Hurricane Katrina
SimsHost:
My Internet access is feeble these days, so I can only catch up once a week, which leads me to bring back an old note:
Quote from: Judecat on 2005 September 10, 23:36:12
...Sounds to me like the last years of the Soviet Union to me...
Nah, I didn't propose anything that extreme. Your arguments would make sense had I proposed a totalitarian Marxist state, but I was just talking about adjustments to the existing welfare system: "...pay a minimum living stipend to everybody whether they need it or not, and raise taxes to balance it out..."
We have to acknowledge that we already have a welfare system and it's not going to go away. For better or for worse, our society in the USA today has rejected "work or starve" as an option; and the more authoritarian European Union is even more adamant about that point. I don't see any reasonable path that would get us to a totally laissez-faire "work or starve" system anywhere in the world. We might postulate a world-wide dictatorship, but would-be dictators haven't faired too well in human history and the few who've become notorious in their quest of totalitarian dictatorship have all advocated socialism as an economic policy. So, welfare is here and it's here to stay.
We already try to pay a minimum living to people who we perceive as being needy, so I don't see how that scheme would discourage people from work any more than the existing system. Quite the opposite. It would encourage people to work by removing the penalty for not working. If you want more than a minimum standard of living, then you'll do something to earn some money so you can buy luxuries.
The existing welfare system consumes more than half our tax money. By eliminating the investigation of potential welfare cheating, we would eliminate the majority of the cost for delivering money to the people. Consolidating all the complex systems (food stamps, public housing, demeaning make-work programs, medicthis, and medicthat) into one cash-based system would also fantastically reduce the cost of administering the system. I would expect the amount we have to pay for welfare to be rather dramatically reduced without any reduction in the benefits that people receive.
I agree that it sounds incongruous to pay money to someone just to take it back in taxes; but hey, if it accomplishes our goal of caring for our people while removing all disincentives to working and cuts our welfare taxes by more than half, I'd be willing to cope with that incongruity. ;D
SimsHost:
Quote from: reggikko on 2005 September 23, 01:16:10
...I have returned!
Hooray! Welcome back, reg! ;D
At the moment I'm sitting here in my house up in Wylie (northeast Texas) wondering how to find out if my house down in El Lago (southeast of Houston) survived Rita's winds. I'm most concerned about the fact that the house was surrounded by huge tallow trees.
They're saying that the Johnson Space Center will be open again on Tuesday morning, but the last I heard they won't even let us back into El Lago until at least Wednesday, if then. No hotel rooms available near JSC, either. Darn.
Oh well, at least the "liberal leave" policy will be in effect until they get the mess cleaned up.
Judecat:
I don't trust the government, any government to make a fair distribution of the money. I know that all the money they are taking now for Social Security tax isn't going to social security payments, and I don't see how giving them more taxes to distribute to more people is gonna make them any more honest.
And after seeing the way the elderly, and even the not so elderly feel about Social Security, I really don't think Socialized everything is a good Idea. SS was supposed to be a supliment to your pension and savings, so that you wouldn't have to be old and poor. But a lot of the people of the generation now retired, decided that since they were getting Social Security, they didn't have to save. We saw the, I'm gonna retire next year, lets remodle the house and buy a new car syndrom. These are now the people who are fussing that the government isn't giving them enough money or enough medicaid. (those statements were made based on the behaivor and attitude of my older step siblings). Between SS having to be the sole support of some elderly, and the government fiscal irresponsibility, my generation is in the position of having no SS, and not having enough money after taxes to save for retirement, much less buy a new car or re model a house.
I know my views are unpopular, but I truely beleive you are your families responsibility, not the govenment's. I also beleive the more "help" you get from the government, the more freedom you give up.
Which kind of leads to another unpopular oppinion, if more people in NOLA had had jobs, historically over the past 50 years or so, they would have had a tax base, and could have fixed their own levee's, rather than have to beg government aide (the city begging, not the citizens)
Judecat:
Sim host -- is that liberal leave like the state of Md -- if you have vacation time you can use it, if not then you'd better show up.
SimsHost:
Quote from: Judecat on 2005 September 25, 20:26:49
I don't trust the government, any government to make a fair distribution of the money. I know that all the money they are taking now for Social Security tax isn't going to social security payments, and I don't see how giving them more taxes to distribute to more people is gonna make them any more honest.
And after seeing the way the elderly, and even the not so elderly feel about Social Security, I really don't think Socialized everything is a good Idea...
I can't argue with the first part of that. Given an opportunity for mischief with money, people will commit mischief. Now, here's the neat part: the program I suggested would reduce the opportunities for mischief by eliminating the complexity of our existing welfare system. Opportunities for mischief would be limited to creating false identities, which is less costly to investigate and report than the bazillions of things people can do under the existing system.
Still, I doubt that a significant portion of the budget for the Dept of Health and Human Services is lost to graft or corruption. You can clearly see where they are legitimately spending the money on the facilties, investigators, and folks who staff the help desks in all the welfare offices across the country. This grand scheme (which has zero chance of ever getting passed by Congress) would make most of those jobs and offices obsolete, so it's not something we'd want to rush into with our eyes shut.
When you venture into the discussion of socialized everything, you're moving away at right angles from what I suggested. I'm talking about reducing the level of socialism in the welfare industry tremendously. The government would not tell people how to spend their money or create industries to support them. (Another flaw in the plan: some small percentage of the human population are not able to make purchasing decisions for themselves. That's another baby we'd want to keep when we toss out the bathwater, but at a tiny scale compared to what we do now.) Instead of establishing free clinics, pay the money directly to the people and let them make their own decisions about where to go for health care. Instead of soup kitchens, let them decide where to buy their food. Instead of of public housing projects, let the people decide how to spend their housing dollars.
The key point here is that I have more faith in the average individual's ability to make these decisions than in the government's ability to decide these things for them. I also have much more faith in private industry to provide safe, comfortable housing, quality medical care, and good food and clothes at the best price.
Take housing as an example. If we make builders compete for those housing dollars, they'll build the best-quality housing they can for low-income families. With government housing projects, we have all sort of mischief and even worse added cost because of the burden of writing and enforcing extremely detailed government regulations. The trouble is that if the government does it, we need those picky regulations to determine a standard of performance for contractors. But if private enterprise builds the housing, then the people who will be living there will be the judges of whether it's the nicest place they can afford.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page