"Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt - and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become." ~ Henry Hazlitt
In 1935, the American government stepped onto that slippery slope to massive corruption with the Social Security Act. This was a usurpation of individual responsibility for caring for oneself and a violation of the powers granted to the federal government by the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Just as important, the “guarantees” in the original Social Security Act have been violated more than once.
Since WWII, the progressives (another word for communists) closeted in the Democrat party and the Deep State have turned the federal government into a socialist charity nanny state. This is something that Madison insisted is not a government function. That is another function usurped by the federal from churches and individual citizens, and contrary to provisions of the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution. And as Kennedy and Hazlitt pointed out, this is something that has been done extremely poorly, as evidenced by the level of corruption so far discovered in the last two years.
The federal government cannot or will not properly manage and account for taxpayer money used for charity-like purposes (wealth redistribution). What we know as an absolute certainty is that the federal government has not been a proper steward of the taxpayer money used for charity-like programs. I will be so bold as to say as much as one-third of our national debt that was accumulated in the last 60 years has been squandered in fraud, bribery, and other forms of corruption, with minimal amounts going to the intended purpose. If federal government can’t do it right, the federal government should not be doing it at all.