What direct benefit is there from not having any US tariffs?
Lower prices for consumers. More competitive pressure for manufacturers and to a lesser extent service providers and growers/farmers, to force them to be more efficient and responsive to the market. Greater specialization and more total production due to the benefits of comparative advantage.
How will that work from a practical perspective that would be an improvement over what we have today?
Competition usually is practically advantageous. It forces greater efficiency and responsiveness, and gives people choices.
No, you use the word entitlement as a pejorative.
I have not been using it as such. I'm using it in two ways only. Its standard definition, and the government term of art (where entitlements are programs that automatically funded by law each year, with no need to pass a new budget that includes them each year, or to put it another way they are programs that exist by default, regular programs would go away without new congressional approval each year, entitlements only go away if congress actively votes to eliminate them)
So, you object to my SS dollars today paying your SS benefits today (even though you have paid into SS while you were working and I will get mine when I am older) but you do not object to my tax dollars today paying your child's (or grandchild's) education costs today.
I don't necessarily object to the former, or not object to the later, but educating children so they can be productive, seems to have a higher practical, and even moral, claim on our resources, than paying for people's retirement.
So, if SS payments were not paid directly to a recipient but were sent to, say, a grocery store (gas station, landlords, etc.) to provide SERVICES (and products) to said recipient that would be ok with you?
I said services and transfer payments where different, I didn't say one or the other was automatically better.
And I don't consider buying people's things, and paying their expenses, an essential government service. At most a case may be made for assisting the poor in doing so. If we decide we want to do that, then we would look for the most efficient way of doing it. That is more likely to be transfer payments than setting up government housing and government food distribution centers etc. (or contracting for the same, even if it isn't directly paid for by the government).
Education, might be considered essential or at least closer to it. Without education or with very poor education the quality of the democracy declines because you have uneducated voters. Also the uneducated are unproductive, educating people is an investment with a real positive return. Individual transfer payments are generally a zero sum game, rather than a positive sum game like education. |
