It is an oft repeated canard that the “American economy is not working for the vast majority of middle and lower-income Americans.” What follows from this are recommendations that have vitually nothing to do with making it work better for these people, but are elaborate schemes to get politicians re-elected, to cater to powerful interest groups, and to speak nobly about helping the less fortunate, while justifying the plunder of the productive.
I recommend we take a lesson from the United States Golf Association (USGA). I love golf, and especially its traditions. The USGA organizes a golf handicapping system that should be the model for our welfare state. In golf, the handicapping system is a voluntary way to make the game fair and equitable for players of all different skill levels.
The major features of the system include:
So, for example, assuming you and me are playing golf on a course of “average” difficulty. If my handicap is a 10, and yours is an 8, then when we play a round of 18 holes against one another, in order to make the competition “fair” on the two toughest holes on the golf course, I would get an extra stroke advantage over you. If your handicap were scratch (zero), I would get a one stroke advantage on each of the 10 most difficult holes on the course. Of course, nothing forces the two of us to play using our handicaps, we could just as easily play straight up – but the system allows for us to compete in a match on terms that should make it more competitive than if we played straight up (e.g. in the last scenario, you would beat me by roughly 10 strokes each time we played, after a while that might not be fun).
Notwithstanding the many reservations I have about such a system, I think it could be gainfully applied to the US welfare state. If politicians wish to take tax dollars from me and redistribute them to other citizens, do I not have a right to know who is getting these dollars and why? It seems odd (unethical) that there is not a problem with taxpayers having their property confiscated without recourse, but for the sake of “privacy” we are not able to access information on who the tax recipients are. So, if we adopted an economic handicapping system:
People that did not carry an AEA Economic handicap index would not be eligible for any government support, and anyone that did receive support would have their index known to any and all who wished to see it, as well as their level of support (just like I know how many strokes I get when I play against Tiger Woods). Citizens with higher indexes (i.e. they are worse off) would be eligible for more benefits. Nothing in this program would alter the current level of government welfare payments (welfare broadly speaking), and I would, in fact, support an even larger welfare state (e.g. more generous health coverage) if this simple system were adopted. I suspect cultural norms would rapidly evolve making the majority of current welfare benefit recipients wish to maintain their privacy – and thereby dramatically reduce the amount of government transfer spending. Such a proposal would insure that those who were the neediest in society would be guaranteed to be generously taken care of – just as left-wingers claim to want, and would introduce personal responsibility and accountability into the system (just as the right-wingers claim to want), without any byzantine rules and regulations.
The idea obviously could be refined a good deal; its simplicity and transparency doom it, of course.