I heard a talk by Prof. Peter Schuck of Yale Law School on why the government performs poorly solving problems at Harvey Mansfield's government seminar the other day. The talk was short on facts, with a lot of talk in the vein of "It's a very complicated problem and there are no easy answers". I asked something like, "I know you want to be a moderate, as do we all, but really intellectuals have the responsibility to propose radical, politically impossible solutions, because practical people can't be the first to propose them. So what would you think of banning labor unions? It wouldn't affect the private sector much, since international competition has done a lot to weaken unions there, but it would help government, where most of the unionized workers are now" (not quite that; I've improved my question). He didn't really have an answer– the thought was too far outside his thinking.

Anyway, he did raise some interesting points, and I looked up some numbers later, since they depend on details. Here are some useful numbers:

Medicare: Spending was $523 billion for 47 million people in 2010. That's $11,000 each. If the average person lives till 77, that means 12 years of Medicare, $133,000. (Wikipedia, Medicare (United States). Would you prefer the insurance, or that sum of money as a lump sum?

Poverty: 46 million people are below the poverty line. Spending is $525 million from just Medicaid, earned income tax credit, and food stamps ($125 million excluding Medicaid; adding other programs in housing, legal aid, job training, etc. might add $100 million, at a guess). That's about $11,000/year/person, just like Medicare. For a family of 4, that $44,000/year in government aid. Median household income in America is $51,000 (though maybe that excludes fringe benefits such as pensions and health insurance). So a household earning $7,000/year would rise above median income if it got the average poverty spending (Forbes, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/09/13/if-the-us-spends-550-billion-on-poverty-how-can-there-still-be-poverty-in-the-us/print/; Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr12-02.pdf)