How about entitlement reform. I'm all for it. Isn't that a conservative viewpoint?
Yes and no - it depends on the "entitlement." And we need to get rid of that word anyway. Health care, unemployment insurance, some form of retirement protect and the slew of other domestic spending policies aren't entitlements, they are just good government.
Our problem is that we are using the wrong words to describe an archaic system that doesn't do what it is intended to do in the sense that it doesn't solve a problem it just creates more. And it doesn't need to. Right now, there is almost no fundamental difference between the ultimate policy goals of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security Retirement Income, Social Security Disability Income, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, TANF, welfare, housing assistance, Section 8 vouchers and all the rest of them. They all pretty much do the same basic policy thing - help less fortunate and low income people get some assistance either on a temporary or permanent basis so that we don't have dead bodies in the streets like some kind of dystopian recall to 14th century France. The ideal of all of these programs is a necessary good. The devil is always in the details.
But they bump into each other so much now, and end up hurting the very people they are trying to help, that they have become logistical problems. I've posted before about a single mom I know that would love to go to school or work or get job training and make money and pay taxes and everything else. But if she takes any positive step forward to do that, she loses the current group of benefits she gets making it impossible for her to feed her kids and give them a home. We should strive to be better than that and no matter what the tax rate is we have the wealth to do it.
It's time to fully realize what the social safety net is. It's not an entitlement. It's good government and it's purely American in its romantic goal, it's just not in its practical application. And there is an easy fix - logistically but not politically. We need to merge them all into one program. The ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, SSID, TANF, UI, and the whole rest of them need to be one program that provides basic preventative and emergency health care to all citizens and their children; basic retirement benefits to all citizens at a certain age; basic levels of gap coverage so that if they are receiving the benefit they can still get a job or training or education in a certain time frame and not lose the benefit.
And frankly, the best way to make it all work is the BIG and the Fair Tax coupled with it. Turn the federal economy into a usage tax base, give everyone a basic living wage in lieu of all the various programs that are out there, and you can gut well over half of the social safety net, consolidate the rest, and turn the economy into one that churns when it is used, instead of penalized when it succeeds. All great politician speak, but I firmly believe it. We could fundamentally alter the basic administration of government within 10 years if we did all this and have a solid social safety base, an economy that feeds itself constantly, and remove the daily political football wrangling of tax policy and domestic spending policy into a neat one program application that is easy to understand and use for everyone.
And yeah, taxes might need to go up a little on people like me. I'm ok with that. But not with the current system(s). They are a waste of money and they create and nurture a cycle of dependence that is impossible to get out of for most people of limited means, education and ability. And it's just wrong and stupid. Rich people don't need tax cuts - they need people to buy their services and products. They need a middle class and a functional underclass that is active in the economy. That is what built our greatest economic growth periods and we can do it again and make it sustainable long term if we stop fighting the battles of the New Deal and the War on Poverty with the language of the 80's and the technology of the 21st century.
You could double my taxes if concomitant with that I see a doubling of my paying client base. I end up making more. I then end up spending more, and then other people make more. It's really not that hard.
