Financial expert and author, Joe Hoft, told Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon that America’s exorbitant spending on social programs is a disaster waiting to happen, on par with or greater than the bank meltdown in 2008.

Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday, on Sirius XM Patriot Radio 125 to discuss his book, Falling Eagle Rising Tiger, Hoft explained that when the Great Depression paralyzed America in the 1930’s, President Franklin Roosevelt did not let the crisis go to waste and pushed for social change with his New Deal.

Joe, the identical twin brother of the controversial purveyor of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, contends that over the past century the United States has become increasingly a socialist state. Yet, according to Hoft, social change in America has not gone very well.

The enormous welfare handouts, which Hoft relates are now in excess of $1 trillion annually, are unsustainable. Contrarily, he contends that Asia Pacific, including Australia, Japan, and China, are prospering by increasing their reliance on capitalism, creating smart tax policy, and spending substantially less than the U.S. on social programs.

When you compare China’s population to the U.S., Hoft points out that they have about four times as many people as the U.S. However, the U.S. is spending about “30 times more per capita than China is on social programs, and spending seven times more overall,” he asserts.

Hoft submits that many of the federal social programs, like Fannie Mae and FHA under FDR, and the Community Reinvestment Act under Jimmy Carter, shifted financial risk onto the American taxpayer and contributed greatly to the bank failures in 2008. So, too, social programs from the 1930s, like social security, are ticking time bombs, ready to explode.

According to Hoft, China has changed its policies drastically since the late 1970s, and they are now more capitalistic. “Because of their more capitalistic approaches, they have become the second largest economy in the world. Five hundred million people have been lifted out of poverty.”