A grumpy basic income
While the Swiss universal basic income referendum failed, it has brought the idea of a replacing welfare with a UBI back into the news. It sounds like the Swiss referendum was a very bad plan: it added the UBI on top of other forms of welfare.
It’s hardly a new idea. I first heard about it from an article on Charles Murray’s In Our Hands• back in 2006.
Capitalizing on the Swiss referendum, Murray has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. John Cochrane has some interesting thoughts on what Murray says on his own Grumpy Economist blog.
It’s worth reading, because Cochrane goes into detail about what I identified as the biggest problem with the plan, that after time additional welfare will inevitably be added on top of the basic income. It’s a neat idea, but since the entire purpose is to replace all forms of welfare and government income assistance, simplifying government and dismantling the bureaucracy around the welfare state, that flaw is a big one.
In the real world, there’s simply no way around it. It’s a neat idea, but I can’t see how it could be safely implemented. Even a constitutional amendment, I now think, would fail to keep Washington from finding ways to rebuild the complexities of the welfare state. It’s the complexities of the welfare state as much as it is the welfare state itself, that feeds the bureaucratic event horizon. And the event horizon is pretty much the purpose of government bureaucracies. They’re not going to let it fade.
In response to Everybody gets $7,000 a year: Charles Murray argues that we can vastly reduce the cost of the welfare system and social security simply by giving everyone $7,000 a year plus a health plan.
- The Bureaucracy Event Horizon
- Government bureaucracy is the ultimate broken window.
- A Guaranteed Income for Every American: Charles Murray
- “Replacing the welfare state with an annual grant is the best way to cope with a radically changing U.S. jobs market—and to revitalize America’s civic culture” (Memeorandum thread)
- In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace The Welfare State•
- “After a first few expensive years, the plan would develop much less expensively than the present welfare system. Gone would be Social Security, Medicare, and the rest, and everyone would have at least $5,000 annual discretionary income.”
- Universal Basic Income: John H. Cochrane at The Grumpy Economist
- “…the bulk of government spending now does not go to people who are really poor. SSI and medicare go to old people, many of whom are quite well off. Housing subsidies such as the mortgage interest deduction go to people with big mortgages and big tax rates—nor poor people. Murray doesn't really emphasize this point, but his proposal is far more progressive than the current transfer system.”
More bureaucracy
- Why does the EpiPen cost so much?
- With Mylan raising the cost of the EpiPen even as the EpiPen enters the public domain, people are complaining—but they’re complaining in ways that will raise health costs even more.
- How to make life easier for car thieves
- Petition for exemption from parts-making requirement 49 CFR part 543, required antitheft devices as standard equipment.
- Big government demands a nanny state
- Big government ensures that voters will demand a nanny state. They can’t afford not to police their neighbors when they pay for the poor choices their neighbors make.
- The dark side of bureaucratic health care
- The death panel comes in many forms, and is a natural outgrowth of health care managed by government bureaucracy.
- ObamaCare: it’s a tax, bitches
- Circling closer to the bureaucracy event horizon: now we have to list all the things we don’t do and check to see if we have to pay taxes on not doing them.
- One more page with the topic bureaucracy, and other related pages
More public assistance
- Starvation, sharing, and charity
- The modern world makes an evil out of sharing, and then complains that too many people go hungry.
- How many legs does the ACA have?
- If you call public assistance insurance, how many people have insurance? The left wants us to believe that, like Lincoln’s apocryphal dog, the ACA has five legs. But when you call a tail a leg, that doesn’t mean the dog can walk on it.
- Government cheese goes to school
- Government cheese is government cheese, whether it’s a poor food product, poor housing, or poor education.
- The Family Cow
- If you kill the cow for steak today, you won’t have any milk tomorrow. We are digging deep into our national cash cows—taxpayers—and we’re going to soon run out.
- Everybody gets $7,000 a year
- Charles Murray argues that we can vastly reduce the cost of the welfare system and social security simply by giving everyone $7,000 a year plus a health plan.
- Three more pages with the topic public assistance, and other related pages
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
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