From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 14:35:03 +0800
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Subject: Re: Welfare / Norplant
In-Reply-To: <199708251623.JAA15070@toad.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970828203213.02f5ada8@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 10:49 AM 8/25/97 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>Possibly more palatable to the majority not already on welfare, but hardly
>an incentive to a single mother contemplating the increase in her
>AFDC/WIC/etc. benefits should she add to her brood.

>At 5:33 AM -0700 8/25/97, Peter Trei wrote:
>>Offer a 'birthday present' program, under which *any*

As with many government programs, and many attempts to fix them,
it's going for the wrong problem, and tieing in to a lot of emotional
hidden agendas.  The real problems are that we'd rather not keep paying 
money to people many of us disapprove of, and that doing so in the 
way that it's been done has failed badly, and created an underclass of
more people that we disapprove of that are getting money, as well as
an overclass of welfare bureaucrats who do a better job of evading 
disapproval, and the whole process tends to create lots of hostility,
in no small part because not only is having to live on the dole demeaning,
but lots of people (including the above-mentioned bureaucrats) want to
make sure it's as demeaning as a modern liberal society will allow.

The obvious approach to the problem of people on welfare getting more
money if they have kids is not to refuse their right to have kids,
it's to not give them more welfare money.  Regardless of the consequences.
(Private charity is a totally different case, none of the government's 
business, though the government has corrupted a lot of the big players
like Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army into running welfare
subcontracting with government money.)  Maybe the way to implement it
is to cap the monthly amount, maybe it's to cap the lifetime amount
(so welfare mothers know that if they want more money this month
based on having more kids, they'll get fewer years of support.)

Milton Friedman's socialistic approach to the problem, the Negative
Income Tax, is also a partial win.  It proposes that the paternalistic
welfare bureaucrats haven't done much good in reducing the
number of people dependent on welfare, so fire them.
Use the well-known evil bureaucracy, the IRS, and have it just give money
back to people with sufficiently low incomes.  Maybe you'll get more
welfare recipients who aren't the "deserving poor", but so what;
probably there will be fewer "welfare queens" multi-dipping,
and maybe even there'll be more welfare mothers with (gasp)
their husbands or boyfriends living with them, but you'll have
also gotten rid of a class of parasitic bloodsuckers who've probably
contributed substantially to the dependency of the poor,
and saved enough money to make up for the extra undeserving poor.

[ObCryptoPolicyContent]  After we get rid of those bloodsucking bureaucrats,
or maybe even before, we can make it harder for the IRS to stay in business
as well, by moving much of the economy out of their reach into cash :-)
And the off-the-books cash economy is not unfamiliar to the poor, either;
maybe we can learn some tips from them....]

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)