If we don’t end the welfare state, the U.S. won’t get another 250 years.

The United States of America can’t survive the welfare state. Not for another 250 years. Not for another 50 years. Perhaps, at this rate, with mass migration not even for another 25 years.

Not only is a growing share of the population dependent on means-tested benefits, but we’ve sent a signal to the rest of the world that if they come here, they can not only enjoy a government-subsidized life, but they can make millions running their own non-profits.

The Somali frauds in Minnesota were only the most flagrant tip of a rotten welfare iceberg. The entangled political and economic interests that made that monstrosity possible pervade every city and system in this country to a degree that would have been unimaginable even fifty years ago, when social scientists were warning about a future in which everyone was on welfare.

Since then, the social services sector has merged even more deeply with local politics and migrant resettlement to spawn a seemingly infinite variety of new services and ‘privatized’ them by outsourcing them to politically connected contractors. Rather than just having a welfare state, every community now has innumerable ‘welfare start-ups’ and ‘welfare providers’ with their own satellite networks of businesses providing management, grant writing, medical care, translation services, training, day care, adult day care, and countless others owned by community leaders who also run voter turnout operations, fund PACs, and themselves run for public office.

The welfare system has splintered into thousands of welfare states within a state. The price tag for this is increasing exponentially so quickly that no one can even hazard a good guess at it.

The state welfare bureaucracies haven’t gone away, but they now clumsily oversee dozens of welfare statelets in every major city that cater to very specific minority and immigrant groups. Aside from the fraud, which is pervasive and mostly unpunished, these new ‘welfare states within a state’ constitute taxpayer-funded enclaves for not only Somalis, but countless other groups, maintaining a tribal or clan system of governance at odds with the United States.

The economics are unsustainable. It’s become routine for city and state budgets to double within a decade. The pace is only accelerating and the fraudulent accounting and gimmicks that have been used to postpone state and municipal bankruptcies will only hold for so long.

But it’s also culturally unsustainable. American cities have ceased to be American and are becoming tribal welfare states. The members of these enclaves are not American, have no desire to become American and have annexed parts of America to their own countries, commuting back and forth, and using welfare money to fund property purchases back home.

Some are not actively hostile to the United States, while others are violently disposed to us.

Welfare mass migration to the United States must end. The Trump administration has begun taking some important steps in that regard by enforcing some regulations already on the books.

No one should be able to enter the United States if they will become a ‘public charge,’ no matter what sob stories accompany them. Anyone sponsoring new arrivals should be held financially accountable for any costs they accrue. Rather than diversity lotteries, statistical tables of welfare use by culture and country of origin should determine immigrant admissions. Members of groups from high-welfare-use countries and cultures should be barred from the United States.

No immigrant should be able to apply for citizenship if they or their family members have drawn on the welfare system within the last twenty years. And any use of government subsidized benefits, whether food stamps, refugee aid, or funded health care, should be treated as a debt that must be repaid before any further benefits are given, rather than aid given free of charge.

No federal money should be able to be passed on by states to contractors. If a state cannot provide a particular form of aid or benefit through its own offices, the money should be returned. While government aid bureaucracies are notoriously poor at managing money, the Somali fraud crisis in Minnesota shows that using third-party non-profits is an even worse arrangement.

Draining the welfare swamp will provide added benefits by also weakening the links between state and local party machines and the bloc votes they rely on. Without the ability to provide financial benefits to minority and migrant enclaves, the system of voter fraud will break down, and democracy might even take hold once again in places like California and New York.

But the welfare system isn’t all a matter of foreigners. In too many places, Americans have learned that benefits fraud is easier than working, and from disability fraud (including military disability fraud) to food stamp abuse, it’s become a way of life in some places. That culture is just as rotten and needs to be addressed because it’s at the root of the problem.

America can’t survive as a system doling out privileges without obligations. And that is what’s really at stake. Even if America had infinite wealth, a system in which one group of people works for a living while another cheats the system for a living is morally corrosive, it convinces more of the population that the game is rigged and that there’s no point in even trying to be honest. That’s what happened in the USSR, it’s what happens in failed states and it’s happening here.

Welfare fraud is just another symptom of the corruption of a constitutional system of limited government into a massive pie that everyone wants to carve up. When the federal government has budgets in the trillions and states in the hundreds of billions, while getting virtually nothing done, government becomes just another name for one group stealing from another.

The second group are known as the taxpayers and the first group, whether they’re billionaires, corporations with armies of lobbyists or ghetto grifters, are members of the welfare class.

Willie Sutton said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. These days, governments blow through far more money than banks and with far less accountability. No amount of DOGE audits will fix the problem when the problem is the money itself.

If we don’t want a welfare state that’s bigger than the country, then we need a government with far less money and far less ability to spend it. That’s what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created a much more modestly sized federal government with far more limited powers that was funded by tariffs rather than an infinite variety of taxes imposed on Americans.

There is no way to substantially shrink the welfare state, the fraud and the corruption without shrinking the government. The escalating federal and state budgets offer a warning about the near future. We cannot continue spending this much money without not only going deep into debt, but without destroying our national identity and our moral fabric as a nation.

Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield