It is commonly assumed and often stated that the United States has a very much smaller social safety net than most other countries. This is not actually so. It is also said that the US has a smaller welfare state and this is also not quite so.

As Timothy Taylor reminds us here:

Second, America is commonly perceived to spend much less on social welfare than many European countries. This perception arises because most comparisons focus on gross public social welfare spending. In fact, after taking into account taxation, public mandates, and private spending, the United States in the late twentieth century spent a higher share on combined private and net public social welfare relative to GDP than did most advanced economies. Americans just did it differently because the governments operated a safety net system that relied to a much greater extent on private insurance and pensions and taxed lower income people less heavily.

This ties into the manner in which the US Federal taxation system is much more progressive than that in most other countries. For it near entirely depends upon the progressive income tax and does not even contain that possibly regressive VAT.

The truth being that the US has a social safety net as do all other rich countries. It’s just that they do it differently. Much more private provision, much more of the government provision being in-kind and through the tax system and through taxing the poorer rather less to start with.

It’s possible to argue that this is a better or a worse way of doing it. But the usual assumption that it isn’t being done just isn’t true.