Mr Populist Wants Privilege And Subsidy

SENATORS HILLARY Clinton and Barack Obama have been getting nice coverage as moderates, even though their ADA ratings for 2005 are both 100 per cent perfect liberal.

Now millionaire lawyer John Edwards is getting a reputation as a populist. He’s running for president on the following five headline issues on his campaign website:

Provide moral leadership in the world
Strengthen our middle class and end poverty
Guarantee universal health care for every American
Lead the fight against global warming
Get America and other countries off our addiction to oil

So let’s just look at one issue. Ending poverty. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Jackie Calmes

[I]n an address in June at Washington's National Press Club... he set a national goal of ending poverty in 30 years for the 37 million Americans living below the poverty line, lifting one-third of them above it in each of the next three decades. His "Working Society" agenda would mean a higher federal minimum wage, reduced taxes for low-income workers, universal health care, and one million new housing vouchers for working families, to help them find homes in neighborhoods with better schools.

But is there any indication that those proposals would do anything to end poverty? Let’s look at the economics:

Higher minimum wage: throws people out of work.
Reduced taxes for low-income workers: would help, but taxes on low-income workers are already heavily rebated by the Low Income Tax Credit.
Universal health care: doesn’t actually help much, because most of the uninsured are single people in their twenties.
Housing vouchers: but we already have that, big time.

In other words, John Edwards wants to increase the power of government over peoples’s lives with new subsidies and privileges.

If Edwards wants a “Working Society” he should propose a reduction in the disincentives for people to work. People in the lowest quintile work about half the hours that people in the higher quintiles. Maybe that’s why they don’t earn much money.

The way to strengthen the middle class is to make them independent of government and corporations, with their own jobs, their own savings, their own houses, their own health insurance, and a much smaller government taking money out of their paychecks.

But why would a Democrat help them do that? Why, with jobs, savings, houses, and smaller government, pretty soon they’d be turning into Republicans.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.