Three studies suggest the answer is yes. Not discussed is an obvious implication. Since we know that Medicaid does not improve health, it looks like there would be substantial social gain if we took money out of Medicaid and spent it instead on food stamps and cash welfare.
Can we have a safety net that provides relief to people who experience misfortune and need temporary help without creating a permanent class of dependents who face high financial penalties if they get a job and go to work or if they marry the other natural parent of their children?
I answer “yes” in this latest Forbes editorial.
We can have a safety net that meets the needs of people who experience misfortune without creating a permanent class of nonworking dependents who behave in socially undesirable ways.
When you put all our social programs together, low-income Americans face roughly 100% marginal tax rates. Earn an extra dollar, lose a dollar of benefits. It’s not that simple, of course, with multiple cliffs of infinite tax rates (earn an extra cent, lose a program entirely), and it depends on how many and which programs people sign up for. But the order of magnitude is right.
Zucman’s/Emmanuel Saez view of inequality and the case they make for a wealth tax. The American Economics Association has awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark medal to University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman. At the link you’ll find what the AEA decision makers thought made him deserving.
This PDF is the main document concerning National Policy Topic of Economic Inequality.
The ethnic differences in the prevalence of traditional marriage are huge. Among the nearly five million children in the ACS from 2014 to 2021, these were the percentages of children living with married birth parents broken down by the child’s ethnicity.
Source: Charles Murray, “The Geography of Traditional Families in America.” American Enterprise Institute, April, 2023.
For the past two decades the US has been experiencing shortages of cancer drugs, antibiotics and even saline, a drug potentially needed by almost every patient who gets admitted to the hospital. Nearly all thirty of the most frequently used emergency department drugs experienced shortages from 2006-2019.
