What You Should Be Reading: June 2026

Welcome back to “What You Should Be Reading.” In this monthly blog series, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) distills the most worthwhile public-policy research and invites its fellow Americans, fresh from celebrating their republic’s 250th birthday, back to the decidedly less intoxicating business of debating how it ought to be governed.

This month’s edition includes a checkup on the health of the American Dream, an overview of persistent fraud in Obamacare enrollment, and a guide to curbing waste, fraud, and abuse in federal welfare programs.

So, without further ado…

The American Enterprise Institute: “Land of Opportunity: Advancing the American Dream.”

Over the 40 years between 1979 and 2019, the real incomes of Americans in the bottom quintile increased by 97 percent, and those in the top quintile, by 124 percent. “Economically speaking, the United States is unrivaled in its prosperity among major countries, delivering rising living standards to all its citizens,” Kevin Corinth and Scott Winship note in the American Enterprise Institute’s recent handbook.

Nevertheless, the authors point out: “[T]here is growing concern that the American Dream is in trouble.” In unison, politicians on the right and left accuse the American economic system of leaving many behind.

Of course, the concerns of Vice President JD Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) about the weakening of noneconomic foundations may well be warranted. “The social side of the American Dream is in worse shape,” Corinth and Winship write in the handbook’s introduction. “The most fundamental unit of society—the family—is in peril, and communities have weakened.” They grant that “focusing strictly on economic elements would omit half the story. Americans would not view a society that delivered strong economic prosperity without social prosperity as a success.”

Yet many politicians mistakenly criticize economic attributes fundamental to the American republic and integral to its astonishing success: namely, free trade, liberal markets, and largely voluntary economic relations. “The Declaration of Independence itself enshrines the rights to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as a defining aspect of the American experiment’,” Corinth and Winship argue.

To the extent that the American economy is market-based it has generated a degree of wealth, consumption, comfort, and opportunity rare even among advanced nations. “Americans [throughout the income distribution and across successive generations] are materially better off today than at any time in history.”

The AEI handbook outlines myriad policies to address America’s social ills while advancing liberalizing economic reforms that would continue to uphold America’s promises of intergenerational mobility, equal opportunity, and economic prosperity.

Read the full handbook here.

Cato Institute: “Curbing Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in Federal Welfare Programs.”

In his seminal book Free to Choose, Milton Friedman proposed a taxonomy of spending and the intuitively understood incentives that result. “When you spend, you may spend your own money or someone else’s; and you may spend for the benefit of yourself or someone else,” he explained, thus distilling four categories, each representing a different combination of whose money is being spent and who benefits. “Category IV refers to your spending someone else’s money on still another person.” And that is the category to which most welfare programs belong: “You [the bureaucrat] are paying for someone else’s lunch [namely, a welfare recipient’s] out of an expense account [funded by taxpayers].” Naturally, Friedman notes, “You have little incentive either to economize or to try to get your guest the lunch that he will value most highly.”

Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a $66.5 billion program serving approximately 7.2 million elderly adults and individuals with qualifying disabilities, is an example of Friedman’s principle. In their latest briefing paper, Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman of the Cato Institute find that “more than 1 of every 9 dollars spent on the program are improper payments.” Those administering the program and directing its funds have little incentive to disrupt the status quo and fight waste and inefficiency on behalf of the program’s recipients; thus, SSI’s design has grown cumbersome, and its eligibility controls have become outdated. Citing the Social Security Advisory Board, Boccia and Turman argue that one set of SSI rules—namely, those governing in-kind support and maintenance—is so complex that it is “‘virtually impossible to attain consistency’ in applying them, creating significant burdens for both administrators and recipients.”

Category IV problems occur also in the state-level programs, and these often produce worse levels of waste and abuse than their federal counterparts. That is, they feature, as Boccia and Turman explain, “a financing mismatch whereby states process applications and distribute benefits while federal taxpayers finance most, or all, of the expenditures. This leaves states with weak incentives to enforce eligibility standards, invest in fraud prevention, or control waste, since the consequences of financial mismanagement fall overwhelmingly on federal taxpayers.”

Such welfare programs as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), child nutrition programs, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) have exactly this design: largely federally funded and state administered. As Boccia and Turman document in their paper, the problems in these programs range from the very broad-based eligibility of SNAP to Medicaid’s financial gimmicks to incredible amounts of food waste sponsored by child nutrition programs.

Alongside SSI, these programs “are among the largest of the more than 90 means-tested federally funded welfare programs, which collectively cost taxpayers nearly $1.2 trillion in fiscal year (FY) 2025,” according to Boccia and Turman. The duo argue that Congress could save federal taxpayers nearly $6 trillion over the decade by “eliminating federal SNAP, TANF, and child nutrition funding, and converting Medicaid and [the Children’s Health Insurance Program] into a zero-growth block grant. These reforms would help address the structural incentive problems that are driving widespread financial mismanagement in these programs, giving states a more direct financial stake in improving program performance.”

Read the full briefing paper here.

Paragon Health Institute: “The Persistent Obamacare Enrollment Fraud.”

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) can be viewed as a failure of American health care policy from many perspectives. One of them, undoubtedly, is how prone it is to fraud. Meant to make health insurance more affordable, Obamacare has instead lured in opportunists eager to tap into uncapped federal funding. A new Paragon Health Institute report on Obamacare enrollment fraud finds that “approximately 6.2 million exchange sign-ups in 2026 were improper, representing roughly 27 percent of all ACA exchange sign-ups, the same percentage level as after 2025 open enrollment.” The report further projects that “taxpayers will fund up to $25 billion in improper subsidy payments in 2026—nearly one quarter of projected ACA subsidy spending in 2026.”

Fraud is as pervasive in Obamacare as it is in other government programs—most prominently Medicaid—precisely because its design contains the same failures and misaligned incentives, and very often produces unintended consequences.

Obamacare works like a leaky bucket—to borrow the analogy from a recent Cato Institute report. It was meant to deliver health insurance to low-income enrollees, yet nearly a quarter of projected federal subsidy spending may leak away through improper enrollment alone, not to mention administrative costs and other inefficiencies. In Florida, one of the worst offenders, Paragon estimates that roughly 3 million people enrolled in the income category qualifying for the largest subsidies, although only about 625,000 were plausibly eligible. Enrollment therefore equaled 495 percent of the eligible population, with approximately 2.4 million estimated improper enrollees.

“Without structural reform,” the report concludes, “improper enrollment and phantom coverage are likely to remain embedded features of the ACA exchanges—benefitting unscrupulous enrollment intermediaries and insurers—rather than isolated abuses.”

Read the full report here.

Note: TPA highlights research projects that contribute meaningfully to important public-policy discussions. TPA does not necessarily endorse the policy recommendations the featured authors make.