I just got an eyeball popping email. I'm sorry but somebody pinch me. See, I thought I heard the tail end of this discussion on Laura Ingraham's show earlier this week and I was wondering what kind of crackpot... But just let me blurt it. Dr. Charles Murray wants to give you $10,000 a year. Cash.
According to Dr. Murray, who makes the case in detail in his newest book, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, the plan would reduce poverty, fund universal health care, spur economic growth, balance the federal budget, and give people more control over their own lives.
So I'm going to check on the details and see what real economists are saying about this idea, but it looks like he's saying that we can afford to completely dismantle the Welfare State and hand every adult American 10Gs a year. You know what would happen if somebody had the wherewithal to get a national referendum on the matter? It would pass in a heartbeat. You know would happen next? Think Dave Chappelle Show, Season One Episode Four.
OK that's funny, but Charles Murray is deadly serious about this, and his argument is very hard to resist.
It's actually easy to do. If you step back from the intellectual gridlock that passes for policy debate today, here is the overriding empirical reality: We are already spending about $1.5 trillion a year on transfer payments (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income support programs, welfare and subsidies of all sorts, including corporate welfare). If we simply divided up the money we are spending anyway and gave it back to people in the form of cash, we could provide everyone with the resources for a decent standard of living, including money to pay for healthcare and save for retirement.
There are other benefits to this approach. No more taxpayer-financed freebies for favored corporations. No more subsidizing people who grow politically protected crops. A few hundred thousand government employees liberated for productive work. Perhaps most important of all: We would remove from the bureaucracies the responsibility for dealing with the human needs that remained, and relocate that responsibility to the people who can do something about them--family, friends, neighbors, communities. In the process, we would revitalize the institutions through which people find those valued places I was talking about. We would take the stuff of life back into our own hands.
And we could do all this within a few years. If, for example, we cashed out income transfers and provided an annual grant of $10,000 to all American citizens age 21 and older, the projected cost of the new system would match the projected cost of the current system by 2011, and get cheaper from then on. And it would represent a dramatic increase in assistance for almost all low-income families, even in the most generous welfare states.
Holy smokes. There it is. The ultimate tax rebate and reparations all wrapped into one, plus a half a million slugwort government bureacrats kicked to the curb all in one fell swoop. I'm not going to resist this one. So what if he wrote the Bell Curve? Uh.. did he submit this book to peer review?
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