New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

Moreover, a UBI is not unprecedented. It has been successfully implemented in a number of developing countries, including recently in rural India and Namibia. Additionally, the U.S. actually has a deep-cover UBI program that we call Social Security. It’s only for old people, so it obviously falls [...]

The right-wing is getting riled up about food stamps, again. Sean Hannity even dedicated an entire hour to the food stamp program last week, with predictable messaging about how it is exploding and a scourge on the country. While the purpose of this manufactured outrage is to get rid of or dramatically shrink the food [...]

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

Cash benefit programs are simply distributive institutions: they, along with our other economic institutions, determine which individuals get to spend money and how much. The government does not spend money on a cash benefit program, it just channels it to someone who spends it. The only coherent [...]

A transfer is a cash (or cash-like) benefit that governments just distribute out to certain (or all) people. The United States has a variety of transfer programs. The Earned Income Tax Credit transfers money to low-income workers and their families. The Child Tax Credit transfers money to households with dependent children. SNAP transfers food vouchers [...]

Evan Soltas wrote a column about Social Security in Bloomberg. I responded to that column with a blog post, and explained where I thought he went wrong. Now he is out with a blog post responding to me.

In my argument, I basically pan the notion that retirement savings [...]

Evan Soltas has a post out today about generational warfare, in which he effectively advocates cutting Social Security benefits. Him and I had a little back-and-forth about this article before it came out, and he told me to blog my response to make it clearer. So here goes.

In his argument, Soltas groups [...]

I do not think we should make any modifications to Social Security benefits. Closing the small Social Security deficit would be trivially easy with tweaks on the revenue side, and there is just no reason not to do that. However, if we are actually going to make cuts to the program, why don’t [...]

I had the extreme displeasure of reading Kristof’s long Sunday piece on out-of-control rural Kentuckian welfare cheats. According to some random person Kristof met in Kentucky, a bunch of people there try to make their kids really stupid and illiterate so that they can claim them as disabled and collect mountains of government [...]

I wrote earlier about the myth of Social Security insolvency back when scaremongering about Social Security was in the news. These days, it looks like Medicare is the new punching bag. It is hard to tell if the right-wing gave up on the Social Security stuff because of how ridiculous it was, or [...]

Unlike Social Security, projected Medicare spending will dramatically outpace projected revenues in the next few decades. If nothing is done, Medicare will run huge deficits. Importantly, these projected deficits are not primarily driven by the shifting demographics of an aging population; rather, they are almost entirely driven by rapid growth in healthcare costs.

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