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Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a big factor back in the day. Government agents would go into homes to check to see if Dad was home. If so, no more government money.
And based on my rumor mill, there are quite a few single moms that aren't truly single. Dad is just using the grandparent's address so they can be unmarried for w…
Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a big factor back in the day. Government agents would go into homes to check to see if Dad was home. If so, no more government money.
And based on my rumor mill, there are quite a few single moms that aren't truly single. Dad is just using the grandparent's address so they can be unmarried for welfare purposes. Change the economic incentives and the number of Dads at home will bump up rather quickly.
So step one to stop the problem is to make Glenn Beck cry: have an unconditional citizen dividend to make the jump from welfare to work much easier. This dividend would replace the child tax credit, the earned income credit, and the standard deduction for wage earners. Welfare programs should be cut by the value of the dividend. The actual cost to the government would be thus quite small. The reduction in the enormous marriage penalty among the very poor would be huge.
Step 2 would be to replace the tax free nature of employer provided health insurance with vouchers for everyone which have the value roughly equal to the tax savings of professional class workers. This would decouple employment from health insurance, making life much easier for part time workers, day laborers, and seasonal workers.
Step three would be to enforce the national picket line to bring up the "market" minimum wage. Tax imports by the same amount we tax domestically made products. Don't provide the citizen dividend to guest workers.
I agree with most of this. Unconditional citizen dividend means even an unemployed man can bring something to the table, and the government gets out of family business. Also, easier to commit because it's easier to get out due to having some guaranteed income.
It, really depends on the size of the dividend whether you can cut all those things you mentioned; the risk is that people end up getting less than they had before. Obviously, not having a work penalty is very helpful WRT maintaining the labor force, and decoupling health insurance from employment is a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.
It's possible that the citizen dividend would, itself, push wages up, freeing us from the market distortions caused by strikes, although if it didn't, I have nothing against strikes if necessary.
Wondering what your thinking is with respect to the guest workers. I'm pretty agnostic regarding that.
We are over 30 trillion dollars in debt. Extending the U.S. welfare system to the entire planet is not feasible.
You should have to be a *net* taxpayer to come here. You should have to pay catchup Social Security tax in order to get citizenship. And it is the job of immigrants to integrate into U.S. society, not the other way. around. (And the converse is true for U.S. expats...)
I can be this selfish about keeping the U.S. for the cultures that founded the U.S. and still be an
international saint compared to the current administration. Stop dropping so many bombs to "spread democracy." Stop the drugs at the border; don't fund wars in the jungle to get rid of coca bushes. Don't buy oil on the international market; poor countries need that oil. Drill here until we truly have a replacement for oil. (If you're worried about carbon emissions, the first place to start is to replace coal plants with nuclear power plants.)
I agree in general with your ideas, though not on some of the specifics. I don't think continuing to prosecute the drug war is a good idea, and I don't think a UBI is a good idea. To solve the "welfare cliff" problem, I'd more suggest not killing welfare benefits as early or as sharply. Make it a 2:1 or 3:1 (or some other ratio I'm not in the mood to do the math on right now) so that your welfare dollars drop off by 1 for every 2 or 3 you earn, for example. My primary objective to the drug war continuation (aside from the fact that it's entirely unconstitutional) is that it exacerbates the missing fathers problem. I am in full accord with your thoughts on immigration.
I'm with Timothy Leary on the recreational drug issue. Make the lighter drugs over the counter, and require a license for the harder drugs. Though I have to admit as I get older, I tend to think the license requirements for fentanyl and meth would be effective illegality for most people. On the other hand, dilute forms of natural opium and coca leaf should be available for those who can handle their high.
But there is a difference between what I want and what is politically feasible. So my fallback is IF you are going to make a drug illegal, do the enforcement at the border, not in other countries or in residential neighborhoods.
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I prefer a citizen dividend to assorted tax deductions in part because it simplifies life for employers. Flat tax with prebate for 95+ percent of the country. Additional brackets for the elite.
This was the original intent behind the income tax. It was supposed to be a surcharge on the wealthy. But having lots of people paying zero tax breaks the self-checking of the system. So make the bottom bracket wide and flat, and use a prebate (aka citizen dividend) to avoid overtaxing the bottom classes.
Employers should not have to determine their employee's tax brackets. Just withhold 10% for everyone. Let the IRS send a bill to those in higher brackets. If my electric company can send a monthly bill, so can the IRS.
(Last I checked, employers have to calculate EIGHT different taxes for every employee. This is ridiculous.)
I wouldn't make it a "tax deduction", my thought was more along the lines of self-reporting to the welfare agency. I have the (fortunate?) experience of having been all over the bloody map when it comes to economics. I've held six figure jobs, and I've been on SNAP. Sometimes in the same year. When I had my severe midlife crisis and left computer jocking to drive tractor trailers, I had to report to the SNAP and Medicare folks how much I was making when my income changed. This was done through a web interface. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable burden to me.
