June 21, 1979

Ultimate Welfare System

The United States eased into the ultimate welfare state this week with hardly anyone noticing.

The Internal Revenue Service has ruled that employers now must make "earned income credit" payments each week to workers whose annual earnings are less than $10,000.

Eligible for EIC grants of 10 percent of their pay up to $9.60 a week are married couples with dependent child, or an unmarried person with a child and half the expenses of a dwelling.  Receiving the maximum will be employees earning $96 to $115 per week.  Lesser amounts will go to workers below and above this bench mark.

Employers are required to make the handouts and deduct the amount from their withholding tax collections.  Even the Soviet Union hasn't been able to achieve this degree of socialist efficiency.

The central government no longer has to bother with the messy chore of gathering taxes from each according to ability and redistributing wealth to each according to need.  The principle has been established that private citizens can be ordered to support other private citizens directly, with no bother to authority other than that of punishing those who fail to comply.

From here on out it will be an easy directive to up the ante.  Lenin eat your heart out.

This first step toward a guaranteed annual income for all Americans regardless of effort or ability flies in the face of a 10-year government experiment to determine the effect of this utopian dream on real people.

More than $60 million was doled out to families in Seattle and Denver.  The results surprised no one but the social planners!

-When a family is guaranteed an annual income, regardless of work, the incentive to strive diminishes.  

-Enthusiasm of a teen-ager for a job declines markedly as does his education interest.

-Families given a guaranteed annual income show a higher-than-average propensity for breakup and divorce.

-Among blacks and Hispanics, the tendency toward indolence, once income is guaranteed, is even more pronounced.

What a shame the government spent so much time and money to learn the obvious.  I could have told them the same thing with a single phone call.  And I would have charged only a million dollars for the advice!

The first thing I learned at my father's knee was that very few people like to work.  Given their druthers, they'd rather go fishing.  I've heard some pretty good sermons on the premise that work is an unnatural punishment of man for getting so uppity in the Garden of Eden.

President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" - was doomed from the start simply because a lot of people prefer poverty to work.  The preferred solution, it would seem, should be that of maximizing opportunity for the ambitious, and goading the lazy.  What the deserving poor need is work, not dole.  Handups, not handouts.

Dr. Robert Spiegelman, who conducted the government's guaranteed income experiment, came to two conclusions:

First - A federally mandated rise in welfare payments means an expansion of the welfare class.

Second - The sort of "generous" guaranteed annual income most ardently asked by the nation's black leadership is the single program most likely to complete the destruction of the black family.

Handmaiden to the guaranteed income is the minimum wage already deeply entrenched in the American economic system.  Yet, it is the most regressive tax on the books today.

The minimum wage is boosted with increasing frequency by Congress in a misguided attempt to be "compassionate." The real effect, however, is a cruel withdrawal of opportunity for the unskilled worker.

As wages go up without an increase of productivity or sales, employers turn to labor-saving machinery to keep competitive.  Marginally effective employees are shoved off the lower end of the work chain on to the welfare rolls.  They become tax eaters rather than tax payers.

The present rate of unemployment of 5.8 percent is tolerable for the U.S. work force as a whole.  Within this statistical smoke screen is hidden the 15 percent unemployment rate for blacks - and even 40 percent in certain big cities.

This shameful condition is the direct result of the minimum wage which has cut off the bottom rung of the work ladder whereby previous minorities have climbed out of the ghettos.

Perhaps a man can't raise a family on $2.90 an hour.  But two people within a family working at that rate can manage.  Sweatshops may have been inhuman but they were a ready escape hatch.

Congress is aware of the great hurt it is inflicting on young poor, particularly young, blacks.  A bill to exempt teenagers from the minimum wage languishes in committee hostage to the political ambitions of black leaders.

In addition to a high rate of unemployment, the minimum wage contributes a large part of inflation.  It's a double whammy on the poor.

Guaranteed welfare is neither compassionate nor smart.

This is the ultimate truth that brings down welfare states.

Author: Lindsey Williams