Paul Krugman is doing the rounds on his book tour (I saw him here in Philadelphia Tuesday night—yeah, I'm a dork, I got him to autograph my copy) and here he is on Democracy Now! to pound the drum for government spending. Oddly enough, Krugman's been accused of supporting austerity cuts, which just isn't true. For an hour, all he did was talk about how the government needed to spend our way out of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for the remainder of the hour, we’re joined now by one of the world’s leading economists, Paul Krugman. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, also professor of economics at Princeton University and centenary professor at the London School of Economics. His latest book is End This Depression Now!

Paul Krugman, welcome back to Democracy Now!

PAUL KRUGMAN: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: How do we end this depression now?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Spend. I mean, it’s really—it’s actually—the economics is really easy. If we were to spend more money at the government level, and actually, at this point, largely, just rehire the schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks at the state and local level, we would be a long way back towards full employment. Other things to do, we could talk about monetary policy, debt relief for homeowners and students. But the core of it is, right now, there just is not enough spending, and we need the government, which can do it, to step in and provide the demand we need.

AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, you’re going against the accepted dogma on all television among the so-called leaders of our country. Spend? In a time when the government has the debt the size it has?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Right. So you can always say, "Oh, you know, $14 trillion." Everything about the U.S. economy is huge. Investors don’t think it’s a problem. Investors are willing to lend the U.S. government money at 1.8 percent interest. This is not the time. I’ll be all for worrying about the budget deficit once the—once the economy is off the bottom. But it is not off the bottom. We are in a depression. This is the time to spend.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you get the money?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Borrow it, and then repay it later in better times, which is not at all—that may sound funny, but that’s exactly what we’ve done in the past. That’s exactly—how did we get out of the Great Depression? We got out of it by—actually, we got out of it before World War II, but thanks to the spending that preceded World War II, thanks to the military buildup. A little factoid people may not know, just this morning: Which of the major economies in the advanced world grew fastest in the first quarter of 2012? The surprise answer is Japan. Why is that happening? It’s because Japan is now spending a lot of money reconstructing after the tsunami. And that spending is driving rapid growth in Japan right now. We could all be doing that.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Mitt Romney for a moment, the presidential candidate’s economic plans and his critique of the Obama White House. This is what he said Wednesday at a campaign stop in Iowa.

MITT ROMNEY: President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, to tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt to this country as all the prior presidents combined. The consequence is that we are now enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to Mitt Romney, Paul Krugman?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Boy, you know, don’t even know where to start. I mean, Romney’s technique is that—since basically every word he says is a lie, including "a," "and" and "the," you never know where to start. But this is—the idea that the—first of all, that Obama is responsible for the large deficits is just not true. It’s overwhelmingly the result of the Bush tax cuts, unfunded wars and a terrible economic crisis that began, of course, under Bush. The idea that the deficits are what’s holding us back is all wrong. The deficits are in fact what’s keeping us afloat. If we had tried to balance the budget, we would now be in a full, full-on replay of the Great Depression. So it’s all nonsense. It’s—and, by the way, the idea of Obama as somebody who governs from the left, I mean, Obama is—Obama’s positions are those of a moderate Republican circa 1992. It’s not—he’s not a leftist. What’s happening now is you have a radical-right Republic Party.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about the Republicans, to House Speaker John Boehner, recently addressed the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2012 Fiscal Summit.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: The failure of stimulus, a word people in Washington refuse to say anymore, has sparked a rebellion against overspending, overtaxation and overregulation. Americans who take pride in living on a budget recognize that we can’t go on spending money that we don’t have. And our economy is stuck in large part because it is stuck with debt.

AMY GOODMAN: House Speaker Boehner also advocated making long-term changes to programs such as Social Security.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: We can eliminate all the unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid tomorrow, and the effect on the congressional budget 10-year window could be minimal. That’s because changes to these programs take time and need to be phased in slowly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s House Speaker Boehner, who has also just revived the debt ceiling—the debt ceiling threat.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, so—boy, again, let’s leave aside the long-run budget stuff for the moment, and let’s just talk about—the idea that stimulus failed, it was never tried. Take a look at the actual track of government spending in the United States, and take into account the state and local governments as well as the federal, and what you see is, far from actually having a big increase in spending, we’ve actually had much lower. We’ve had austerity in the face of a recession, in a way that we have never had before since the 1930s. So it’s actually been the reverse.

And look, we’ve just done an experiment with what happens if you cut government spending sharply in the face of a depressed economy. That’s what’s been going on in Europe. It’s been going on in an extreme form. I’ve been saying, actually, we’ve basically had a large-scale human experiment, the kind that is banned under Princeton University rules, going on on the people of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. And the results are clear: it’s disastrous. It leads to very, very sharp economic contractions. Here, we’re having a minor version, though still terrible, of the Great Depression; there, they’re having a full-on replay of the Great Depression.

AMY GOODMAN: Contrast it with Argentina.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Ah, Argentina is an interesting story, because they broke all the rules. There are two countries that we talk about now, actually, people like me. One is Argentina. Argentina had something that was a little bit like the euro. They had a supposedly permanent commitment: one peso, one dollar. Became impossible, fell apart. There was a period of about six months of economic chaos, following, to be honest, then a rapid recovery. Argentina bounced back strongly because they were competitive again. The weaker peso made them able to export. You know, and they defied all the predictions of ruin.

The other story, which is more contemporary, is Iceland, which, in effect, did the same thing. Iceland, because of—the funny thing is, Iceland, the sheer scale of the financial disaster meant that they could not be orthodox. It was not possible. So they were forced to allow a devaluation, have some temporary controls on capital, repudiate some of the debt their bankers ran up. Iceland has a lower unemployment rate than we do right now. So, those are the stories that we should be looking to as examples that say this does not have to be happening.

AMY GOODMAN: So, right now, President Krugman—and that’s not making a mistake—what do you do starting today?

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As The New York Times suggested last week, the fate of President Obama's Affordable Care Act in general, and its mandate that Americans obtain health insurance in particular, may hinge on Justice Anthony Kennedy's notion of "liberty." While Solicitor General Donald Verilli posited "a profound connection" between health care and liberty, his opponent Paul Clement argued, "that it's a very funny conception of liberty that forces somebody to purchase an insurance policy whether they want it or not."

Of course, that very conception of liberty has been the law of the land for decades. Today, tens of millions of Americans must purchase health insurance and a pension plan for their golden years. And as it turns out, the Medicare and Social Security mandates for individuals and employers dwarf anything required by the dreaded Obamacare.

As we learned during the recent debate over the extension of the payroll tax cut, 160 million Americans pay taxes to fund the Medicare and Social Security trusts for today and tomorrow's retirees. Since 1935, workers and their employers have each paid into the Social Security trust fund, a figure which next year will return to its 6.2 percent rate on the first $106,000 of income. In addition, employer and employee alike are on the hook for another 1.45 percent for Medicare, the insurance program for the elderly established in 1965.

In comparison, the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate impacts just a small fraction of Americans. For starters, over 80 percent already have health insurance, compared to roughly 17 percent who do not. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 59 percent of those under age 65 receive employer-sponsored insurance, while another 22 percent are covered by public programs including Medicaid and SCHIP. Of the 50 million people who are currently uninsured, about 20 million (including undocumented immigrants and those with religious objections or claiming economic hardship), are not covered or are otherwise exempt from the health insurance mandate. As a recent Urban Institute analysis concluded:

What may be surprising, however, is that if the ACA were in effect today, 94 percent of the total population (93 percent of the nonelderly population) or 250.3 million people out of 268.8 million nonelderly people would not face a requirement to newly purchase insurance or pay a fine.

As Ryan Grim noted, that's because "98 percent of Americans would either be exempt from the mandate — because of employer coverage, public health insurance or low income — or given subsidies to comply." The Urban Institute estimated that 8.1 million Americans would have their insurance paid for by the expansion of Medicaid to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Another 10.9 million people would receive subsidies to buy private insurance in the new state exchanges, while only 7.3 million (2 percent of the total U.S. population) would be required to purchase a health plan using their own resources alone. As for those Americans choosing to instead to pay the penalty for failing to obtain insurance at all, the CBO estimated that number at 4 million. (That forecast is almost double the rate in Massachusetts, where only 48,000 in a state of 6.6 million people opted to pay the penalty rather than acquire health insurance under Mitt Romney's version of the individual mandate.)

But if far more Americans pay the Social Security and Medicare mandates, the number of direct beneficiaries of "Obamacare" is much lower.

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This afternoon's session centered around the Medicaid expansion and whether it was coercive for the Federal government to fund 90 percent of states' costs with the proviso that if they did not implement the expansion, they could lose all of their Medicaid funding.

