BIDENOMICS: The Welfare-Industrial Complex Is Booming.

Drill into the nation’s 3.7% unemployment rate, and you’ll find a growing welfare-industrial complex beneath the seemingly strong labor market. Government, social assistance and healthcare account for 56% of the 2.8 million net new jobs over the past year, and for nearly all gains in blue states such as New York and Illinois.

The tens of thousands of migrants pouring into big cities need to be tended to. So do the hundreds of thousands of drug-addled and mentally ill homeless living on the streets. Progressive government doesn’t do anything on the cheap. America’s welfare state has thus become a proverbial Big Dig, and it keeps getting bigger.

New York City is spending $394 a day—or $143,810 a year—to house and feed each migrant, many in formerly posh hotels. Mayor Eric Adams grouses about the flood of migrants, but what does he expect when the city makes itself a welfare magnet?

Meantime, the homeless population continues to swell, even as government shovels more money into housing subsidies—nearly $43 billion in the Democrats’ March 2021 Covid bill alone. The number of homeless shot up 85,389 between 2019 and 2023, with California and New York combined accounting for about half the increase, according to a recent federal government report.

The national media is perpetually puzzled why regular Americans aren’t giving Presidentish Joe Biden credit for the booming economy. But it isn’t booming for working Americans — which the media would know if they cared to meet any.