James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: The proposal > <http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/-in-our-hands_105549266790.pdf> > from the conservative thinktank American Enterprise Institute's scholar > Charles Murray is worded as follows: > > Henceforth, federal, state, and local governments shall make no law nor > establish any program that provides benefits to some citizens but not to > others. . . . > > I saw the YouTube lecture by Murray. I agree with large parts of it.
Of course you cannot implement it exactly the way his first sentence describes. The government owes some people far more than $10,000 a year, such as severely disabled veterans. It has to pay a lot more than that for many medicare patients. There will have to be some means-tested programs. Just not as many. I think this should be done in an incremental fashion over many decades. The problem of full unemployment caused by robots and computers will come over us gradually, over decades, so the solution should also be at that pace. That will give us time to experiment with different solutions. We should go slowly but we should start now. - Jed