The idea behind this was to revamp how Medicaid works to deliver health care to the very poor in our states so that they wouldn't simply have triage services, but preventive and access to regular health care like everyone else. To make that happen, Congress offered the large payment in exchange for reshaping Medicaid across the states.

This particular piece of the Affordable Care Act strikes right at the argument over government overreach and federalism. The federal government could have simply expanded Medicare to cover the very poor and administered everything on a federal level, but instead chose to leave the actual administration to the states while funding it to the tune of 90 percent.

To the right wing, this is called coercion. To the left, it's called a gift. There isn't any middle ground, as was evident by the sharp division along ideological lines in today's argument. I don't think that the eloquence of Solicitor General Verrilli's closing argument will change any minds on either side. As much as I don't want to handicap the outcome, this one felt very much like a 5-4 decision, with Medicaid and the poor being the losers.

Because the closing arguments more or less sum up the principles being hashed out, I've clipped them here. SG Verrilli's is first; Attorney Paul Clement's is second (and far shorter).

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It comes down to this: Is liberty really freedom from the shackles of exclusion; that is, being denied access to health care because one is poor or sick? Or is liberty being freed from the obligation to participate; that is, accept the individual mandate or penalty and on the state level, the constraints under which the federal government will fund 90 percent of funding for the poor? Those are the choices. Both sides cry liberty, but the court will define the one we all will have to live with.

I am feeling pessimistic today. Even though I understand all of the admonitions that oral arguments are generally not determinative of a final outcome, and even though there were small glimmers of possibility that at least two justices might understand what it means to strike the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, it's also true that I paid a visit to the comment sections of my previous posts, where I saw people hoping they would strike it in the hopes of getting something better.

This triggered my pessimism, because there is no way that killing the Affordable Care Act will lead to something better. It will mean more people die, more people do not get treatment for chronic illness, that more people go to emergency rooms, and finally, that the entire health care system is at risk of blowing up altogether. It will mean that the conservatives forever control our health care system and access to it.

Conservatives' vision for the future is one where we are all enslaved in one way or another. We're either enslaved to our corporate masters so we can have health insurance, even those who might innovate or create if they had the freedom to do it and still be able to go to the doctor, or we're enslaved to our bodies, which might fail us for no reason other than a genetic defect, or environmental reasons, or a virus, or just fate. They see liberty as something to be controlled by the privileged few, by the wise men (and yes, I do mean men) in their counting-houses who dole out "opportunities" to make them and their friends richer.

On the other side, liberals' vision for the future is one of community, where we attend to those basic needs of our society collectively. Education, health care, roads, public safety. These are all areas where we believe government can be most effective, freeing individuals to pursue whatever path to prosperity or satisfaction they wish.

One is cynical; the other hopeful. And right now, it would appear the cynics are winning the message war.

Transcript of the closing arguments after the jump:

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Credit: Gallup

This week, GOP White House frontrunner Mitt Romney marked the two year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act by declaring the reform law the "national nightmare" he "always predicted." But leaving aside for the moment that Romney repeatedly touted his virtually identical Massachusetts law as a model for the nation, there's a much bigger problem with his call for a "free market, federalist approach" in which "each state should be allowed to pursue its own solution." As Ezra Klein exhaustively documented five years ago, it's almost impossible for even the wealthiest of those state "laboratories of democracy" to achieve universal health care on their own. Worse still, Romney's mythical nightmare future is the horrifying present in the states his party currently represents. As the data show, health care is worst precisely where Republicans poll best.

That point was reinforced last week with the latest Gallup poll on the uninsured in America. With almost 28 percent of respondents uninsured, Texas far and away led the nation as well as the "uninsured belt" that stretches across the solidly red south. Led by Mitt Romney's Massachusetts, 9 of the top 10 performing states voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

But tallying up the ranks of the uninsured understates the magnitude of the unfolding health care horror story in Red State America. Two years ago, the Commonwealth Fund released its 2009 state health care scorecard, which measured performance in providing health care access, prevention and treatment, avoidable hospital use, equity across income levels, and healthy lives for residents. Again, while nine of the top 10 performing states voted for Barack Obama in 2008, four of the bottom five (including Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Louisiana) and 14 of the last 20, backed John McCain. (That at least is an improvement from the 2007 data, in which all 10 cellar dwellers had voted for George W. Bush three years earlier.)

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"Help, help, I'm being oppressed!" That's the argument made by states that will be heard before the Supreme Court. As this article points out, under the new Affordable Care Act, the feds will pay all of the Medicaid costs between 2014 and 2020, then dropping to 95 percent in 2017 and then to 90 percent in 2020.

