| Mr Khan said:
On the bolded point, i would respond that there is a difference between the government providing minimums and the government attempting to provide too much. The incentives for home ownership were irresponsible, and i would argue more economically motivated than from a humanitarian motive (shortest way to express this point being: a privately-owned home is different from shelter). In most of these cases i'm speaking about really treating the underclass, rather than most of the incidents you cited being attempts to mess with middle-class welfare: Medicaid serves that purpose, as does welfare (although open-ended welfare payments should be checked). The moral calling here is to treat the homeless, the hungry, the unemployed or unemployable, the truly poor. In a society with excesses like ours, such things should not exist. |
I'm not convinced that progressive taxation systems and subsidies do anything except for increase the number of people in the economy who earn a low income ...
While I could write up a long explaination about this, subsidies to low income earning individuals act as a subsidy to low wage paying companies and progressive tax systems act as a cost to high wage paying companies.
Henry Ford was highly successful and paid remarkably high wages for the time. The reason why he was able to both be successful and pay so well was because he could attract highly skilled labour from his competition and the value they added to the company was greater than the cost of their increased wages. Had there been food stamps at the time, Henry Ford wouldn't have a similar ability to attract skilled workers or he would have had to offer higher wages to maintain the advantage Ford had (as an employeer). To make matters worse, had there been a progressive tax system in place at the time, increasing wages would have had diminishing returns because for each additional dollar Ford paid the government would be taking more and more money out of the employee's pay-check; and, once again, Henry Ford wouldn't have a similar ability to attract skilled workers or he would have had to offer higher wages to maintain the advantage Ford had (as an employeer).
The "War on Poverty" created an economy that punishes companies for seeking out or creating skilled labour and paying them well, and benefits companies that pay poorly, and people wonder why there are fewer and fewer companies that pay high wages or provide training to attract/develop highly skilled labour.
