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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (92137)	10/28/2008 12:07:21 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541635

"The issue raised is about taking income tax money from ordinary citizens and giving it to other ordinary citizens, similarly situated other than that the tax-payers have sufficient means to pay taxes and the receivers are needy, taking it from one neighbor and giving it to another neighbor, not to a defense contracting corporation in exchange for goods, but another neighbor." Lane, I assure you that I know what the issue is. My point was that it's simply a matter of degree. Let's take a look at the base closure issue where we pay civilian workers on military bases which are redundant and wasteful. We pay those workers with taxpayer money even though we don't need them to do their jobs. (Interestingly, they did a study for one of those bases and found that the average worker worked, if I recall correctly, less than two hours in an 8 hour shift.) Why do we pay them? We pay them because they need jobs (they're "needy") and because the money they circulate keeps their communities viable. We pay them because they're voters and if we stop paying them then our politicians risk losing votes. We pay them because, hey, the politicians who generously continue to pay them are not spending their own money. Paying people for work that has no real benefit is, I think you'll agree, just one tiny step short of simply giving them money and not pretending it's for work. In fact, I'd call that welfare thinly disguised as something else. So my point is that we do income redistribution all the time. We do it through tax rate decisions, unemployment insurance benefits, spending decisions and, yes, through direct payments of welfare, food stamps and other benefits to the "needy." And instead of worrying about whether something can be called "income redistribution," we would be better off formulating, articulating and applying public policy metrics to govern the process. Those public policy metrics would shine some long overdue light on questions of corporate welfare, farm aid, government procurement, private welfare and a host of other "income redistribution" schemes. And all the "they're taking my money and giving it to people who don't work" complainers would have more things to complain about. Ed