Posted on 08/27/2014 5:55:16 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
Our current welfare system is clearly a mess. The federal government currently funds 126 separate anti-poverty programs, at least 72 of which provide either cash or in-kind benefits to individuals. For example, there are 33 housing programs, run by four different cabinet departments, including bizarrely the Department of Energy. There are currently 21 different programs providing food or food purchasing assistance. These programs are administered by three different federal departments and one independent agency. There are eight different health care programs, administered by five separate agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services. And six cabinet departments and five independent agencies oversee 27 cash or general assistance programs. All together, seven different cabinet agencies and six independent agencies administer at least one anti-poverty program. This maze of overlapping bureaucracies is difficult to navigate for those in the system and perhaps even more difficult to supervise and evaluate.
And obviously we should be concerned that the existing welfare system has utterly failed at its primary mission: lifting people out of poverty and enabling them and their children to become independent and self-supporting members of society.
Last year alone, the federal government spent nearly $700 billion to fund anti-poverty programs. State and local governments kicked in an additional $300 billion, bringing the total to roughly $1 trillion.
(Excerpt) Read more at cato-unbound.org ...
Please, no. It already stinks enough in Washington (and elsewhere, too, for that matter).
The prospect of eliminating most or all of those bloated government welfare programs, with the concomitant reduction of costs in administering those programs, seems appealing at first glance.
The promise of increased personal responsibility, both for former welfare recipients as well as for former agency employees, hints at beneficial outcomes in market dynamics.
Those who are in this multi generational quagmire, or even those who fall into its grasp mostly due to lack of personal ambition and or substance abuse problems, are faced with this delema every day: Gee, if I find a job, I will lose my or some of my benefits. So, why get up and sacrafice my freedom. This is not an over simplification. I can point to any one of personal situations of which I am aware that support this notion. IMO the only way out is to order educational training, either accedemic or technical, with a finite end to government subsidies. Kind of fish or cut bait.
the flaw in the slaw is the concept that the government owes anybody a living.
I think that the idea is this. Provide a guaranteed minimum base for everyone. Whatever you earn above that is yours to keep - after taxes of course. So employment would not negatively affect the guaranteed base but would add to it. It would also serve to eliminate the need for a minimum wage.
I would prefer private charities and churches provide all or most poverty aid, as it use to be in the past. One-size-fits-all behemoth government program never work, are wasteful and riddled with fraud and corruption. Of course, that’s why the pols like them.
I would donate much more to charity if I wasn’t being raped so much for taxes.
The primary people to suffer if the poor were given an allocation would be the people who run the programs. I'm all for survival of the fittest. Many would waste their money and maybe die in the streets, for sure.
Many others would learn to budget and allocate their funds in ways that create wealth, moving upward. Let people make their own choices, or they have no way out of the maze.
I contend that this approach would save more people than it would destroy.
I think the left’s aversion to private charity is that private charities often put “conditions” on the help,
like attending a religious presentation,
or, not driving up week after week in your ‘slade and demanding money and food without some attempt to get a job.
I think they are doing that now with the various subsidies.
What happens where everyone then says, OK, I got the basics, I quit. No, I chose not to in effect work for the state and I surely don’t want my off springs to do it either.
Low level work will slowly be automated away.
Assembly line workers? Used to be able to provide a good middle class living.
Now 1 robot does the work of what 100 people did in the 1950s
The issue we are going to have as a society is as automation increases, jobs will go away and never come back.
Cab drivers? They will be obsolete once Uber starts using driverless cars.
Just the tip of the ice berg of what we are going to deal with in the coming decades of this century
A basic income guarantee or reverse income tax or whatever it might be called will raise prices due to the extra money sufficient that the income will boost people’s ability to buy stuff to pretty much the same level as when they did not have the reverse tax income.
No new program, whatever it is billed as and promises to do will eliminate any bureaucracy or program already extant. It will only increase the bureaucracy and the restrictive rules on all of us while reducing our own real income yet further, even as the number of dollars increases.
No new program, whatever it is billed as and promises to do will eliminate any bureaucracy or program already extant. It will only increase the bureaucracy and the restrictive rules on all of us while reducing our own real income yet further, even as the number of dollars increases.
Dilemma.
Perhaps you are correct. Time to review Professor Philip Hamburger’s new book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”
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