Redefining welfare
According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama is proposing a welfare program disguised as a tax cut. The trick is that the tax credits can be claimed by people who don’t pay taxes. Fill out a form, receive a check. It’s a transfer payment.
The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.
The genius of this is that the transfer payments stay “off the books”. The books show net revenues on the income side instead of total revenues on the income side offset by the welfare program on the expense side.
Instead of a bureaucracy with case workers, the New Welfare will be administered by the IRS.
October 18th, 2008 at 4:24 am
When did “welfare” become a negative word?
What is wealth?
How did the redefinition of these two words create an artificial reality where the tally on a spreadsheet was worth more than any actual person’s faring well?
As has been pointed out we are human BEINGS, not human DOINGS.
The accumulation of wealth requires a lot of doing and thinking in what has been a fun game that relieves boredom for some and is a threat to the further existence of many others. And perhaps the end of the natural environment as well.
I would much rather see the game end in financial ruin than in ecological ruin.
Game enthusiasts enjoy the gamble and risk aspect of the “Market” while the non-game players are penalized as if they were losing participants in the game. Gamesters then tell real people to “get real” and that the game is the reality they need to get real about.
I wrote an essay about 25 years ago that explored this in some depth and have been waiting for events to play out so it would become obvious to my fellow creatures, especially those whose reality is the game, not life, that we need a new game. Ah, yes, I have been bored by this game for over a quarter of a century. I want something new and fun and I want to be part of defining what that is.
To create the next form of the game of economics (”or speed bartering”) we need to clearly define the goals of the game.
The current market is based on the “isms”: sexism, racism, classism, ageism, etc. to create an artificially low value on necessary but messy human endeavors. It is like children playing the game so that the “winners” can force the losers to do their chores for them.
What are the chores from which the market winners want relief? Lets look at the low paid and allegedly “low skilled” work and we see that these jobs are actually those jobs that are essential to the continuation of the human species and many other biological species.
Taking care of and educating children. Taking care of the sick and elderly. Cleaning toilets and maintenance of all kinds. Growing, distributing, preparing, serving and cleaning up around food. These are necessary tasks to maintain health.
My basic definition of work is “anything that promotes the biological continuation of a species” everything else is bullshit as far as I am concerned. Most animal and plant species are engaged in work every second of their lives or they die. Work also includes sex and the results of sex: more life and a lot more work. The word “labor” comes from the basic activity that results in the live birth of a member of the next generation of a species. I have always had to suppress a laugh when burly human males equate dock work to child birth in the title “labor movement”.
Work as applied to human beings has an additional meaning beyond basic survival activities and that meaning lies in those characteristics that need to be transmitted from generation to generation in order for the next generation to be recognized as “human.”
The unnecessary jobs pay better in the gamesters world precisely because they are unnecessary and therefore can be done or not done as the mood changes. They can be done badly without repercussions to the individual doing the job, although doing the job may cause irreparable harm to non-gamester persons they may be charged to help. If a person who helps is successful they would put themselves out of a job but if they hinder those they help, then they create job security for themselves.
Funding silos and how they create failure to succeed become understandable.
Some of the more unnecessary jobs can be found in the insurance and financial institutions. Many or most of these jobs are actually make-work at best or work that is a mandated “failure to succeed” job.
If the market actually worked, people in the make-work catagory would be supporting those who are doing the real down and dirty work.
If you want to continue playing the market game, you need to give folks a reason to play with you. Right now people are bored with the game since they lost their game pieces a long time ago and are getting bored waiting for monopoly to finish.
The prophets say the world will end in 2012 - I think it is just the end of this particular game.
What ever new game we choose to play, it will have new rules; I would like to suggest that it be played 1) without slaves and servants 2) that people and companies will have to be responsible for cleaning up their own messes and 3) jobs that exist to help improve the health, education and success of others always be defined as “whatever it takes” to succeed rather than tallys of contacts.
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:48 am
that’s weird