The Pity Party (34 page)

Murray's transfer system would abolish nearly every social welfare program: the book is subtitled
A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
. “Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare programs, social service programs, agricultural subsidies, and corporate welfare” are all zeroed out. An appendix lists ninety-eight federal programs to be eliminated, and the implementation of the plan calls for a constitutional amendment prohibiting not only the federal government but state and local ones from enacting any law or program that “provides benefits to some citizens but not others.” It's not quite a libertarian Nirvana, in that Murray leaves in place existing arrangements for public education, the provision of transportation infrastructure, and the U.S. Postal Service.

A different approach to sweeping all the chess pieces off the board was put forward by William Buckley in his 1973 book,
Four Reforms
. Buckley relies on federalism to pare back and simplify the welfare state by limiting eligibility for federal social welfare and insurance programs to those Americans living in states whose median income was below the national average. We would all, as
American
taxpayers, assist the poor in poor states, which would strain to pay for such assistance out of taxes raised within their borders. Having done so, those of us who are Californians, Virginians, or residents of some other prosperous state would rely entirely on state programs funded from state taxes to assist the poor within our state's borders. Under federalism, different states might try different approaches (perhaps even a negative income tax), and the most successful systems would be copied around the country. Because Buckley thought it was economically and politically debilitating to turn the “sky black with criss-crossing dollars,” his proposal grounds a lot of those dollars. Federal welfare expenditures would shrink, as the number of people eligible for them was limited, and prosperous states would pay for their own welfare programs without the transportation and administrative fees of sending dollars to Washington and then back to the states.
⁵⁴

Apart from the fact there is no likelihood a policy resembling Friedman's, Murray's, or Buckley's will be enacted in the foreseeable future, the proposals have other similarities that clarify the argument between conservatives and liberals. First, all three treat the welfare state as an inevitability—Friedman for practical reasons, Murray and Buckley for political ones. In doing so, they move the debate away from whether to have a welfare state, pouring water on the hopes of those conservatives who want to see it completely dismantled someday, to the question of how to organize and operate it.

Second, by radically simplifying the welfare state, all their proposals speak to liberalism's efficacy failures. In general, simple tasks are completed more successfully than complex ones, and the welfare state is no exception. When it gives people money, people receive the money it gives them. When it gives them Head Starts or Model Cities, they often wind up with something less than a head start or a model city.

Third, simplicity is conducive to efficiency as well as to effectiveness. Writing in 2006, Murray argued that the day was fast approaching when it would be cheaper to inaugurate a transfer state than to perpetuate the existing welfare state. That day has arrived. There were 222 million Americans at least twenty-one years of age in 2012. The federal government spent $2.224 trillion on human resources programs that year. (And, as noted in Chapter Four, state and local governments spent an additional $728 billion on social services and income maintenance in 2011.) Giving each American adult $10,000 would have cost $2.22 trillion, less than what we spent on scores of federal, state, and local government programs to fight poverty and alleviate suffering. Murray's plan, however, does not give
every
adult $10,000: those who earn more than $50,000 receive $5,000, and those who earn between $25,000 and $50,000 receive a total between $5,000 and $10,000, as determined by the formula described above. Using Census Bureau data for 2002, he calculated that those provisions for reducing the transfer payment would lower the cost of the program by 14 percent from its theoretical maximum.

Apply that reduction to the facts of 2012, and the program would have cost $1.913 trillion, or about one-third less than actual federal, state, and local outlays on the welfare state that year. Because of inflation and economic growth, a larger proportion of Americans in 2012 had earnings in excess of $50,000 than in 2002, so the reduction of the program's cost from its theoretical maximum would have been greater than 14 percent. Even if the basic amount of the government stipend had been $11,170, the HHS poverty guideline for an individual in 2012, the theoretical maximum of the program would have been $2.48 trillion, leaving a net cost in the neighborhood of $2 trillion, still far below the actual cost of all welfare state programs in 2012.

Fourth, the simplicity these conservatives propose would clarify not only the welfare state's administration, but also its politics. Doing so, by no coincidence, creates problems for liberals. The more complex the welfare state, the more difficult it is for any citizen to know whether he is a net importer or net exporter of the wealth it redistributes. Large parts of the welfare state are organized to take advantage of this ambiguity by encouraging the illogical belief that nearly every citizen, except for the very richest, is a net importer of the enormous but finite amount of money it redistributes, and is
entitled
to come out ahead in his dealings with the welfare state. Social Security benefits are paid by check or direct deposit; Social Security is funded by payroll taxes imposed on employees and employers. The former is palpable, the latter is subtle, neither of which is by happenstance. Simplify the welfare state, take billions of crisscrossing dollars out of the sky, and we address the issue in terms of how much help the poor need and how much the rest of us can afford, banishing all ambiguity about who the poor are and are not.

Fifth, the plans (Murray's in particular) challenge liberals in another sense: “Do you want to eliminate poverty? This eliminates poverty. Our democracy takes up the intertwined questions of our duty to the poor and our definition of what it means to be poor. People who find the democratically determined answers insufficiently compassionate are free to argue for a higher income floor or a different schedule for reducing transfer payments . . .
and
for the higher taxes those changes will require.

“Do you, on the other hand, want an endless, eternal supply of venues for demonstrating your empathy? That's your problem—not ours, and not America's. If you want to prove, to the world or yourself, how noble and sensitive you are, do it on your own time and your own dime. The fundamental obligation to one another's economic welfare that connects us as fellow citizens has already been discharged through the transfer program. All other acts and feelings of solicitude will connect Americans in extra-political ways, as neighbors, co-religionists, etc.”