To put this into perspective, the federal government now pays between 50 and 83 percent of state Medicaid costs. The states who filed this lawsuit to try to overturn the ACA are saying it's too coercive to offer them all this new money:

WASHINGTON — A major issue in the Supreme Court battle over the new health care law is whether Congress can force states to make a huge expansion of Medicaid, to add millions of low-income people to the rolls.

States say the federal law is unconstitutionally coercive because all their Medicaid money would be at risk if they flout the new requirement.

The states’ argument has implications that go far beyond health care. It raises questions about Congress’s ability to attach conditions to federal grants to the states for other purposes, like education, transportation, law enforcement and protection of the environment.

The implications for the health care overhaul are also enormous. The Congressional Budget Office says that about half of the people expected to gain coverage under the new law — 16 million of the 31 million people — will get it through Medicaid.

The Obama administration denies coercion and says the terms of the deal are exceedingly generous to states.

The states’ argument has “no logical stopping point,” said Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who will defend the health care law at the Supreme Court next week. The states’ theory, he said, “would call into question not only the extension of Medicaid eligibility in the Affordable Care Act, but also every other requirement for participation in the Medicaid program, not to mention an unspecified number of other federal spending programs.”

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, a vocal critic of the new law, offered a similar assessment, saying that a ruling for the states could “bring into question” prior expansions of Medicaid and conditions attached to other federal money.

Medicaid is by far the largest grant program, accounting for more than 40 percent of all federal aid to state and local governments, according to the White House.

The health care law offers Medicaid to people with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level (up to $14,850 for an individual and $30,650 for a family of four). Some states, like Louisiana, expect Medicaid rolls to grow by more than one-third, as many uninsured adults without children gain coverage.

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But under a state law taking effect Wednesday, Henry and other eligible women won't be able to get care at Planned Parenthood clinics — which treat about 44% of the program's patients — or other facilities with ties to abortion providers, meaning those women will have to find new health-care providers.

The $40 million program is at the center of a faceoff between conservative Republican lawmakers and the federal government, which provides 90% of the program's funding. Although Texas already forbids taxpayer money from going to organizations that provide abortions, the law will cut off clinics with any affiliation to a provider, even if it's just a shared name, employee or board member.

Well, here's a problem. Medicaid funding has some conditions tied to it, and Medicaid funding provides about 90 percent of the baseline funding for the Texas Women's Health Program.

Via Huffington Post:

Cindy Mann, director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations (CMSO), wrote Texas health officials a letter on Thursday explaining that the state broke federal Medicaid rules by discriminating against qualified family planning providers and thus would be losing the entire program, which provides cancer screenings, contraceptives and basic health care to 130,000 low-income women each year.

"We very much regret the state's decision to implement this rule, which will prevent women enrolled in the program from receiving services from the trusted health care providers they have chosen and relied upon for their care," she wrote. "In light of Texas' actions, CMS is not in a position to extend or renew the current [Medicaid contract]."

The federal government pays for nearly 90 percent of Texas' $40 billion Women's Health Program, and nearly half of the program's providers in Texas are Planned Parenthood clinics. But the new law that went into effect earlier this month disqualified Planned Parenthood from participating in the program because some of its clinics provide abortions, even though no state or federal money can be used to pay for those abortions.

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The Affordable Care Act is working. 2.5 million more young adults ages 19 to 26 now have health insurance. The shrinking of the Medicare "donut hole" allowed 3.6 million seniors to save $2.1 billion on their prescription drugs last year. And the ban on insurers refusing to cover pre-existing conditions is saving lives (even among those who opposed so-called "Obamacare"). And even though most of its provisions don't go into effect until 2014, the data from Oregon and Massachusetts strongly suggest the 30 million people who will gain coverage will be much healthier and more financially secure.

In Massachusetts, the 2006 health care reform Governor Mitt Romney signed into law lowered the uninsured rate from 10 percent to a national low of two percent. Even with its individual mandate, "Romneycare" is extremely popular, enjoying a 3 to 1 margin of support from Bay State residents. Now, a new study by Charles J. Courtemanche and Daniela Zapata published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBR) shows that universal coverage in Massachusetts is indeed making people there healthier. As Ezra Klein of the Washington Post summed up their findings:

The answer, which relies on self-reported health data, suggests they did. The authors document improvements in "physical health, mental health, functional limitations, joint disorders, body mass index, and moderate physical activity." The gains were greatest for "women, minorities, near-elderly adults, and those with incomes low enough to qualify for the law's subsidies."

