The New York Times

The U.S. Built a European-Style Welfare

State. It’s Largely Over.
By Claire Cain Miller and Alicia Parlapiano Updated May 11, 2023

1. Part A.
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 similar to a European-style welfare state.

Congress rapidly fortified the social safety net, making it much stronger than at any
point. It made policies like Medicaid and food stamps more generous. It created new
federal benefits like paid sick and caregiving leave, and free school lunches. And it
made some pandemic benefits, like stimulus checks and child allowances, nearly
universal. The government is estimated to have spent about $5 trillion helping
individuals and businesses since March 2020.

2. Part B.
A much more generous safety net was rapidly constructed, starting in 2020, but most
of the programs have ended or are set to expire soon.

Since then, most of it has been disbanded. When the public health emergency ends
Thursday night, certain benefits, including free Covid tests and extensions for food
stamp recipients, will begin to expire. Last month, Medicaid began unenrolling an
estimated 15 million Americans who were guaranteed coverage during the
pandemic, one of the longest-lasting benefits. A few policies — including rental
assistance, child care grants and more generous health insurance credits — won’t
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expire until next year or the year after. But for the most part, the pandemic-era
American welfare state is over.
This was by design: The policies were created as a response to the crisis and wound
down as the acute phase of the pandemic ended and the economy reopened. Efforts
to extend certain programs have failed.

3. Part C.

There has been little political will to make policies permanent because they did not
emerge from a deeper shift in how Americans view the role of government or the
rights of citizens, said Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College
who has studied social democracies.

“The set of goals — protecting people from the downsides of unemployment, helping
families with children and ensuring access to health care — are totally accepted in
Western Europe,” she said. During the pandemic, she added, “we looked more like
that, in our own patchwork way.”

“But people did not have an ideological conversion, a new view of what American
citizenship could be,” she said. Rather, it was a recognition that during the crisis,
“without these things, the entire system could go under.”

Yet the country’s brief flirtation with a much more generous safety net left its mark,
researchers said. In March, for example North Carolina opted to expand Medicaid.

None of these represent big, structural change, the way that other large-scale crises
have reordered societies throughout history. But they suggest that pandemic policies
may have made way for incremental changes in the role of government in
supporting people during hard times, Professor Berman said, by showing what is
possible.
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“I’m not making the argument that we have a budding Western European welfare
state, but I also don’t think we’ve gone entirely backward on some of these issues,”
she said. “And I’d expect in the next election for a lot of these issues to be more
prominent.”

4. Part D.
The United States has historically been opposed to the large government programs
and high tax rates seen in much of Europe. Political polarization has made a
permanent expansion of social benefits more difficult. So has the current economic
climate, with high inflation and interest rates. While Republicans argue that the
increases in government spending during the pandemic fuelled inflation, people in
the Biden administration have countered that other factors have played a bigger
role, like the oil shock from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and pandemic-related
challenges like supply chain tangles and shifts in what Americans have wanted to
buy.

“The politics of trying to make these programs permanent just isn’t there today, not
to mention budget constraints,” said Samuel Hammond, an economist at the
Lincoln Network, a right-leaning think tank. “The macro environment has turned in
a way that has sort of reaffirmed the fiscal conservatives.”