"All Aboard the Gravy Train" by Chris Edwards (Cato Institute: Commentary)

"All Aboard the Gravy Train" by Chris Edwards (Cato Institute: Commentary): "The CFDA was launched in the 1960s because members of Congress needed a guide to help their constituents access benefits from the hundreds of new Great Society programs. There were 1,019 federal subsidy programs by 1970; the number rose more in the late 1970s before President Reagan cut back in the early 1980s. It started growing again in the late 1980s, but leveled out in the mid-1990s as Congress briefly restrained the budget.

This decade, budget restraint vanished and the number of subsidy programs grew by 27 percent. The number of subsidy programs in the Department of Agriculture increased 56 percent thanks to bloated farm bills in 2002 and 2008."

"To illustrate the broad advance of the federal welfare state, here is a sample of large and small subsidy programs added since 2000 and their annual cost:

Medicare prescription-drug benefit ($62 billion)
Homeland-security state grants ($1 billion)
Local firefighter-staffing grants ($180 million)
Clean-diesel funding ($156 million)
Healthy-marriage promotion ($150 million)
Community abstinence education ($117 million)
Education-data-systems grants ($100 million)
Small-shipyards subsidies ($98 million)
Bioenergy-fuels grants ($80 million)
Anti-gang state grants ($45 million)
Laura Bush library program ($26 million)
Specialty-crop block grant ($49 million)
Seniors' farmers-market program ($22 million)
EPA community-action grants ($2.4 million)
Drug-free-workplace grants ($1 million)

All these programs cost taxpayers money, but they also generate great deals of bureaucracy. Each requires armies of federal, state, and local administrators to handle grant applications, police eligibility, calculate funding formulas, and write stacks of reports that nobody reads.

These efforts don't always work, so scam artists claim unjustified benefits. (The cost of fraud is in the tens of billions of dollars for large subsidy programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.) And each new subsidy program spurs the creation of lobby groups that set up camp near Capitol Hill to push for even higher federal spending."