This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 5th, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Welfare States of Europe continue to provide a cautionary tale for the United States at a Cato Institute

student briefing. Senior fellow Tom Palmer laid out some of the costs, both seen and

unseen, of centralizing power over human welfare.

People around the world understand what we mean by a welfare state.

But most Americans do not.

They associate welfare with the poor only. They don't think that they're receiving welfare. That's what poor people get.

And yet the widest definition of means tested programs in the federal budget indicates that between a quarter and a third, closer to a third, of the portion of the federal budget associated with transfer payments could be considered

oriented towards the poor. The great bulk of it is not. In fact all of us live in a welfare

state. We are all forced upon penalty of jail into paying for Social Security, Medicare, and

a host of other programs.

We're taxed for or receive money via agricultural subsidies, support for student tuition,

state universities, and much more.

Our home purchases are subsidized by a variety of tax breaks,

and then the loans are securitized by government-sponsored agencies that direct loans to less qualified buyers.

So I'll talk about that in a moment.

And then don't forget our massive corporate welfare programs that subsidize firms to market lemons abroad,

to be able to market a wide variety of different products, all subsidize by United States

government, the subsidies of solar panel companies for example the

solender case and of course producing ethanol and possibly the most

astonishingly inefficient program for energy production imaginable in which not only is it economically

inefficient but some suggest it actually takes more than a gallon of

...