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Riches and honor come from You, and You are the ruler of everything. Power and might are in Your hand, and it is in Your hand to make great and to give strength to all. (1 Chron 29:12)

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John F. Cogan’s history of federal entitlement programs, The High Cost of Good Intentions, warns us that the ice we skate on has grown thinner decade-by-decade. Both Democrats and Republicans are now kicking the can down the road, apparently uncaring that the iceman soon cometh…. —Marvin Olasky

“Many of these programs may have come from a good heart, but not all have come from a clear head—and the costs have been staggering. We can be compassionate about human needs without being complacent about budget extravagance.” —Ronald Reagan, 1981

Throughout U.S. history, federal entitlement programs have sprung from the noble intention of providing assistance to people who are destitute through no fault of their own. Veterans’ entitlements, dating back to the Revolutionary War, were created to provide assistance to soldiers disabled by injuries and illness suffered during wartime service….

But over time, entitlements have become a complex system that now transfers hundreds of billions of dollars each month from one group in society to another, most often regardless of individual need. The scale of federal entitlement assistance today is unmatched in human history….

Since World War II, total federal spending as a share of the nation’s output of goods and services has increased from 15 to 21 percent. The growth in entitlement spending accounts for all of this increase…..

Entitlements have created a fiscal challenge unlike any other in the nation’s history. The baby boom generation’s retirement, coming on the heels of eight decades of entitlement liberalizations, has put the nation’s budget on a dangerous financial trajectory….

Today, the nation faces a prolonged period of permanently high federal expenditures that will impose a crippling debt burden on future generations if they are left unchecked….

The nation’s first major federal entitlements were benefit programs for disabled wartime veterans. Enacted at the outset of each major war, these programs were originally established to compensate soldiers who were disabled in wartime service and widows of soldiers killed in action. Revolutionary War pensions were initially confined to members of the Continental Army and Navy. Congress then extended pensions to members of state militias, then to disabled wartime veterans regardless of whether their disability was related to wartime service, and finally, in 1832, to virtually all remaining Revolutionary War veterans. These laws effectively transformed the original disability program for Continental Army soldiers and seamen into a general retirement program for all remaining War of Independence veterans….

In dispensing Civil War pensions, Congress discovered the power of entitlements as an efficient vehicle for gaining electoral advantage. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Republican Party used Civil War pensions as a tool to help realign the American electorate and secure unified control over Congress and the presidency for fourteen consecutive years….

A storm was brewing on the fiscal horizon.

Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought an attempt to slow the juggernaut. The attempt, however, achieved only modest success in restraining the growth in entitlement spending and in putting Social Security temporarily on a sound financial footing.

By the 1990s, there was widespread recognition in Washington that decades of liberalizing entitlements and demographic trends had put the federal government’s finances on an unsustainable path. A storm was brewing on the fiscal horizon. Yet all three branches of government acted as if they were in a collective state of denial….

Knowing full well the dimensions of the coming fiscal storm, Congresses and various presidents of the past twenty-five years continued a steady stream of legislation extending the class of worthy welfare claimants higher up the income ladder. The Congress and the executive branch capped off this remarkable period by mandating universal health insurance coverage and subsidizing its purchase for households with incomes far in excess of the national median. The Supreme Court added to the profligacy with decisions in the 1990s liberalizing disability and welfare programs and later by straining to uphold the Affordable Care Act…. From The High Cost of Good Intentions by John Cogan and published by Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif. © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Used with permission.  (Excerpts from John F. Cogan article in WORLD)