BuckeyeBlog

One of the silliest policies in government welfare is the bright line cutoff: Make $1 more than, say, the poverty level (of course these days we’re all on welfare, so it’s always, you know, 300 percent of the poverty level, but let’s pretend) and you do not receive benefits worth thousands of dollars, make $1 less and you do receive the benefits. Makes for quite perverse incentives and grotesque unfairness.

So of course we do it again and again. Now the stimulus pays your mortage if you are spending at least 38 percent of your income on your house payment, and bupkiss if you spend 37.9999 percent.

Geez.

The fix is a sliding scale. Full benfits at some level, say 39 percent, and zero benefits at some other level, say 31 percent. This way you get no sudden discontinuities.

But for the socialists and the newspapers, sudden discontinuities are good. That way you’ve always got screaming victims who aren’t receiving their share, which of course justifies ever more socialism.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 8:40 am and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.