The Neumann plan for full employment and balanced budgets

Just the bare-bones outline of a strategy here, and I’ll clarify and amend it down the road, i.e. make it up as we go along.

1. Eliminate welfare. Don’t cut it back. People on welfare are already condemned to a life of poverty. Get rid of it altogether. We need people to rise up out of poverty, not be condemned to it.

2. Double the minimum wage. It’s bad enough that people on welfare are damned to a life of poverty; it’s even more disgusting that working folks are damned to the same thing. Every worker is entitled to a dignified standard of living.

3. It wouldn’t be fair to eliminate welfare if you couldn’t guarantee jobs for everyone. Governments have long been in the business of providing make-work projects to fill the gaps where the private sector fails in this. But why do these just need to be “make-work” projects? How about  a national program of make-affordable-housing projects, something the private sector has been unable to do for the last 50 years. If there are no employment opportunities in your local private sector, you are guaranteed a job at the Affordable Housing Construction Co-op.

4. Eliminate economic immigration. There are a few legitimate reasons for immigration. Family unification and religious or ethnic persecution for example.  A “skills shortage” in an economy with 8% unemployment isn’t one. If we have legitimate skills shortages then obviously we need to work harder at retraining our unemployed. Let’s limit economic immigration until the unemployment rate is under 1%.

5. Institute a Social Impact Tax. We need to get our heads around the idea that taxes need to be set at a level that permits the non-deficit funding of these programs. Instead, we have been bullied into believing that our social programs and the public welfare must accommodate inadequate tax rates. The non-stop pressure to lower taxes benefits primarily the very few at the upper reaches of the economic food chain. We’ve long bought into other taxes designed to change behavior; cigarette taxes are a well-accepted strategy for reducing tobacco usage. Why can we not use a financial transaction tax to discourage non-productive economic behavior? And hedge funds that dismember productive corporate entities and off-shore the jobs and the profits, enriching a few investors but impoverishing the broader community, would be taxed at a rate of 100%.