Yours is one of the opinions on ET I have great respect for. I would value your comments on what I have written below. I will add that the conditions you have spoken of above, unless we were describing the situation in the United States today, would not, in general, be descriptive of the advanced nations we regularly compare ourselves to. Also, it is good for us to keep in mind that the extreme skew we find in the wealth distribution may be reflected to some extent in average and median values for such things as property tax, etc., and therefore may give a distorted view of what is more commonly the case.
Here below are my general comments on which I would be much obliged to have your honest comment and criticism:
In the U.S., we have an economy where welfare competes effectively with unskilled labor's wages in many areas of the country. The Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. In 1966 it was $10.50/hr!
The U.S.trails all other advanced nations in social services. This is telling us that competition between labor's wages and welfare is not due to welfare being too generous, but instead is being caused by wages being far too low. Wages for un- and minimally skilled labor must rise to a level that competes effectively with welfare.
The greatest economic health is found in those parts of the country where the minimum wage is much higher than the Federal mandate.
We have unwittingly incorporated perverse incentives into welfare qualification in some States. This is especially noticeable in pockets of poverty in the deep South, where misalignment of incentives and bad policies beget even more dependence on welfare. We are moving in the wrong direction in those areas. In general, in those States where medicaid wasn't expanded, the only way a person forced by circumstances to try to live on very low wages, or food stamps alone, can access the main welfare system and routine medical care is to have one or more dependents. The more dependents an indigent person has, the more they can draw from the welfare system. We have created an incentive for single women to become mothers, and the more children those mothers bear the greater the financial support they are eligible to receive. Statistically these unmarried women, together with their male partners, are producing the next generation of welfare mothers and fathers. Incentives are clearly misaligned.
By pushing for a living wage for all full-time workers and universal access to healthcare, the Sanders proposals will go a long way toward reversing the perverse incentives we have built into our welfare eligibility requirements. Of course This must be accompanied by job expansion for low skilled labor. That is also addressed by the Sanders plan.
Sanders has offered the most detailed plan of any candidate for how he would pay for his proposals. (see Sanders.com) I've looked at these proposals. They are completely doable, and far more easily than one might imagine. Which raises the question, "Why has it taken us so long to act in all or best interests?" I can only guess it is because we have been stuck in our ideologies so firmly that we have become inept at logically weighing advantages and disadvantages. We call Sanders proposals socialist, as if they were something unusual in the U.S. economy. In fact, the economy is already both socialist and capitalist, and if Sanders proposals are adopted we will still have a largely capitalist economy. All modern economies are mixed economies. The U.S. will remain an economy with the greatest capitalist component. What Sanders is proposing is mainstream in the world's political landscape and in comparison with prosperous periods of our twentieth century past. What we have been doing since the 1980s is radical by comparison.
I have said, many times, in these Forums that there is plenty of money, but our priorities are in the wrong order. We can either entrench ourselves in ideology, and experience deteriorating social conditions, that will lead to the rise of nationalism and more Donald Trumps, or we can recognize our mistakes and correct them. We should be asking how is it possible that all these other countries we compare ourselves to are doing so much better socially then we are? There is no reason we can't compete both socially and technologically. Why does it have to be either or? That should make no sense to anyone. Our goal should be to compete in both areas. As it is, we are only technologically competitive. We could do so much more.