Importantly, the researchers concluded that "the general strategies for obtaining nearly universal coverage in both the Massachusetts and federal laws involved the same three-pronged approach of non-group insurance market reforms, subsidies, and mandates, suggesting that the health effects should be broadly similar." (Or MIT professor and architect of both laws Jonathan Gruber put it bluntly last year, "they're the same f--king bill.") It's no wonder Mitt Romney used to recommend his Massachusetts reform as a model for the nation.

If the individual mandate is one of the highest profile (if contentious) aspects of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the expansion of Medicaid is among the most important in enabling 30 million currently uninsured Americans to get coverage. By extending Medicaid coverage to families earning up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) and providing subsidies to those up to four times the FPL, starting in 2014 the Affordable Care Act passed by Democrats in Congress will bring insurance to millions more Americans. A March 2011 analysis by the Commonwealth Fund revealed that when fully implemented, the ACA will bring relief to "nearly all of the 52 million working-age adults who were without health insurance for a time in 2010."

As it turns out, America's future is Oregon's present.

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Forget Michigan. Worry about Steny Hoyer.

While most political eyes are fixed on Romney's primary results, the middle class faces a threat to its financial security right in the heart of the Capital.The Democratic Party does, too.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, who is the living embodiment of Washington's corporatized politics, is once again pushing a "Grand Bargain" that would cut Social Security and Medicare—and result in more electoral losses like the ones he helped bring upon his party in 2010.

Hoyer is the Lobbyists' Legislator, the Revolving-Door Representative, the Minority Whip who really drives floor votes for the Corporate Party rather than the electorate. Hoyer's pseudo-centrist deficit pitch will please the rich individuals and corporations that have given him one of the biggest campaign war chests in Congress.

It will also help Republicans run a repeat of their 2010 play, when they took the House by running to the Democrats' left on Medicare and Social Security.

Losing Game

Corporate Democrats like Hoyer makes the GOP's work easy. He proposed raising the retirement age to 70 just a few months before the 2010 election. The GOP responded to that kind of talk, as well as the President's "Grand Bargain" overtures and right-leaning deficit panel rhetoric, by writing a "Seniors' Bill of Rights" that painted Democrats as Social Security and Medicare cutters.

Republicans should have been politically vulnerable on Social Security. They'd recently failed to pass a highly unpopular privatization plan, and prospective Speaker John Boehner refused to take benefit cuts off the table. Enter Steny Hoyer, who came to the Republicans' rescue by saying "We should consider a higher retirement age or one pegged to lifespan" in July of 2010. That led to headlines like "Republicans and Democrats Lining Up Behind Major Cuts to Social Security and Medicare" - and that was on the liberal-leaning Talking Points Memo website. A headline in the right-leaning Washington Times reading "Both parties mull raising retirement age" was featured below a large color photograph of Hoyer.

Hoyer's comments undercut House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Republicans played Hoyer and other Blue Dog Democrats for suckers that year (unless they were working from a shared script), luring them into making these comments with promises of a grand deal—then nailing them at the polls by posing as these programs' defenders.

Now he's at it again. By pushing for yet another would-be "Grand Bargain" in an election year, Hoyer's backing a course of action that will all but guarantee more electoral defeats for Democrats in 2012.

Steny Hoyer, (MD, D-Corporate)

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Credit: Commonwealth Fund

A new study last week from the Commonwealth Fund confirmed the shocking gap between lower and higher income Americans when it comes to health insurance coverage. While only 12 percent of families making $89,400 a year (or four times the federal poverty rate for a family of four) was uninsured at some point last year, that figure skyrockets to 57 percent for a family at about $29,700. Mercifully, thanks to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), beginning in 2014 that gap will largely be erased. Unless, that is, Republicans take control of the White House and Congress. If the GOP succeeds at the polls in 2012, the health insurance income gap will get much, much worse.

Last March, a previous Commonwealth Fund study found that since the start of the recession, almost 60% of Americans who lost a job and their health insurance - 9 million people - could not afford to regain coverage. Medical costs pushed four million more into bankruptcy. Its 2010 Biennial Health Insurance Survey of over 3,000 adults ages 19-64 highlighted the devastating toll of the Bush recession which started in December 2007:

Both insured adults--who are facing higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs--and uninsured adults cannot afford adequate health care. Seventy-five million adults did not get needed health care in 2010, skipping doctor visits, prescriptions, specialist care, and recommended tests and treatments because of costs. This represents a 60 percent increase from 2001, when 47 million people reported skipping needed care because of costs. Uninsured adults were the most likely to forgo care because of costs, with 66 percent reporting they did so. However, many insured adults were also less insulated from high health care costs--31 percent of adults who were insured all year went without the health care they needed because of costs, up from 21 percent in 2001.

