Tag: welfare

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ideological culture subsidy

Race-Based Handouts?

collectivism, individualism, race, racism, regulations, welfare

The decision won’t be the end of the matter, but it’s a good sign.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman has ruled that a federal agency established to give subsidies to businesses, in its current form called the Minority Business Development Agency, may no longer use race or ethnicity as a criterion for distributing benefits.

The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty on behalf of three business owners who weren’t allowed to apply for help from the MBDA because they’re white. The plaintiffs argue that the Agency violates the constitutional requirement of equal treatment under the law.

According to Judge Pittman, although “the Agency may intend to serve listed groups, not punish unlisted groups, the very design of its presumption punishes those who are not presumptively entitled to MBDA benefits.”

Supporting rights-based governance, I’m no fan of any welfare programs. As long as we have them, though, why should the handouts or the ability to apply for them be determined by race?

Government-imposed racial discrimination is unjust on its face. It should be extirpated wherever it exists. The Minority Business Development Agency is one of those places.

If Pittman’s ruling is allowed to stand, it may have a salutary effect on many other agencies and programs. 

The MBDA’s name presents a problem, however. 

I guess it won’t be too hard to remove the word “Minority” and call the agency the Business Development Agency. 

Or just shut it down.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Throwing Big Bucks at the Rich

John Stossel, welfare, subsidy

John Stossel’s latest YouTube video focuses on the many ways “your tax dollars end up in millionaires’ pockets.” 

In an interview with Lisa Conyers, co-author of Welfare for the Rich, they deplore how recent COVID Relief funds went to state governments already flush with surpluses and, disproportionately, to wealthier local communities.

“Politicians also give your money to companies that promise jobs,” explains Stossel, using as an example the Ohio case wherein General Motors closed its Lordstown plant . . . after receiving tens of millions of tax dollars to keep it open. 

Regarding Wisconsin’s Foxconn subsidy, Conyers notes that it came to a million bucks per job. Actually, Stossel corrects, the cost of each Foxconn job was $1.42 million.

Soon the subject shifts to the spectacular subsidies billionaire sports team owners receive for their lavish stadiums. Some folks apparently still think this welfare is an investment that pays off by stimulating greater economic activity. But Stossel points out the stark math: $188 billion in welfare to the wealthy sports moguls and $40 billion back in benefits. 

“The Vikings stadium is so nice,” Bob Fastner deadpans in a comment left at YouTube, “that I can’t afford to go inside.”

“20 years ago, our small town almost subsidized a sports stadium for all the reasons your program described,” offers Friendly One in another comment. “A small independent radio station brought the true financial history of such projects to public awareness, stopped it. It became a thriving business center instead.”

“The politicians don’t call each other out on this and just continue stealing from us,” observes Kiki The Great. “Something all of us can agree on,” comments Mr. Beat. “End corporate welfare!”

Left or right, we don’t support corporate welfare — so why is there so much of it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Whitey Need Not Apply

UBI, black, white, slavery

“Oakland to give low-income residents $500 a month,” reads the headline, “no strings attached.”

Well, actually there may be just a little itty bitty filament attached to what CBS News calls “the latest experiment with a ‘guaranteed income,’ the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.”

Though certainly not universal, “Oakland’s project is significant because it is one of the largest efforts in the U.S. so far, targeting up to 600 families,” notes CBS. It is different in another unique and important way . . . “it is the first program to limit participation strictly to Black, Indigenous and people of color communities.”

You read that right. 

But have no fear of excluding poor whites. The network immediately provided, “The reason: White households in Oakland on average make about three times as much annually than black households, according to the Oakland Equity Index.”

Even if accurate, how does this “on average” group statistic justify denying help to someone in poverty who is white? 

“It’s also,” CBS News informs, “a nod to the legacy of the Black Panther Party, the political movement that was founded in Oakland in the 1960s.” 

You see, the Black Panthers advocated for a basic guaranteed income or universal basic income. And so, since black people in a group with black in the name pushed the idea, it only logically follows that whites should be denied this assistance. Or, uh, hmm, er.

Oakland’s program is different in yet one more way: It is privately funded.

So, what’s the big deal?

Sure, people can privately send money to whomever they want, with whatever racial criteria they design. But, private folks may not create government-run programs that are racist even if they fund every penny of the cost.

This isn’t a pilot program for “guaranteed income” but for a racist America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Debate Begins?

UBI, universal basic income, $1000, welfare,

The Green New Deal? So yesterday! 

“Millionaires and billionaires” paying “their fair share”? Well, after Bernie Sanders’ millionaire status hit the news, Democrats have some reason to shy away to . . . the Universal Basic Income!

