Tag Archives: political economy

Some Welfare Reform Ideas

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Convert our welfare programs virtually entirely to hand up programs instead of the handout programs that they are currently. There are a relative few folks who truly cannot make their own way and need the support of handouts, but these would be more easily taken care of were the present waste in the form of payments to those who don’t need the help eliminated. That’s even before the fraud and abuse—two virtually synonymous terms in this context—gets dealt with.

Those who don’t really need the help can be dealt with in the following ways. First is to recognize the everyone is capable of falling on hard times, whether through things beyond their control or through their own negligence or mistakes. Give them access to hand up programs, but those programs must come with expiration deadlines after which payments to individuals cease. Extensions should be possible, but they should be difficult to obtain, with the onus on the recipient to prove he still needs them and still is doing his best to meet the criteria for a hand up.

Additionally, hand up programs must come with means testing. Means should be based on the Federal Poverty Guidelines, which in the main, they are. However, currently, “means” generally has thresholds running from 200% to 400%, of the FPG. That has to stop. If a family’s earned income is above the Poverty Guideline, they are tautologically not poverty-stricken. They do not need Federal welfare, even if living just above the Guideline is uncomfortable.

There must be a work requirement attached to all hand up programs. Able-bodied individuals must be working, looking for work actively (not just tossing a resume over the transom once a week or sitting around a union hall), or in training or schooling for work (financial support for the training/schooling, if needed, must come from the State or local jurisdictions).

Finally, Federal welfare must be a last resort after local community, church, and charity capacities are exhausted, then city, county/parish government jurisdiction and larger charity capacities are exhausted, then State and regional charity capacities are exhausted. Particularly regarding the governmental jurisdiction from the city/county/parish level on up to the State, capacity must be limited to existing revenues, with no increases in American taxpayer fund transfers into the State or local jurisdictions.

These are not new ideas, but it’s long past time to implement them. Doing so not only would benefit welfare recipients and those who do not really need welfare payments, it would strongly benefit our nation writ large by reducing drastically Federal spending, with the resulting impact on our yearly budget deficits and our national debt, and by increasing our GDP through all those folks going back to work, improving national productivity.

A Path

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House Republicans are appropriately dismayed with the Senate’s reconciliation budget framework bill—the Republican Senators shied away from the deep spending cuts that are needed, passing only a lick and a promise threshold of $4 billion against the earlier House-passed bill with its serious threshold of $1.5 trillion on the risible fiction that the $4 billion is a floor, and that more cuts will occur in subsequent legislation.

I’ve suggested one path to passing a budget framework: debate the Senate’s bill, rather than killing it outright, and amend the Senate’s version to include serious spending cuts. Then hold out for those cuts in the House-Senate Conference that would result.

In conjunction with that, Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) could commit to not bringing any of the dozen appropriations bills that would be the actual spending bills to the floor for debate unless and until all dozen are passed out of committee and those committee’s spending cuts aggregate, across all of the bills, to the required total spending cuts of the House-passed $1.5 trillion, or a skosh less if that’s what fell out of the Conference Committee agreement and passage.

Along those lines, Johnson could require all of the committees, particularly the chairmen, to work with each other to achieve the total spending cuts and defense and border spending increases that are necessary.

That last also would push the committees—including the Chaos Caucus members and the timid-on-spending-cuts Republican members—to honor the Congressional sessions-old commitment to pass all of the appropriations bills on time, with no need for any Continuing Resolution foolishness.

Come to that, Johnson should make that appropriations bills commitment regardless of any framework bill conference committee outcome.

Update: After I wrote this and scheduled it for publishing, the House Republicans went ahead and passed the Senate’s bill 216-214, and they did it without any floor debate or amendment to make the bill meet their requirements.

Silliness, indeed.

We Want our Maypo®

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HHS has terminated or canceled, as the case may be, some $12 billion in grants to the States for health-related programs, and a number of State Attorneys General, led by Arizona’s Kris Mayes (D) are suing to keep the dollars flowing.

