural values and are clearly beneficial, a larger group might assimilate, and many are poorly aligned or harmful.
Making immigration easier and offering generous benefits removed the hard selector that once favored highly assimilable migrants, which increased dependency, social strain, and political exploitation.
The fix is to prioritize selection for shared values and self‑sufficiency, cut incentive-driven benefits that attract dependents, and honestly address problems so immigration supports flourishing societies.

A presidency built around personal loyalty is eroding democratic norms and has enabled the use of armed federal forces and legal changes to target political opponents.
Policy decisions like cutting foreign aid and imposing new work requirements on safety‑net programs can cause widespread human suffering and will affect millions of people.
Scholarly critique, mentorship, thoughtful reporting, guest research, and direct giving matter — they shape understanding, push back on harmful policies, and provide tangible help to those in need.

People often grow more conservative as they age, but some do not due to changes in their beliefs about the left's social issues. They feel abandoned by the left, but their ideas haven't shifted much.
The author reflects on how their old beliefs about welfare and social issues changed after questioning the foundation of those ideas. They now see certain welfare policies as unhelpful rather than supportive.
Shifts in views about topics like abortion and the gender wage gap indicate that some are reconsidering accepted narratives and how they match reality. It's important to stay open to changing one's beliefs based on new evidence.