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“I propose that every man, woman, and child receive from the federal government an annual payment. This payment would not vary in accordance with the wealth of the recipient. For those on public assistance, this income grant would replace the welfare system. It has also been suggested that the national income grant could replace certain social security benefits.” (George McGovern, 1972)

Today the Cato Institute held the following book forum: “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State and Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (AEI Press, 2016) and (Public Affairs, 2016) Book Forum October 4, 2016” (See more below)

In 1972, when George McGovern made his proposal, the US population was 209.9 million. As of August 13, 2016, the US resident population was 324.2 million: “U.S. population growth is among the highest in industrialized countries, because of “immigration levels, which are higher in the U.S…” In other words, while the US birthrate is at or below replacement, immigration rates are high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States

When George McGovern made the proposal, well-educated multi-generational Americans could still usually count on living wage employment. Such has no longer been the case since the Reagan years.

The author of this blog site would propose a better, non-politically correct, solution to the public welfare “problem” – appropriate education and jobs for people in their own countries – in this case the USA. Jobs for Americans, what a novel idea! The US should do away with H1B and other non-refugee related legal immigration and give jobs to Americans first. The primary beneficiaries of these visas which legally strip Americans of their jobs appear to be mostly from the highly overpopulated Asian countries, such as India and China. Why are Americans and Europeans called racists if they want to work in their own homeland and be near their families? And, yet, the Japanese have almost no immigration and those allowed to permanently migrate are generally from the Japanese diaspora (reverse migration.) But, no one says anything, despite their World War II history. In short, Japanese can take American jobs, but Americans can’t take Japanese jobs, though post-Fukushima no one in their right mind would want to work in Japan. H1B visas are also an easy door to citizenship to those who know how to work the system because their friends and relatives have already worked it, or they have a knowledgeable lawyer. For illegal immigration the US needs to examine their contribution to mining land grabs and wars which create desperate migrants and refugees. People need to have the right to stay home, not the right to permanently immigrate.

Americans should be favored over foreigners in employment and for funding in publicly funded educational institutions. After all, where else are they supposed to go work? Who will care for their elderly parents? Only those married to US nationals and true political refugees should be admitted as long-term immigrants to the US both for the sake of the environment and because the US is not providing jobs for either its well-educated or its less well-educated citizens. Study abroad is a good chance for people from different countries to become friends. Allowing foreigners to take jobs away doesn’t create an environment of friendliness, but rather hostility. This is an effective way to turn those who love foreigners into xenophobes.

Even if only for the sake of the environment, America must stop the immigration pyramid scheme that it has run since the beginning. The immigration pyramid scheme must eventually end. The question is only if it ends before or after the total destruction of the environment and social fabric. Economic growth is a fraud. One doesn’t have to watch job reports for long to realize that the reason that the economy must grow and create jobs is because of population growth. Keeping a population at replacement means that new jobs don’t need to be created, except for the unemployed.

If you aren’t working you can’t pay taxes. A subsidy is a poor substitute for a job using one’s education, gifts, and talents. Since at least the Bush II years, true political refugees and those married to US nationals appear to have the lowest priority for immigration. Meanwhile, multi-generational Americans who don’t know how to bribe or otherwise cheat appear to be too largely excluded from jobs. (In the past they could count on farming, at least.) And, if Americans are able to ex-pat out because America has nothing but unemployment to offer them, they are sometimes subject to both US taxation and foreign taxation alike. They find themselves as unemployed or unwanted immigrants abroad, simply because the US government doesn’t have any love for its own people, but only hate.

Cancellation of student debt is unfair to those who have paid their debts, even when it required sacrifices such as not having children because they couldn’t afford them. Employment with living wages which allow at least pay-back of the original loan (minus interest) makes more sense.

