The Roman Empire was once the most powerful in the world.
It had a formidable army. An extensive system of roads. A bustling capital. A respected currency. And a people whose ingenious capacity for organization was renowned.
But the empire declined over the course of decades and ultimately fell after a wave of barbarian invasions. The true cause of its ruin became the subject of intense fascination.
What actually caused the Roman Empire to fall?
The United States of America is now facing the same historical ailment that brought the Roman Empire crashing to the ground.
Debt spending. One chart illustrates that the danger is very real.
It shows that roughly 47 percent of government expenditures now go toward some form of welfare or entitlement spending, compared with only about 8 percent devoted to national defense.
Professor Peter St. Onge put the comparison in rather stark terms.
The welfare state is eating America -- now 6 times bigger than the defense budget.
— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) August 25, 2026
In Rome the political promises outran production. Inflation bought time, at the expense of collapsed production that accelerated the fall. https://t.co/xoDP0BKD5Q
“The welfare state is eating America — now 6 times bigger than the defense budget,” St. Onge wrote. “In Rome the political promises outran production. Inflation bought time, at the expense of collapsed production that accelerated the fall.”
Economist Andrew Follett sounded a similar alarm.
“47% of government spending is on some form of welfare. Only 8% is on defense,” he wrote. “Reducing welfare spending is profoundly difficult politically...but it must be done or we will go the way of Rome.”
Comparisons between modern America and ancient Rome may seem cliché. It became a bit of bro-culture lore that Western men ruminate about the Roman Empire.
Every empire in trouble eventually gets compared to Rome, and every budget fight seems to produce somebody warning that the Visigoths are right around the corner.
But there is one comparison that refuses to die. Rome discovered something about politics more than 2,000 years ago that Washington has never managed to unlearn: It is remarkably easy to create a government benefit and remarkably difficult to take one away.
The Roman grain dole provides one of the better examples. What began as an effort to make grain affordable gradually became an entitlement. Gaius Gracchus established a regular subsidized grain program in the late second century B.C. Later politicians expanded it. By 58 B.C., under the tribune Clodius, grain was being distributed free of charge.
And then the numbers exploded. Estimates vary depending on precisely which Roman program and period is being counted, but the basic trajectory is unmistakable. By the time Julius Caesar took power, roughly 320,000 Romans were reportedly receiving the grain distribution.
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Caesar apparently looked at the books and decided this had gotten ridiculous.
He conducted a review and cut the rolls roughly in half, to around 150,000 recipients. But even Caesar couldn't make the underlying political problem disappear. The grain supply had become part of the relationship between the Roman government and the Roman population.
That is where the parallel with modern America becomes uncomfortable.
Ever since the dawn of the “Progressive Era,” the only thing that has progressed is the weakening of the dollar and the mounting national debt.
In between the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank, the New Deal and the Great Society, it’s been one slippery slope ride to imperial decline.
No politician has been brave enough to stem the tide of these government entitlements. There have been brief pauses under the likes of past presidents like Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan, but the size and scope of the U.S. government continues to grow. And the appetite for government spending along with it.
Look no further than the now-abated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for a glimpse at how much political capital needs to be burned to modestly slash a few programs.
The howling of government dependents is enough to make a legionnaire blink.
Eventually, reform becomes extraordinarily difficult because government spending doesn't merely distribute money. It distributes political capital.
The welfare recipient wants to keep his benefits. The government employee wants to keep his job. Contractors want to keep their contracts. NGOs want to keep the gravy train coming. And politicians are increasingly hired to represent special interests, rather than represent the voters who officially elect them.
Rome knew something about this trap. Its grain program required enormous quantities of food to be imported into the capital, drawing heavily on provinces such as Egypt and North Africa.
And once the Roman population came to expect it, interrupting the grain supply wasn't merely an economic problem. It was a political crisis.
Augustus understood the danger surprisingly well. According to Suetonius, the emperor considered abolishing the grain distributions because he believed they discouraged agriculture.
The emperor ultimately decided against it, apparently recognizing that ending an established entitlement was politically unrealistic.
Sound familiar?
The welfare program not only survived, but it also evolved. Eventually the government was distributing bread rather than simply grain, while other provisions were added to the growing list.
By the late Empire, the image had become so embedded in Roman political culture that it produced one of history's most enduring political phrases.
Panem et circenses.
Juvenal's famous sneer wasn't really about bread and circuses. It was about what happens when citizenship degenerates into a transaction: Keep the population fed, keep it entertained, and don't ask too many questions about what is happening to the culture.
There was another problem brewing. Rome had bills to pay.
The military guarded enormous borders. Imperial bureaucracies grew. Emperors purchased political loyalty and increased military spending. Wars, internal instability, and shrinking production put a tremendous strain on imperial finances.
One solution was irresistible because governments have rediscovered it throughout history: debauch the money.
Roman emperors incrementally reduced the precious-metal content of their currency. Nero infamously reduced the silver content of the denarius. Caracalla introduced the antoninianus, nominally valued above the denarius but containing nowhere near as much silver.
During the third-century economic crisis, the currency debauchery reached extremes. Coins that had once represented substantial quantities of precious metal became increasingly debased, eventually containing only traces of silver.
Before the people know it, their currency is ruined — and the government’s reputation along with it.
Leaders make promises in prosperity. Politicians discover that cutting benefits is unpopular, raising taxes is unpopular, and because they won’t live to see their empires ruined, they put their own personal fortunes above the fortunes of the empire.
So they borrow. And borrow. And borrow some more.
That is the part of the Roman analogy Americans should worry about: “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.”
Thus was the verdict of the great historian Edward Gibbon.
The Roman Empire has been relegated to the ashbin of history because its leaders failed to heed the warnings of the ancient Greeks, who had a similar experience with debased currency.
Demosthenes had sounded the warning, which was consistently heeded by the Athenians:
The Greek city states adopted coinage but habitually and shamelessly debased their coins. Said Demosthenes: “the majority of states are quite open in using silver coins diluted with copper and lead.” Only Athens, excepting its one major devaluation by Solon, maintained throughout its history the purity of its coinage, a fact which does much to explain the extension of Athenian commercial and political power over all of Greece.
Aristophanes in "The Frogs" described the steady process of currency devaluation, which became the pretext for Gresham's Law ("bad money drives out good money"):
But if I am correct in discerning the life or the manners of a man, who will yet suffer for it, Cligenes the little, this ape, who now troubles us, the vilest bath-man of all, as many as are masters of soap made from adulterated soda mixed up with ashes, and of Cimolian earth, will not abide for a long time. But though he sees this, he is not for peace, lest he should one day be stripped when drunk, when walking without his cudgel.
The freedom of the city has often appeared to us to be similarly circumstanced with regard to the good and honourable citizens, as to the old coin and the new gold. For neither do we employ these at all, which are not adulterated, but the most excellent, as it appears, of all coins, and alone correctly struck, and proved by ringing every where, both among the Greeks and the barbarians, but this vile copper coin, struck but yesterday and lately with the vilest stamp...
Now, it’s America’s turn. Unless the nation turns away from the siren song of debt spending, the decline and fall of the American empire will become the next futile warning of history.