When you bring in a flat tax... I haven't done the numbers, it may well be a simplification to do a UBI. Though that presumes that everyone *has* an employer, or I have possibly misunderstood your logistics chain.
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As far as harder drugs, having been an EMT in a state with a significant opiate issue, I don;t think most people want fentanyl at all. Fentanyl is an artefact of the drug war and it simply being easier to smuggle in something that's 100 (fentanyl) or 1000 (carfentanil) times stronger than basic heroin, and then the cutting process being done by retards.
If we just straight up legalized heroin, nobody would *ever* touch fentanyl. Heroin addicts are actually remarkably good at moderating their own doses when they have a well regulated (in the original 2A sense) supply. For the most part, they don;t want to die, and know how much to take to not kill themselves. The "opiate crisis" is entirely self-inflicted.
We have a zero income tax bracket now: it's whatever falls below the standard deduction. For an employer to deduct properly, an employer needs to know how much total income you are likely to make including income from other jobs, and spousal income. Employers also have to calculate employer/employee portions of FICA and Medicare. Employers also have to compute state income tax, federal unemployment insurance, and state unemployment insurance.
For a big corporation this can be sunk overhead cost. For a tiny part time startup, this is a really BIG DEAL. Back in my Libertarian days, I tried creating economies of scale for slogan oriented T shirts, bumper stickers and the like. Compliance was the biggest cost of the business by far. Employing someone else to do part of the work was more work than doing it all myself.
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As for fentanyl, you may be correct. But if the voters don't buy it, correct isn't good enough. Back in 1999 I had this fight with the leadership of the Libertarian Party over "Legalize Hemp" vs. "Legalize Drugs." I "won" the argument by footing the bill myself for print runs of Legalize Hemp bumper stickers and yard signs.
Today, Sean Hannity is pushing hemp products. I feel a Nana nana naa naa coming on every time he does so. (Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project deserves at least two orders of magnitude more credit than me, of course. This doesn't stop me from wanting to neener dance, however.)
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Going forward, I'd push for legalizing poppies and coca leaves. If someone is hardcore enough to concentrate poppy gum into heroin or coca leaves into cocaine, let them do so as long as they can handle their high. Neglect your kids or poop on the sidewalk, however, and it's off to the brutalist architecture government run cold turkey rehab clinic.
This is a program I believe I can sell to the Right today. America survived cocaine in Coca Cola, and some of the Founding Fathers were doing opium laced liquor while writing the Constitution.
If you have time, would you mind elaborating on your opposition to UBI? I'm debating pro and wd. like to hear some con ideas.
I used to be a huge UBI person until 2020 and rereading Hoffer True Believer. Now I think UBI is a recipe for violent revolution, because it creates a caste of comfortable bored poor.
“a recipe for violent revolution, because it creates a caste of comfortable bored poor.”
Might we not also say this about Substack?
I can see that, but I'd say that depends on the size of it and how incentivizing it is to work.
I know you weren't asking me, but I'll throw in a thought: UBI implies an income you can live on. Having the government fund lazy hippies is annoying.
This is why I use Citizen Dividend. There are lots of people who get dividends who still go to work. I'm shooting for Citizen Dividend + Market Minimum Wage = Living Wage. And by living, I mean enough to frugally support a family and pay for normal medical and legal expenses. Special government aid or charity should be for special situations.
yes, consideration of the behaviours that get incentivized should always be considered when looking at ongoing social benefits.
Thanks. It's a definition issue; I think a UBI can be any amount, and thought maybe the wording was changed to uncouple it from Andrew Yang. Just having something to count on and the ability to work part-time would be good. Unpaid emotional labor is real!
It's a combination of what's probably basic old school protestant work ethic and some notion that the math doesn't work out in the end. Though frankly, it might if we got rid of the Fed and the stupid fiat currency and the inflation effects. Still, I think subsidizing sloth is probably overall a poor idea.
I dunno. I have been *in the dirt* at times. It is currently still less than 30 days since I stopped being homeless. But I still think that it is best to encourage people to be in some way productive. At least until we get to a point where we hit true post-scarcity. But that's basically AI style singularity, so who can say what happens then or if the species even survives it.
So I guess the short answer is "I think the social incentives and mathematics don't work out". I am open to being convinced otherwise, but I have seen a lot of arguments both for and against and I am still on the "against" side. I know that's not a very concrete of an explanation for my position.
A lot of it is probably personal sense of not being particularly happy *myself* when I'm being supported and not supporting myself. So I recognize that this is very much an "anecdote and not data" position, in some ways. I am simply a happier person when I pay my own rent and buy my own food. I feel more accomplished and more successful at being an adult human.
Seems to me the best way to destroy the drug trade is to remove the demand for escape through drugs, rather than restrict the supply, which increases prices, incentivizing people to produce in the black market.