To me, all this is doing is putting a huge dose of moralism and prosperity theology, combined with some bootstraps and trying to make the near-poor feel better about themselves by crapping on the true-poor. Also, the next step is dictating their food entirely (school lunches eventually).
To be fair, $194 a month, I probably could get by on that foodwise or close to it in a month- provided I had access to my car. Some folks don’t have that access though.
Personally, if I had my way- I’d replace welfare and the minimum wage with direct money transfers to every citizen as a guaranteed minimum income- and if they’re mentally sound, they can do it what they wish. (You’d have to take care of the mentally ill so it’s not perfect). A few folks would get themselves killed, but it would be much better for the vast majority, and would fix the labor market issues. (We would need tight border control though)
I totally agree. I’d still keep public health and education on (I’m from Europe), but putting all welfare and job creation initiatives together and replacing that with a minimum guranteed income does make sense. Of course I don’t have the numbers to see if it’s really feasible money wise, but I have seen no study that says it isn’t, at least.
A minimum guaranteed income would improve labor conditions a lot.
While I tend to agree minimum income would in theory be better it would I fear create rent seeking situations that would erode that buying power. Minimum income for some would work but minimum income for all might not.
Well, there would be concerns of inflationary impact, but I think those would be relatively minor. There are also massive logistical concerns of moving to a post-employment society, but also massive benefits. Costs of things would lower as automation would no longer have a negative social impact.
Public Health- with a guaranteed min income, Obamacare would probably work as intended. Education- we could reform the college system since people wouldn’t need education to stay afloat- so college could revert to a quality over quantity approach, and massive incentives to grade-inflate would die down.
Yes, a Basic Income makes a LOT of sense, and it’s something I advocate. It solves SO many issues, dismantles SO much burocracy and means you can can tax all other income, far more simply than today. Think about this one, too - as a startup, you don’t need to ask “what will we live on while…”.
(And no, you just make sure eligibility for the Basic Income is tight - immigrants not on it would still have a tax-free income allowance)
In fact in the UK there’s (as well as the Green Party) right wingers, real hardline right wingers, like Tim Worsall who advocate a Basic Income because it deals with mechanisation in society, 100% eliminates welfare traps and issues with marginal tax rates, etc.
(Worsall is right that rate is not “comfortable”, but there would be a lot more spending and a lot more work round, and nobody with any sense whatsoever would starve or go without shelter, etc. (Well, we couldn’t ditch housing benefit here in the short term, but still…))
Heck, as pointed out in a FT column, Milton Friedman advocated it. I don’t believe your Charles Murray is a leftist, either. Some of the right’s support (and studies) is for a negative-income tax - which dosn’t eliminate all work disincentives either, so you’d expect to see more work under a proper basic income!
Enidigm - That doesn’t appear to have happened in the studies of it. And there’s already a basic income for some people, I note - the state pension. Moreover, remember that fiat money is essentially an illusion based on confidence, and the velocity of it matters a lot - when even the poorest have a guaranteed income, the velocity is going to speed up dramatically.
I like the idea of basic income as well, but I don’t support enacting one, and here’s why. The problem with basic income is that it only works if everyone’s willing to let those who want to destroy themselves do so, without blaming the basic income program as an enabler. Never happen in our current culture. In many cases we won’t let people do stupid things at all, instead putting regulations in place to stop them and/or going to heroic measures to save them. Of course there are still plenty of situations where we do allow people to be dumb, but it’s a major media circus if it turns out they were able to do so because the government (or other organization, but mostly government) gave them the means to do so. Often that turns into the next political cause leading to either more regulation or neutering of the enabling program. So if you did get a basic income enacted, in short order you’d end up with a ton of restrictive regulations on it (much like what you see in that link in the OP), or it would be stripped down to the point of uselessness to “prevent abuse”.
Yeah, that this is beyond the left-right divide makes it even more strange that it’s not been properly discussed by mainstream parties. However, I believe it’s on the progressive end of the progressive/conservative scale, and that’s where the reticence comes from. That is, there’s progressive right wing and conservative left wing, and in most countries of the Western world both left and right wing parties fall on the conservative end of the spectrum. I think why this is so hard to even propose (here we have finally a party proposing it, and every other party is hammering them really hard because of this specific issue).
It’s also really easy to dismiss (if you don’t want to discuss it) with “where would you get the money from?”. Without any attempt to actually run the numbers.
