The New York Times practically wet itself the other day noting that during COVID the United States “built a European-style welfare state,” and isn’t it a tragedy that we gave it all up:

In the early, panicked days of the pandemic, the United States government did something that was previously unimaginable. It transformed itself, within weeks, into something akin to a European-style welfare state. . . Since then, most of it has been disbanded.

Since then, we’ve also had the highest inflation in 40 years, and an exploding national debt that is someone is going to have to pay for eventually. Here’s what the transfer payment expansion of that spending binge looks like:

For a “news” organization that worries about “sustainability” for everything else, why not in this domain, too?

Here’s the practical political problem: while the public generally thinks the government spends too much, there’s always a majority for specific categories of spending: