'For 'Faster Growth,' Soak the Poor?'
Glad to see someone (Josh Barro) trying to counter the latest nonsense from George Shultz, Gary Becker, Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Allan Meltzer, and John Taylor:
For 'Faster Growth,' Soak the Poor?, by By Josh Barro: This weekend, the Wall Street Journal assembled a redoubtable list of conservative heavies in economics (George Schulz! Gary Becker! John Taylor!) to produce a completely insane account of what is wrong with America's economy and how to fix it. The upshot of the piece is that the U.S. economy is in the tank because the government gives too much money to poor people, and so it should stop. ...
The article is another great example of conservatives' empathy gap on economic issues. The authors emphasize that entitlement cuts must be done in a "humane" way. But they do not stop and think about whether a one-third reduction in Social Security benefits would seem humane to a middle-class person who depends on Social Security as his largest source of income in retirement, as most do. They don't reckon with the possibility that capping the federal commitment to Medicaid would have not just fiscal effects but also human ones: denying health care to people who need it and cannot afford it. ...
So why respond to the poverty-trap problem by calling for big cuts to benefits? The answer, of course, is that every economic ill must be shoehorned into an argument for lower taxes and less government spending. If a proposed solution to an economic problem doesn't involve taking benefits away from poor people, then it's not a solution at all -- at least by the logic that prevails on the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Posted by Mark Thoma on Monday, March 25, 2013 at 03:46 PM in Economics, Politics, Social Insurance |
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