How the US Government Buys Votes

[Mr Khan]

Rath said:

HappySqurriel said:
Entitlement spending is (typically) voted in with the best of intentions, and makes the problems it was designed to fix dramatically worse over time. The reason for this is that these programs are designed to address the symptoms of a problem and there is almost no consideration of the reaction the social program will have.

If we stopped paying people not to work, subsidizing companies for paying employees below living wages, increasing costs on companies for paying reasonable wages, and taxing efficiency and success all the people who currently receive government handouts could be working to achieve as high (or higher) standard of living.

 Even in a very healthy economy there is 5-6% unemployment. Those people would be screwed without government handouts.

Edit: Also several of the economies with the best standard of living in the world have large amounts of spending on things like pensions, public healthcare and unemployment benefits. The fact is that when this spending is well administered it can work very well, when it's poorly administered it works awfully.

This is the key issue. I believe the bottom limit for unemployment is about 4%, and that it's supposedly more wasteful to stress full employment than it is to merely support those bottom numbers.

Equally true is the fact that many economies seem to manage social programs quite well. Japan has the longest life expectancy for women and one of the highest for men in the world, and that's operating off of a largely socialized medicine plan that even covers foreign studying students like me for next to nothing on my part. Japan is not, of course, without its own economic problems, though they stem from unique sources of their own (Japanese twisted Keynesian solutions regarding endless construction programs that ran up against a rather corrupt construction industry)

The point is, responsible administration sees these systems work, though it also requires the populace to use them responsibly. I'd argue there's a culture of exploitation that is embedded in America, one that must be torn out by the roots if we are to proceed with fixing the country in any way, because such an explotation culture will undermine both libertarian and welfare-state solutions to our current ills.