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— 281—

Section Three

THE GENERAL WELFARE

hen our Founders wrote in the Constitution that the federal government

would “promote the general Welfare,” they could not have fathomed a

massive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single

year—roughly the sum, combined, spent by the departments covered in this section

in 2022. Approximately half of that colossal sum was spent by the Department of

Health and Human Services (HHS) alone—the belly of the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state.

HHS is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt. When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law these programs, they were set on autopilot with no plan for how to pay for them. The first year that Medicare spending was visible on the books was 1967. From that point on through 2020—according to the American Main Street Initiative’s analysis of official federal tallies—Medicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.

HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsible—along with President Joe Biden—for the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic. All along, it was clear from randomized controlled trials— the gold standard of medical research—that masks provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive. Yet the CDC ignored these high-quality RCTs, cherry-picked from politically malleable