Musings and books
The silver lining to the shit-filled cloud
Now that the Republicans have half of Congress, they have to start delivering, or the same wave of populist anger that swept them into the House of Representatives will sweep them right back out again. And I think they're completely incapable of actually getting anything fixed, because the greedy ( Read more... )
Now that the Republicans have half of Congress, they have to start delivering, or the same wave of populist anger that swept them into the House of Representatives will sweep them right back out again. And I think they're completely incapable of actually getting anything fixed, because the greedy ( Read more... )
Tax cuts and welfare reform aren't the only Republican economic policies to have been implemented, either. The massive financial-industry deregulation that caused the current recession is another Republican policy.
I do see where you're coming from re: concerns about the social service programs becoming a self-perpetuating institution; I'm emailing the social workers I know to get their take on it.
I agree that any welfare system that incentivizes staying on welfare is horribly broken, and that does need fixing. The fix isn't cutting funding to the services, though, it's restructuring the requirements around them so they work better - or even moving the funding from there to a new class of social service that does actually incentivize getting off of welfare. And there are plenty of people who do manage to get off welfare, because pride in making a living for oneself is incentive enough for them; and others actually find a job that pays more than they're making in welfare checks.
Business licensing is not that painful; I know, having just gone through the process myself. Setting up an LLC was kind of annoying and required a few hours of a lawyer's time to draw up a bunch of documents, but a sole proprietorship is really damn easy to set up. Maybe it's worse elsewhere, I don't know.
Education definitely needs to be improved, but it still needs to be kept freely available to everyone. I'd love to see a system where everyone got a voucher and schools were run like business, competing for the tax dollars that came with the vouchers - but only if there were a way to guarantee that there wasn't a way to price poor people out of the better schools.
In general, and I realize this distinction has been lost in a lot of this conversation because I forgot to make the point like I usually do - I think there are a lot of good ideas coming out of the actual fiscal-conservative wing of the Republican Party. However, the fact is that the priorities of the party as an institution are largely set by the party leaders, who appear to be wholly bought and owned by corporations seeking the freedom to extract profit without any regulations, and by wealthy people who are pushing for tax cuts so they can hold on to more of their money, the country's economic stability be damned. And between that and the fact that the Republican leaders enforce a lot more party-line discipline than the Democratic ones do, as far as I'm concerned they've earned this criticism.
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I'm not saying we cut welfare, a better solution is to make it so that the benefits slowly phase out as income grows, rather than stopping suddenly. Also, one thing Benjamin Franklin said would be helpful is to make those who are poor uncomfortable in their poverty. Finding ways of making it slightly shameful to be getting that assistance would encourage people to make their way away from it, combined with making it so they could ease themselves off of it until they can stand on their own. If you're successful and you do it right, the cost for welfare will go down on its own without needing cuts.
As for the voucher system, such a system was in place in washington DC. It did a very good job of getting the poorest of students into very good schools, and did so until it was canceled by the current administration. Only because of huge backlash did they permit current students to continue, but they shut it down for all new students. I imagine that they wouldn't need to get into the best schools, just that there were multiple choices available for all students that were reasonable... The existence of multiple options for all should improve the education for all (as long as it also lets the schools experiment and find better ways of teaching.)
BTW, you do know for whom they are getting that profit, right? It's profit that goes to things like 401k programs for people to retire, for pension programs for unions, for the savings of the elderly, etc. It's not just going to a bunch of wealthy people.
Is it better to have limited sane regulations, or to have overarching extremely powerful regulations whose crafting is done to the specifications of the largest corporations? I vote for limited regulations with more protections of individual rights.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about.
The EPA is meant to reduce pollution in the environment, right? Well, when you have an oil spill, the obvious course would be to use any technology that you have available even if it's not perfect if the alternative is to leave all of the oil in the water. We had a number of foreign oil skimmers that were available very soon after the spill, but they weren't permitted to help with the effort. The EPA regulations though state that any water put into the ocean must have less than 15 parts per million of oil. Theoretically this is to protect from people dumping pollution into the ocean, but it's stupid in this case because it is an operation to reduce the pollution in the ocean. With rigid rules like this, greater good is sacrificed for adherence to the letter of the regulation and trying to get an exemption in this case proved futile and the result came far too late...
A sane regulation would permit putting some oil back in the ocean if the quantity is being reduced compared to the intake. A sane regulation would permit those harmed by the pollution to easily bring a complaint about it in court, rather than having the EPA just unilaterally block things and bring suit themselves. In this case, if they had to prove that the small amount of oil left in the water was pollution being added by those doing the cleanup, they wouldn't be able to do that in court.
Of course, you want there to be lawyers available that people who do not have the means to get their own can use to help them protect their rights in court as a replacement for these sprawling, inefficient, and bloated bureaucracies. Allow people whose rights are directly affected to easily and at little cost to themselves sue to force the company to either do the cleanup themselves, or pay for the cleanup and other improvements to the areas involved.
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