2 ms·

> try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency I like our local safety net: it works by subsidis

> try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency I like our local safety net: it works by subsidising those who need it at tax time, but they acquire all their goods and services on the open market (avoiding distortion).

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
It's kind of amusing the extent to which nominally opposing factions actually agree. Q: How do you help poor people? A: Make them less poor. The right says lower their taxes, the left says transfer payments, mathematically these are the exact same thing. The only real dispute is whether negative tax rates should be used, and de facto negative rates are the status quo and only a real dispute because attempts to make it explicit get muddied by the factions who don't want the problem solved. If housing is overpriced, instead of policies that would reduce the market price of housing (and so lower rents for landlords), they propose rent subsidies (so they get the money), or income-gated housing projects (so they can point to something nominally being done while the market price stays high). Which eats up the money that could have been used for transfer payments/tax cuts while it continues to flow to landlords. And likewise for healthcare costs -- instead of addressing the regulatory causes of high prices, the incumbents keep pushing government subsidies, so that the prices (i.e. their profits) can stay high at the expense of the customer/taxpayer. The fight isn't a question of tax cuts vs. a safety net. The fight is against industry incumbents who want to keep collecting high rents through regulatory capture.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  A local advantage of not having a first-past-the-post system is that centre-right and centre-left parties not only exist but taken together are broadly representative, and hence do spend much of their time working together to find solutions which have been crafted less to be sound-bitey and more to be acceptable to wide swaths of the populace.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

It's kind of amusing the extent to which nominally opposing factions actually agree. Q: How do you help poor people? A: Make them less poor. The right says lower their taxes, the left says transfer payments, mathematically these are the exact same thing. The only real dispute is whether negative tax rates should be used, and de facto negative rates are the status quo and only a real dispute because attempts to make it explicit get muddied by the factions who don't want the problem solved. If housing is overpriced, instead of policies that would reduce the market price of housing (and so lower rents for landlords), they propose rent subsidies (so they get the money), or income-gated housing projects (so they can point to something nominally being done while the market price stays high). Which eats up the money that could have been used for transfer payments/tax cuts while it continues to flow to landlords. And likewise for healthcare costs -- instead of addressing the regulatory causes of high prices, the incumbents keep pushing government subsidies, so that the prices (i.e. their profits) can stay high at the expense of the customer/taxpayer. The fight isn't a question of tax cuts vs. a safety net. The fight is against industry incumbents who want to keep collecting high rents through regulatory capture.

082349872349872 3y ago
A local advantage of not having a first-past-the-post system is that centre-right and centre-left parties not only exist but taken together are broadly representative, and hence do spend much of their time working together to find solutions which have been crafted less to be sound-bitey and more to be acceptable to wide swaths of the populace.