Well, that’s true under FPTP, anyway. That can change, rapidly, under PR. Look at Syrzia and Podemos, for example, who have/are set to push away the old conservative-leaning leftist parties in their countries.
And yes, I’ve often seen that one, “We can’t afford it”. No, we can’t afford the current situation!
I think that may be more than I spend on food in a month… it’s pretty close to what I figure I spend on food. Of course, I tend to cook mostly, so I’m buying fresh produce and stuff, which is fairly cheap.
I can totally understand why people see a guy like Jason Greenslate and get pissed off though. It’s completely unfair that some guy should be able to voluntarily not work, and basically just do whatever he wants, and have people who DO work and pay taxes support him. And then the guy essentially flaunts it. He’s a total tool.
And honestly, I suspect he actually IS working, given he probably gets paid for band gigs and crap like that. He’s most likely just evading income taxes.
Regardless, I think that the idea of just banning certain things from being purchased is going to just be a big convoluted mess of a plan, but I would suggest that we actually could do something that would be MORE productive in achieving the desired goals.
Foodstamps should, ultimately, be focused around enabling nutritionally balanced diets. What if, instead of just being a money card that people used to buy food, it was run more like a farming co-op, where every two weeks or so you got a big box of food. Then, you could actually ensure that these people were eating nutritionally beneficial food, and not just a bunch of garbage. You’d also have the benefit of potentially supporting small local farms.
It seems like that could potentially be a system which would better serve the actual goals of the foodstamp program. It could not only provide healthy food, but could help improve the eating habits of lower income people, which would have other added benefits such as reducing their healthcare costs.
Things like food alergies could be dealt with by simply checking a box, I would think.
For things like potentially not having access to things like a minimal kitchen, I think that’s a problem that should be addressed, not worked around. States like Utah have public housing programs which essentially put people in normal homes that have things like kitchens… because it’s beneficial to have them for the reasons described here. Indeed, a lot of zoning regulations in the US actually require that an appartment have some sort of cooking capability to be rented as an apartment, but I’m not sure how universal those regulations are.
I’m not suggesting it as a way to somehow punish the poor, but rather to offer them a better solution that actually improves their situation. Giving them fresh produce, and perhaps even simple recipe cards that tell them, “hey, here’s how you can use this vegetable” would improve their health, while also teaching them valuable lessons about HOW to eat correctly.
In terms of driving out local food shops, you could potentially include them in the system as distribution centers, so you wouldn’t necessarily drive them out.
On a separate note, I’m curious as to why the restrictions on foodstamps were removed by Obama. It seems useful to require recipients to do things like work at least part time, or participate in training programs to develop their job skills. Why remove those restrictions?
I wouldn’t say it’s preaching to the poor is much as it is punishing the poor and making the near-poor happier that they aren’t poor, so they’re more likely to vote for the same people who will keep them near-poor so others can profit off them.
I think you’re vastly overestimating the time and access the poor have. Many of them work multiple jobs, many of them live in places with no refrigerators, no working oven, maybe a hot plate. You can’t just assume it’s because “They don’t know how to cook” or “They don’t know how to eat correctly”.
Cooking healthy food does not require a huge investment of time.
in terms of access to things like a functional kitchen, as I described (in an edit, which may not have been seen originally) I would suggest dealing with that root problem, and providing such facilities to these people, rather than trying to work around that problem.
The long and the short of it is that the cost of purchasing, storing, and distributing fresh food would vastly outweigh the cost of just giving people food stamps or welfare debit cards and letting them buy their own groceries.
As for the original article, it’s stupid in so may ways. Banning welfare recipients from buying “seafood and steak” with their assistance funds is denying them two of the most nutritious foods. “Seafood” covers everything from a 99 cent can of tuna to those cheap cuts of cod, while “steak” is just about any cut of beef that’s not hamburger or a roast.
Unfortunately one of our own is a perfect example of why that kind of thinking is spiteful and cruel:
FFS this is why a basic income is an absolute good. He doesn’t deserve that kind of indignity, and in this society we would benefit by not grinding up people and spitting out the husk. A basic income may give him the breathing room to do something else productive, rather than being driven to the rather grim places they are.
Debit cards are problematic as well due to bullshit fees and gouging on said fees.
I’ll admit part of my advocacy and concern on these issues is selfish. I tend to view myself as a temporarily lucky bum, and I see that above post as the highest probability of my future in 10-15 years.