“UBI” for short.

Right now the big pusher of the panacea is a Democratic presidential candidate, Andrew Yang.

Entrepreneurially minded, he insists that he is “pro-capitalist.” Which is refreshing in the current state of The Democracy, but, uh, he is also pro-UBI. “Nicknamed his ‘Freedom Dividend,’” Reason magazine reports, his proposal would “give $1,000 a month to every adult between the ages of 18 and 64.”

The Reason article contrasts Yang’s version of the UBI with Charles “What It Means To Be a Libertarian” Murray’s, who wants to chuck every welfare state program and replace it with a basic stipend.

Another libertarian, economist and political scientist Mike Munger, makes a similar pitch: replacing all of the welfare state (including Social Security!) with just the one transfer program. Murray and Munger both tout the beneficial effects for those trapped in poverty, earnestly wanting people trapped in the current welfare system to pry themsleves free from its grasp. But this method strikes me as a fantasy: replacement will not happen. It is politically nearly impossible. 

We would be lucky to nix even one measly program. 

For a freedom-oriented case for the program, consult Mike Munger’s debate with Antony Sammeroff, author of Universal Basic Income: For and Against. Unfortunately, you cannot vet a debate between Sammeroff and Andrew Yang, the latter having recently pulled out of a scheduled debate at New York’s Soho Forum.

Maybe before any political decisions, we insist upon a Universal Basic Debate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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UBI, universal basic income, $1000, welfare,

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Too Big for Breaches

EU, migrant, crisis, collapse, immigration, refuge, welfare, socialism, borders, freedom

“Any reporter who has covered Europe in the last decade has written a dozen articles or more,” The New York Times informs us, “about how one crisis or another has exposed the fundamental unsustainability of the European Union.”

I hadn’t noticed. Until recently, haven’t reporters and commentators been downplaying Europe’s looming crisis? But they cannot pretend “far right” separatist, decentralist and nationalist movements are marginal any longer, not after strong showings for Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, and the Brexit vote.

Now everybody seems to be panicking.

Even the Times is half-predicting an end to what it calls the “European Experiment.”

The Times identifies the tension as arising from “calls for keeping out secondary migrants and demands to keep internal European borders open. It’s a version of the contradiction within the European Union itself: between an open union and a collection of sovereign states.”

Beneath all the brouhaha about freedom of movement across breached borders lies the real contradiction: between massive welfare states on the one hand and, on the other, freedom of movement, speech and all the rest.*

When governments offer freebies, they entice people into un-productive or at least sub-productive lifestyles. Which is not sustainable, especially when extensive. How many productive people must support how many unproductive people?

Then throw those domestic programs open to millions of migrants who lack even rudimentary language and First World skills? That’s how states subsidize their societies’ destruction.

Europe’s governments are way too big for their border breaches.

If you want traditional freedoms, you have to pare down government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

*Between social democracy (socialism lite) and the old liberal order.

 

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Accountability folly general freedom incumbents media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Twirling Towards Freedom?

Citizen Kang, Simpsons, Bernie Sanders, socialism, health care, income, welfare

Does Bernie Sanders remind you of “Citizen Kang”?

Vermont’s [S]ocialist Senator is whipping up a new plan for America: to “guarantee a job with at least a $15-per-hour wage and health benefits to every adult American ‘who wants or needs one,’” we are told.

What was it that the slavering alien Kang promised* in The Simpsons’ eighth season opening episode? Well, we know how that episode ended, with Homer Simpson revealing the ’90s’-era presidential candidates to be aliens in disguise, Kang being elected, humanity enslaved, and Homer uttering the immortal words “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”

And then Kodos, in cahoots with Kang, cracking the whip on Homer.

One shouldn’t have to read George Fitzhugh, the antebellum sociologist who attacked the very idea of free markets and free labor, insisting that slavery is a good thing and the very best form of socialism, to know that socialism and slavery go together hand in glove, whip in hand.

In an age of handouts for nothing, at least Sanders’ socialist proposal suggests productivity. But paying for it by nixing corporate “tax breaks”** is absurd. “Republicans have long opposed a federal jobs guarantee,” Fox News tells us, “saying such a plan would be too expensive and impractical.” And it’s productive people who would pay for it, making them de facto slaves to the system . . . even more than they are now.

But when socialists talk about “jobs,” worry about a more direct form of slavery.

And yes, I can imagine Bernie, with his four houses, flicking the whip.

I won’t be voting for him, if he runs.

Or for Kodos.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Actually, Kang was known not for a promise but for his campaign speech (as Bill Clinton), saying, “[W]e must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

** The only funding source mentioned in the reports I read.

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