Introduction -- Creating legislative precedents : Revolutionary War pensions -- An experiment with government trust funds : Navy pensions -- The first great entitlement : Civil War pensions -- Repeating past mistakes : World War I veterans' benefits -- Retrenchment : Roosevelt and the veterans -- The birth of the modern entitlement state -- The consequences of social security surpluses -- A new kind of entitlement : the GI Bill -- Setting the postwar entitlement agenda, 1946-1950 -- Establishing social insurance dominance, 1951-1964 -- The beginning of the great turn in welfare policy, 1951-1964 -- The first Great Society -- A legal right to welfare -- The second Great Society -- First inklings of fiscal limits, 1975-1980 -- A temporary slowdown, 1981-1989 -- Recognition and denial, 1989-2014 -- A challenge unlike any in U.S. history

Federal entitlement programs are strewn throughout the pages of U.S. history, springing from the noble purpose of assisting people who are destitute through no fault of their own. Yet as federal entitlement programs have grown, so too have their inefficiency and their cost. Neither tax revenues nor revenues generated by the national economy have been able to keep pace with their rising growth, bringing the national debt to a record peace-time level. The High Cost of Good Intentions is the first comprehensive history of these federal entitlement programs. Combining economics, history, political science, and law, John F. Cogan reveals how the creation of entitlements brings forth a steady march of liberalizing forces that cause entitlement programs to expand. In this process -- as visible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as in the present day -- each benefit expansion establishes a new base for future expansions and the entitlement ultimately spreads to a point where the program's original noble purposes are no longer recognizable. His work provides a unifying explanation for the evolutionary path that nearly all federal entitlement programs have followed over the past two hundred years, tracing both their shared past and the financial risks they pose for future generations. -- Inside jacket flap