What's driving American job growth? In progressive states, it's government, social assistance and healthcare.

The Wall Street Journal reports The Welfare-Industrial Complex Is Booming

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.

A 2017 report from Orange County United Way, a nonprofit in Irvine, Calif., estimated that each chronically homeless person living on the streets and in emergency shelters costs the public $85,631 a year, largely owing to high healthcare expenses from repeat trips to the emergency room. The $837,000 Los Angeles is spending to build a single housing unit for the homeless almost appears frugal by comparison.

Aside from two years of runaway inflation, one way to explain Americans' malaise is that they sense most new jobs aren't making them or most people they know better off. The main beneficiaries are workers in the welfare-industrial complex.