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Category Archive for 'Welfare State'

Ezra Klein calls this piece powerful. There is a lot of telling information in it. Brad DeLong’s take on “You Didn’t Build That!” Worthy of a reply by me, but I’m retired and no one cares anyway!

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From the interesting book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People, comes this one: Sweden now has some of the most generous parental leave allowance in the world, with 16 months’ leave on 80 percent of wages guaranteed by law, to be taken whenever the parents feel like it up until the child is eight years old. Without going […]

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Picking up on a theme from two years ago, let’s consider again the argument in favor of progressive (re)distribution of income from the wealthiest to the poorest.  The argument I made back then was that on basic behavioral grounds, the assumption that taking a dollar from the rich and giving it to the poor would […]

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As you probably all know, social security is a transfer program, not a retirement program. Aside from eliminating the program entirely, which advocating for would have you removed from polite company, here are some things to consider about it. The system is in far better shape than Medicare. Medicare is the big elephant in the […]

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Today marks the pinnacle of pathetic pandering in NYS as “we” head to the polls to annoint the latest power-mad, megalomaniacal people with our blessings of awesomeness. In that spirit, check out these 10 core principles from the “Bern’s” website:   AS PRESIDENT, SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS WILL REDUCE INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY BY: Increasing the […]

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So, New York State (who is that, exactly?) passes an historic increase in the minimum wage. It argues, implicitly, that raising costs to $15 per hour will benefit workers and not have the adverse consequences economists warn about. Of course, there are myriad adverse consequences, not just unemployment, so keep your eye on the ball. […]

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In 1960, 0.9% of the American population received disability benefits. In other words, 1 out of every 111 people you encountered received disability. Today, 5.9% of the American population received disability benefit. In other words, 1 out of every 17 people you encounter is receiving disability. Note that Americans are living longer, cars and driving […]

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(1) Corporations like Walmart disproportionately benefit from the existence of antipoverty programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps. Why? Because when these are available to people, Walmart does not have to provide people with a wage that, alone, would be enough for these workers to sustain themselves since the government is already providing it. (2) Corporations […]

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This week I have a question for the readers. Much has been written recently on how racist and horrible people like Charles Murray are, for merely asking the question of whether in fact there are differences in innate “ability” across different groups of people. Since I am sure to have my classes protested if I […]

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It is typically asserted that on utilitarian grounds we can and should redistribute wealth from the richer to the poorer. On its face and all-alone the argument makes some sense. The argument goes like this: since there is diminishing marginal utility of wealth, a dollar to a rich person is worth less than a dollar […]

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