Why might Cato Institute, with its affiliation to the Koch brothers, be in favor of a guaranteed income? Do they have a heart? Or is it because it keeps corporations from having to pay a fair wage? The welfare state most often constitutes an unfair subsidy to business because it allows people to survive while working part-time for low wages. It also gives them some purchasing power. A desperate underclass makes those who have jobs live in fear of losing their jobs if they don’t accept longer hours and lower wages or salaries.

Regarding taxation, the intro to a McGovern-Leontief article stated in 1972:
“Canceling all exemptions and deductions would not only restore the honesty and effectiveness of the income and the corporate profit tax. It would also do away with the immense effort now devoted both to legitimate and illegitimate tax avoidance and to tax enforcement…

… it is an undeniable fact that millions of ordinary, working, middle-income families pay their taxes as required by law, while many of the wealthy use a variety of devices to escape their rightful tax burden. At the same time, the man in the middle sees billions of dollars going into welfare programs that don’t work. In short, many Americans pay their taxes dutifully and feel that others are exploiting the tax and welfare systems…” (Excerpted from the Intro to “George McGovern: On Taxing & Redistributing Income” by George McGovern and Wassily Leontief, The New York Review of Books )

Excerpted from the main body of text, Sections I and II, by George McGovern:
“I propose a minimum income tax so that the rich could not avoid their share of the tax burden no matter what loopholes they used…
This basic tax reform would not unfairly penalize the wealthy just because they were well off. It would simply ensure that they could not dump their tax load onto the backs of already hard-pressed middle-income taxpayers.” (Section I)

“The present tax system contains inequities because it does not levy a correspondingly fair burden on all taxpayers. While the rich benefit from the tax system, middle-income groups and low-income groups including the poor do not receive such benefits.

Those with medium incomes find they are paying their taxes but not receiving either the kind of tax breaks given to the wealthy or the kind of public assistance payments made to the poor.

The poor find that, as soon as they go to work, they are subject to extremely high rates of income taxation because of their sudden sharp reduction of public aid when they earn their first dollar.

The net result is mounting frustration for those in the middle and a future of poverty for those who are heavily penalized when they seek to work their way out of welfare dependence.”
…
“The Minimum Income Grant

I propose that every man, woman, and child receive from the federal government an annual payment. This payment would not vary in accordance with the wealth of the recipient. For those on public assistance, this income grant would replace the welfare system. It has also been suggested that the national income grant could replace certain social security benefits… (Section II)
(“George McGovern: On Taxing & Redistributing Income” by George McGovern and Wassily Leontief, the New York Review of Books, May 4, 1972) https://web.archive.org/web/20160515154846/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/05/04/george-mcgovern-on-taxing-redistributing-income/

From the Cato Institute:
“In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State and Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (AEI Press, 2016) and (Public Affairs, 2016) Book Forum
October 4, 2016
12:00PM to 1:30PM
Hayek Auditorium, Cato Institute

Featuring the authors Charles Murray, W. H. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; and Andy Stern, Ronald O. Perlman Senior Fellow, Columbia University; Former President, Service Employees International Union; moderated by Michael Tanner, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute.

Across the political spectrum there is a growing recognition that our current welfare state is unable to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Among the alternatives being explored by scholars on both the right and left is the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), a simple cash payment from the government to every citizen, without other requirements or restrictions. Two new books look at this idea from very different, but overlapping directions. Charles Murray, envisions a UBI as an alternative to the current bloated and bureaucratic welfare state. Andy Stern worries about inequality and a future in which automation has reduced low-skilled employment. Along with Cato senior fellow Michael Tanner, they will discuss whether a UBI is a practical and affordable approach to poverty in a new economy and whether or not there really is an opportunity to build a cross-partisan consensus for a new approach to social welfare.” “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State and Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, This work by Cato Institute is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License“:
http://www.cato.org/events/our-hands-plan-replace-welfare-state-raising-floor-how-universal-basic-income-can-renew-our (One hour video of the event is now available online at the link.)

Note that we have not watched the video. Our blog post was written based on the summary an hour or two prior to the event.