Budgets and Bailouts
Some questions about President Obama’s budget, regarding each item and expenditure: Who benefits? Who, specifically, is getting our taxpayer money? Is that appropriate and cost-effective?
Those are fairly obvious, though often not asked, and the answers typically come in a cloud of conventional assumptions and rhetoric.
Here’s a fourth: Would that still make sense if we had Citizen Dividends, a guaranteed basic income for every adult citizen?
“No” is the answer in many cases. If every adult citizen had a basic income, say $1,000 a month, a lot of government spending would become unnecessary. No more bailouts of banks and other big corporations. Not so much value or meaning to the talk about “stimulating the economy” and “creating jobs.”
Every adult American, employed or unemployed, will be able to afford food and shelter. Those who are unemployed will be able to manage while they find or create jobs for themselves. Our government will promote the general welfare only, not the special welfare of any specific individual, group, region, business, or industry. That’s what most items in the government’s budget actually do: provide some special welfare, promote some special interest.
Moreover, it is absolutely true and very well documented that the real engine for creating jobs and stimulating economic growth is small business. Small businesses are the engine for innovation and increasing productive. Small businesses, not big ones, ought to get government support, if government is going to provide any sort of support, tax credits, subsidies, or other assistance.
The best way for government to support small businesses is through Citizen Dividends. Individual citizens will invest their money and their time to start businesses. That, after all, is a core component of the American dream, to own your own business and be your own boss. Citizen Dividends will make it possible for everyone who shares that goal to pursue it. This is one way government can support all small businesses, instead of only some, picking winners and losers. Thus, this is an approach that conservatives ought to embrace.
Conservatives ought to embrace this idea, also, as a way to mobilize popular support for cutting government. If conservatives want validation for these assertions, they can find it in Milton Friedman’s books Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose, both of which called for a negative income tax. This is by far the most efficient, most cost-effective, most reliable, and most ethical way to help the poor. It’s truly the conservative means to achieve liberal ends.
Please help spread the word.
Steven Shafarman
Tags: "the economy", Barack Obama, conservative support, economic stimulus, jobs, Milton Friedman