How to reduce social safety net spending humanely

By Dave Anderson:

14% of Americans are on food stamps.  SNAP benefits are near cash substitutes which help people at or below the poverty line.  SNAP benefits are one of the few places where there is a bipartisan agreement to raid for budgetary offsets in order to please the fake fiscal conservatives who voted for Medicare Part D, both Bush tax deferments, and two wars, all placed on the national credit card. 

The Senate will vote down an extension of unemployment benefits tonight.  I'm safe, I qualified for my current extension tier last week, but hundreds of thousands of Americans will soon be SOL as meager lifelines are cut.  The extended benefits that will be voted on tonight are an extension of the Tier 1, 2, 3, 4 and High Unemployment Period benefits that allow some people in some states to collect up to 99 weeks of benefits instead of the normal 26 weeks.  The total cost for a one year extension of the additional UI would be slightly less than $60 billion.  Evidently, we can not have that as that would add to the deficit but it is a high priority to cut taxes on millionaires at a cost of $400 to $700 billion dollars over the next decade.  Somehow taking in less revenue while maintaining the same spending profile reduces the deficit.  I don't understand that, as I only have a fucking masters in public policy analysis. 

The Catfood Commission looks like a failure as it was incomprehensible.  However the deficit phobia that is sweeping through our political elite is aimed at social safety net spending.  Evidently retirement without eating cat-food should be a luxury experience and our elites won't vote for basic economic stabilization measuresthat work because that would mean someone, somewhere and somehow  undeserving would receive a little breathing room.  The elites are bucking up for another whack at basic economic security for most Americans in the name of austerity and morality. 

There is an easier and more humane to greatly reduce both the need for social safety net spending and the political coalition that supports safety net spending. 

What is this solution? 

It is simple.

It is to have an economy that actually works for the bottom 95% of America.  It is an economy where wages roughly keep up with productivity gains.  It is an economy where the fixed costs of success don't increase at several times the rate of inflation.  It is an economy where there is widespread opportunity to advance and a couple of failsafes that allow one to wash away failure without it beinrg a stone around ones' neck for the rest of ones' life, and thus the lives of that individual's children (as we currently live in a world of high intergenerational income correlations, so a failure in the 1980s is a failure in the teens). 

Get an economy that works well for most people instead of an economy where there is stagnation for most classes with few release valves besides debt to enter a bad odds' professional elite class lottery, and the demand for the government to provide good health insurance for kids decreases, the demand for government to provide for a decent old-age pension foundation decreases, the demand for government to subsidize much cheaper in this counterfactual housing and medical insurance for working adults decreases. 

Doing that however would displace the current rentiers, and we can't have that, as they might go Galt. 

Time to take my daughter to go see Santa Claus, he might respond better to vaguely unrealistic fantasies than our political class.