Sixth, a negative income tax will enable the great-sapping-nullity lifestyle, and some will avail themselves of that opportunity. But the existing welfare state enables the great-sapping-nullity lifestyle, and any conceivable configuration of the welfare state will do the same. There is no
policy
that precludes this moral hazard, the cultural contradiction of the welfare state. If government mitigates the consequences that follow from a lack of discipline, initiative, providence, and self-respect, some people will respond to those incentives by discarding those habits and dispositions. If we, as a republic, believed upholding those habits and dispositions was so important that it would be worth the risk that some people might starve or freeze to death (or be spared from doing so only by private charity), there wouldn't be a welfare state. The fact that every nation prosperous enough to fund one has created a welfare state argues that no modern society is prepared to order its moral priorities in this fashion. We would rather live with the irresponsibility of some than with the abject misery of others, even if we believe that the irresponsible and the miserable are often one and the same because more responsibility leads to less misery.

To be spared from misery is not the same as flourishing, however. “Here's the money,” Murray's plan says to every American, whether their ambitions are grand or meager, noble or base. “Use it as you see fit. Your life is in your hands.”
⁵⁵
In other words, once we turn the welfare state into a transfer state, people are on their own. We don't care, in our capacity as citizens dealing with other citizens through the medium of government, whether people use their basic income to go to night school, save for retirement, or buy vodka. Some people are going to make bad choices, and they will “own” those choices, as pop psychology has taught us to say. We'll still have moral duties to reach out to the suffering through churches and volunteer organizations, but will have already discharged our civic duty to them. George W. Bush's armies of compassion will perform their commonplace miracles of renewal, that is, but through channels distinct from government rather than intertwined with it.

Indeed, replacing the whole crowded roster of welfare programs with a guaranteed income could have the effect of invigorating society while establishing firm boundaries for the state. The sort of voluntary organizations that played a vital role in social welfare prior to the New Deal would have important new responsibilities.
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Not only would volunteered charity help people who are poor, but joint, voluntary action can keep people from becoming poor. Replacing huge middle-class entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare with a negative income tax would require individuals to tend to their own financial security. They would not have to do it
as
individuals, however, if fraternal societies or faith-based associations assumed a central role in offering and vetting the necessary investment and insurance products that will replace the entitlement programs. Rather than the enervation that comes from the cultural contradictions of capitalism, these kinds of arrangements would enable economic and social capital to fortify one another.

Finally, the bullshit of a liberal project indifferent to its own efficacy is inseparable from the bullshit of liberalism's lack of a limiting principle. (The latter is descriptive bullshit, in the sense that discussions purportedly concerning how expansions of the welfare state will bring us closer to the goal of social justice, inadvertently make clear that there
is
no goal, which renders the idea of getting closer to it meaningless.) If there is no end to the list of problems government should address, then there is no urgency about addressing any one of them successfully. In liberals' eyes, the welfare state's failures always result from insufficient elaboration, never from inadequate performance.

By stipulating that the welfare state should not get indefinitely smaller, conservatives would gain new leverage in debates and negotiations to press liberals to stipulate it should not get indefinitely bigger. In particular, conservatives think the steadily rising GDP documented by economists like McCloskey should permit the welfare state to get smaller, rather than permit it to get eternally bigger, the liberal position and the historical pattern. Indeed, economic growth holds out the prospect of a welfare (or transfer) state that grows in absolute terms while shrinking in relative terms. The 9.8 percent increase in (per capita, inflation-adjusted) human resources outlays on Ronald Reagan's watch occurred mostly because of economic growth. Relative to GDP, such spending shrank from 11.1 percent in 1981 to 10 percent in 1989. This may look like a rounding error, but it deserves respect as a policy accomplishment. Over eight years Reagan saw the welfare state diminish by one-tenth of what it had been, relative to the entire economy, despite never having a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, and despite the fact that a large portion of social spending is in entitlement programs strongly fortified against mere elected officials. For conservatives to interpret the growth, in absolute terms, of human resources spending in the 1980s as proof that Reagan was a failure, or conservatism is futile, requires begrudging that decade's economic expansion.

By the same token, for liberals to insist that a compassionate society is obligated to devote a larger share of its economic output to social welfare spending—no matter how much the economy grows, no matter that prosperity alleviates suffering, no matter that prosperity allows social spending to shrink in relative terms while increasing in absolute ones, no matter how unreliably social spending has reduced suffering in the past—is to put the republic on a treadmill under the pretext of entreating the citizens to undertake a pilgrimage to social justice. And that's bullshit, too.

From 1975 to 1977, sociologist Jonathan Rieder inhabited and carefully observed Canarsie, a predominantly Jewish and Italian middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Many of its residents had grown up in families that honored Franklin Roosevelt as the hero who saved the country from depression and the world from fascism. By 1975, however, America's travails at home and abroad over the preceding decade had convinced Canarsie's voters that liberalism now stood for “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” according to Rieder's book about the neighborhood. Its residents were, at the same time, disposed to become “Reagan Democrats” a few years later because to them, “The term
conservative
acquired connotations of pragmatism, character, reciprocity, truthfulness, stoicism, manliness, realism, hardness, vengeance, strictness, and responsibility.”
⁵⁷
In other words, a sizable, crucial segment of the electorate came to view the fundamental differences between liberalism and conservatives the way conservatives always had. They came to believe that whether the challenge was a totalitarian superpower, international terrorism, riots in slums and on campuses, crime in the streets, or welfare fraud and abuse, Americans could count on liberals . . . to fashion a response that was conceptually fatuous and operationally feckless.