Thom Hartmann: Time to Ditch Welfare for a Basic Income?

[thomhartmann]

That's right - free money! Conservatives love to complain about so-called "entitlements" and government waste. I’ll tell you about one solution that will completely eliminate waste without leaving people desperate.

For more information on the stories we've covered visit our websites at thomhartmann.com - freespeech.org - and RT.com. You can also watch tonight's show on Hulu - at Hulu.com/THE BIG PICTURE and over at The Big Picture YouTube page. And - be sure to check us out on Facebook and Twitter!

[Kalidurga]

1. This is a great idea

so naturally Republicans would fight it tooth and nail and then of course sign up for it once it was available.

[PoliticAverse]

2. Basic Income proponents usually make an error - taking the total amount spent on social welfare

spending dividing it by the number of recipients, and claiming the social welfare programs can be
replaced by giving each recipient a check for the resulting amount.

For example suppose you wanted to replace Medicare with a 'basic income' and you divided total
Medicare expenditures by the number of Medicare recipients and gave each person a check for the
resulting amount so they could pay their own medical bills. This would clearly fail because those
with very high medical bills wouldn't have enough to pay them and those with very low medical
bills would have extra cash. The issue is that much of social welfare spending really is a type of
'social insurance' and you obviously can't replace an insurance program simply by giving everyone
back the amount of the average premium paid.

[passiveporcupine]

4. I agree, that our medical system needs to be maintained...as a single payer system.

as a single payer system, that works in conjunction with a basic income. I believe that some countries do provide basic income now and still have a Universal Health care system, or a government run health care system.

[panfluteman]

3. Yeah! Count Me In On This!

I really wonder - what is the ratio, as it currently stands in our welfare system today, between what we pay out in salaries to the social workers who determine who needs what and how much versus how much is actually paid out to the recipients? Who knows? The former sum may actually exceed the latter! But such a streamlining of our welfare system may be too objective and rational for conservatives and Republicans, who have all these Horatio Alger-esque, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" objections that are more emotional and irrational knee jerk reactions than anything else.