Picking up a book at the local library, my hand was guided to "A View from the Stands" by John Kenneth Galbraith. I never really know how to classify Galbraith whether as an economist, a liberal who happens to be an economist or a professional writer who recieved training as an economist. Most of the time when I mention Galbraith in discussions with knowledgeable people, I get a sort of look down the nose as if he is not quite a first rank kind of academic. However, I find he makes a lot of sense, says things other writers don't say and pursues the subject of economics from a very liberal point of view, which I find a lot of agreement with. In this book, which is a collection of essays and speech's he has written or presented over the years, he seems to deal with timeless and timely subject matters within the same example. This particular essay was published in 1966. The lengthy quote I am posting is - in my mind - as relevant today as it was in those heady days of 1966. The title is "The Starvation of the Cities" Quote Page 21 Another problem unsolved by economic expansion is that of the people who are left behind. Increasing national income benefits only those who participate in the economy and who thus establish a claim on the income it produces, but a sizable minority cannot or does not so participate, and it thus has no share in the improving well-being. Good public services and sound environmental conditions promote such paricipation. Good health services increase the number of people who are physically and mentally able to take part in the economy. So does good law enforcement. And good, well-located housing. And effective action against racial discrimination. And good urban transportation. But mostly this is what a good educational system accomplishes. There is no single cure for poverty, but we should not, in our sophistication, be afraid of the obvious. President Lyndon Johnson has observed that "education will not cure all the problems of a society ... [but] without it no cure for any problem is possible." And he is right. A community that provides really superior schools, starting with youngest children, and that allows the pupil to go just as far at the public expense as his abilities permit will not have many citizens who are poor; there are few college graduates and not so many high school graduates who are in the poverty brackets. So far, my approach to the problem of poverty has been strongly traditional: we should help them to help themselves. That is good, whereas merely to help them has always been considered bad. Now I venture to think the time has come to re-examine these good Calvinist tenets, which fit so well with our idea of what saves money. We need to consider the one prompt and effective solution for poverty, which is to provide everyone with a minimum income. (Thomas - sounds nice and simple doesn't it!) The arguments against this proposal are numerous, but most of them are exuses for not thinking about a solution, even one that is so exceedingly plausible. It would, it is said, destroy incentive. Yet we now have a welfare system that could not be better designed to destroy incentive if we wanted it that way. We give the needy income, and we take away that income if the recipient gets even the poorest job. Thus we tax the marginal income of the welfare recipient at rates of 100 percent or more. A minimum income, it is said, would keep people out of the labor market. But we do not want all the pople with inadequate income to work. In 1964, of the 14.8 million children classified by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as poor, nearly a third were in families headed by a woman. And three fifths of the children in families headed by women were so classified. Most of those women should not be working. Idleness, we agree, is demoralizing. But even here there is a question: Why is leisure so uniformly bad for the poor and so uniformly good for the exceptionally well-to-do? We can easily afford an income floor. (Thomas: Interesting that in My Family Basic Income Proposal, I used the metaphor of a Basic Income providing a floor while at the same time proposing a ceiling on unlimited wealth as a conceptual model to make a Basic Income financially possible.) It would cost about $20 billion to bring everyone up to what the Department of HEW considers a reasonable minimum. This is a third less than the amount by which personal income rose last year. It is not so much more than we will spend during the next fiscal year to restore freedom, democracy and religious liberty, as these are defined by the experts, in Vietnam. And there is no antidote for poverty that is quite so certain in its effects as the provision of income. In recent years we have come to recognize a major defect in the fiscal system of the United States. Put briefly, it is that, with economic growth and rising incomes, the federal government, through the income and corporation taxes, gets the money, and the cities, with everything from traffic to air pollution, get the problems. This is more acutelyt the case when the effects of population growth and urbanization are added. Various ways have been suggested for correctinbg this anomaly, most of them calling for subventions to the states and cities by the federal government. Undoubtly the best way would be for the federal government to assume the cost of providing a mimimum income and thus to free the cities from the present burden of welfare costs. (Actually, in Canada, with the discarding of CAP, (Canadian Assistance Plan), we went from a federally mandated set of minimum standards to a hodgepodge of provincial standards, most of them to low to live on. In fact in Ontario, our current neo-con government seemed to follow Galbraith's advise and take the most of the cost of welfare and education off the municipaitie's property tax base and move it to the Provincial taxation. As soon as this was accomplished, they reduced the Welfare payments by 21% four years ago with no increases for inflation and assuming inflation of 2% a year, the Welfare recipient now recieves a reduced amount equivalent to almost a 30% reduction. This is not including "clawback" legislation that takes money that the Federal Government has tried to put into the system to increase Welfare rates. So much for progress.) In these years of urban crisis we want a system that directs funds not to the country as a whole but, by some formula, to the points of greatest need, which, unquestionably, are the large cities. To transfer income maintenance to the federal government - to free big-city budgets of a large share of their welfare paymens - would be an enormous step in exactly the right direction. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde
