So it’s no surprise that nearly half of working-age families have no retirement savings at all — and for individuals between 56 and 61, the median retirement account holds only $17,000. Here again, many Democrats and Republicans agree that the answer is to detach retirement security from particular employers, though it should still depend on how much you work. A number of states have considered creating state-sponsored retirement savings plans for private sector workers without employer-provided retirement savings plans. California, Illinois, Oregon and Massachusetts have already established such programs. California’s new Secure Choice plan will require employers that do not provide 401(k)’s to automatically enroll their workers in an individual retirement account.

From the 1970s to the present, then, mostly with bipartisan support (the glaring exception was Obamacare), American policy makers have responded to the decline of high-wage jobs and generous employer-based benefits by gradually expanding the role of the government in ensuring that Americans have adequate income and adequate benefits. Most of this expansion has taken place in what the political scientist Christopher Howard calls “the hidden welfare state” and the political scientist Suzanne Mettler describes as “the submerged state.”

This huge government sector is made up of tax credits, federal grants-in-aid to the states and low-interest loan programs like student loans. Many of these indirect programs, like entitlements and tax breaks for health care, retirement and housing, are not counted as part of the conventional federal budget. This allows Congress to stealthily expand the size of government while pretending not to. The individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act, for example, is a tax, though an unusual one, as the Supreme Court found when upholding its legitimacy in 2012.

In terms of direct spending on social welfare, the United States seems miserly compared with many other developed nations. But according to a recent study for the Peterson Institute for International Economics by Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, this is an illusion. When tax-favored private social spending is combined with public spending, American public expenditures at 20.8 percent of G.D.P. are only a little lower than the average in 21 states of the European Union. Mr. Kirkegaard concludes, “Taking the full effects of tax systems and social spending from both private and public sources into account, the United States is seen to be devoting more resources toward social purposes than is generally acknowledged.”

Preserving the fiction of a small federal government by relying on the hidden welfare state to deliver benefits sometimes comes at a cost. For example, unemployment insurance is not a simple, straightforward, uniform federal program, but a hodgepodge of separate state programs financed partly by the federal government and partly by the states. During economic downturns, this design often creates crises, because the federal government can more easily borrow money in recessions than state governments bound by balanced budget provisions in their state constitutions. And as Suzanne Mettler has pointed out, the importance of indirect benefits in America creates political problems, too. Middle-class American voters often underestimate how many government benefits they receive, while overestimating the cost of means-tested welfare for the poor. Unfortunately, the preference of American policy makers for what the political scientist Steven Teles calls “kludgeocracy” — indirect, complex, off-budget mechanisms rather than simple public programs financed through higher taxes — seems likely to persist.

Looking back over the last half-century, we can discern a long-term trend in which the United States government at all levels has been gradually responding to the decline of high-wage, high-benefit jobs, by methods such as gradually socializing benefits (state-run retirement plans) and partly subsidizing wages (the earned-income tax credit). Is this a trend to be welcomed or feared?