Likewise, 73 million people reported problems paying their medical bills or were paying off medical debt, up from 58 million in 2005. The survey finds that because of medical bills, an estimated 29 million people spent all of their savings, 17 million incurred credit card debt, 22 million were unable to pay for basic necessities like food, heat, and rent, and 4 million declared bankruptcy.

Now, a new Fund analysis revealed the yawning chasm that constitutes the "Income Divide in Health Care":

The new Commonwealth Fund Health Insurance Tracking Survey of U.S. Adults finds nearly three of five adults in families earning less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level were uninsured for a time in 2011; two of five were uninsured for one or more years. Low- and moderate-income adults who were uninsured during the year were much less likely to have a regular source of health care than people in the same income range who were insured all year.

As Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post explained, "This underscores how central the health reform law's expansion of Medicaid -- in which anyone below 133 percent of the poverty line qualifies for the program -- will be to the law's expanded coverage. Everyone represented by the yellow triangles above becomes eligible for Medicaid in 2014."

But the reach of the Affordable Care Act doesn't end there.

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Credit: New York Times

The American social safety net is back in the news, and not just because Mitt Romney acknowledged, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." This week, the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University revealed that a third of Americans now receive Medicaid, food stamps or other means-based government assistance, a number that climbs to 148 million when Social Security, Medicare and unemployment benefits are factored in. The next day, the conservative Heritage Foundation fretted that its "Index of Dependence on Government" rose 8.1 percent last year. Then on Sunday, the New York Times detailed that the so-called safety net now delivers most its benefits to middle class Americans, including many who denounce the very government programs which now sustain them.

But while the torrent of new reports provides fodder for partisans of all stripes (myself included), the picture of the frayed U.S. safety net is a complex one. What conservatives routinely decry as government largesse for the undeserving poor is a hodge-podge of programs which increasingly support the middle class and, above all, the elderly.

Here, then, are five things I found caught in the safety net.

1. Universal Programs vs. Means-Tested Benefits

Eager to reinforce their narrative, conservatives tend to play fast and loose with what's actually in the safety net. As this Politico summary of the Heritage Foundation 2012 government dependency index shows, safety net critics intentionally conflate universal programs like Social Security and Medicare with means-tested aide like food stamps, housing assistance and welfare payments:

Since the 2008 index, the American people's dependence on government has grown a whopping 23 percent.

One in five Americans -- or slightly more than 67 million -- now relies on federal assistance...Overall, about 70 percent of the federal government's budget is directed to individual assistance programs. And nearly half of the population, or 49.5 percent, don't pay any federal income taxes, according to the survey.

Of course, virtually all working Americans pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes; programs whose growth accounts for most of the expansion of federal domestic spending. Since 1965, Social Security and Medicare have helped reduce poverty among the elderly by two-thirds. (Just as important, bipartisan support for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other tax credits have trimmed the numbers of working Americans who owe Uncle Sam each year.) That's why it was so refreshing to see at least one right-wing blogger react to Sunday's New York Times piece by complaining, "Wait - Medicare is now a "safety net" program? I thought that, like Social Security, it was an earned benefit - we all paid our taxes, and we are all eligible."

2. Complain and Ye Shall Receive

To be sure, the conservative commentariat is none too happy to see The New York Times once again highlight the hypocrisy of government spending critics happily (or often, unknowingly) receiving payments from Washington. For example, there's the case of Ki Gulbranson, a Minnesotan who earns $39,000 a year and, The Times claims, "wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government":

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region's long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

Gulbranson has plenty of company within the ranks of the Tea Party. 2009 data from Public Policy Polling revealed that while 39 percent of all Americans responded that the government should "stay out of Medicare," 59 percent of self-identified conservatives and 62 percent of McCain voters hold that oxymoronic view. As The New York Times reported on its joint survey with CBS of Tea Party members in April 2010, "Despite their push for smaller government, they think that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers." 62-year-old Tea Party supporter Jodine White acknowledged to The Times what her desire to slash government spending would produce:

"That's a conundrum, isn't it? I don't know what to say. Maybe I don't want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security." She added, "I didn't look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I've changed my mind."

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