Never mind that the grants were Wuhan Virus Situation-related, and that that pandemic is long since ended. HHS made that clear in the cancelation notice:

[T]he grants and cooperative agreements were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is over, the grants and cooperative agreements are no longer necessary as their limited purpose has run out.

This is clear enough. Yet, the AGs perform their artificial hysteria. Here’s Mayes in particular:

By slashing these grants, the Trump administration has launched an all-out attack on Arizona’s public health system—harming the entire state, but hitting rural communities the hardest. These cuts target the very places that rely most on this critical funding

This is risible on its face. There is no attack, all-out or limited, on Arizona. The State’s governing personnel know full well that the pandemic has been expired for some years, and from that, they knew just as well that the Federal funding for that purpose would come to an end. Arizona, et al., have had plenty of time to (re)allocate State funds to those ends, to the extent each State thought those ends still necessary.

The States chose otherwise, and now they’re demanding their never-ending stream of Federal dollars to continue.

We want our Maypo®, indeed.

Republican Silliness

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This time it includes more than just a few members of the Republican Chaos Caucus. The Senate passed its version of a reconciliation bill that includes a suitable start on tax rate reductions, and the House Republican caucus agrees with that—those reductions are consistent with the earlier House-passed reconciliation bill. However, the Senate’s bill doesn’t include enough spending cuts to suit the House Republicans, and the House Republicans are right on that.

This is where the silliness comes in. A few Republicans, including some from outside the Chaos Caucus, have announced enough “No” votes before the Senate bill comes to the House floor to kill the bill outright. That’s silly.

Instead of just killing the bill, or refusing to take it up at all, the House Republicans and those one or two Progressive-Democrat Representatives capable of reasoned argument should debate the Senate’s reconciliation bill—they’d be the big boys in the room, since the Senate Republicans ducked away from the House’s bill altogether—and then pass the Senate bill amended to include spending cuts acceptable to the House. That would create a House-Senate disagreement in the same bill, which would send the modified bill to the normal House-Senate Conference, wherein the tax rate cuts would be preserved, and badly needed much larger spending cuts could—should—be inserted into a Conference-approved bill for up-or-down majority votes in each house. Likely the much larger spending cuts still would be less than the House so correctly wants, but they’d likely be much larger than the Senate’s going-in proposal.

And, as is the case with budget framework reconciliation bills, it would set the terms of debate for those spending cuts in each appropriation bill. The difference this time, though, would be those much larger spending cuts in the framework would set a much higher floor than heretofore for spending cuts in those dozen appropriation bills.

Bargaining Chips

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The People’s Republic of China is avidly intent on keeping its bargaining chips, of which two truly important ones are its TikTok app and its port businesses at each end of the Panama Canal.

What gets lost, even ignored, in this, though, is that bargaining chips have only the value the bargainee assigns to them, not what the holder of the chips claims to be their value. Not a red sou more than that.

TikTok, for instance, can be viewed as utterly without value as a chip to be played: current US law requires it to be shut down entirely and banned from the US unless and until it is sold in toto to an entity not under the control of the PRC. The only thing standing in the way of that way is the law’s provision that the deadline for sale can be moved back if our Federal government deems negotiations for the sale to be making sufficient progress. That’s where things stand under President Donald Trump, and that confers exactly zero value to the app as a PRC chip.

So it is, nearly, with those PRC businesses that are Panama Canal bookends. A BlackRock-led group has concluded a deal to purchase those two port businesses along with a number of others around the world from CK Hutchison Holdings, a PRC-domiciled (Hong Kong) company. The PRC is actively interfering to delay and potentially prevent that deal from coming to fruition. The appropriate response here is for the US to restrict, even block as far as may be, the ability of those two ports to get any business from the US or any other nations. That would deny those ports any value as PRC chips.