The Role of Government

[Dave Roberts]

This provides an interesting essay on the role of government in providing for human needs as well as a study of private charity. It's a bit long, but well worth the time to read it, whether or not you may agree.

[KeithE]

[Dave Roberts]

[Haruo]

But you've got to figure out a system where the top 1% can get rich enough that they can afford to be charitable enough.

I don't anticipate much direct interaction with this article by William or ET, and if Ed weighs in I doubt I'll understand his points.

[ET]

[Haruo]

[ET]

[Dave Roberts]

This relates well to the mis-shapen role of government in our society.

[ET]

[Dave Roberts]

[Dave Roberts]

[ET]

[ET]

Dave, back to the charity part of this discussion. I don't think it is feasible to ever go to a completely private system of charity. However, I would argue that the system we have now is largely wasteful. The Department of Agriculture main job these days is to administer food stamps. Why are government bureaucrats who are theoretically tasked with setting policy on farming administering food stamp handouts? Besides the fact that here is no constitutional authority for the federal government to engage in charity, the farther away the administration of benefits are from the recipients, the more subject they are to abuse. Charity endeavors should, in my opinion, be almost exclusively state and local matters. Transferring that money from Nevada or Oregon or Michigan or Oklahoma to D.C. just means there's a big pool of money for politicians and lobbyists to fight over. The closer the programs are to the people, the more say we have in how they are run. "Of, by and for the people" to me means that there shouldn't be a "one-size-fits-all" approach to charity (and a whole lot of other things). The states should be laboratories for what works and what doesn't. If the "blue states" want to try one method and the "red states" want to try another, then so be it. Let them go about it instead of having to fight which way everybody will follow whether they want to or not.

Post secondary education is a rather interesting subject to me, particularly the costs. A multitude of lengthy threads and discussions here have decried the "high cost" of health care. Folks have talked about the immorality of it all, yet college costs have risen TWICE that of health care over the last 30 years or so. However, since higher ed is largely a government-run domain (and a bastion of liberal thought and administration), it seems to be protected from the obvious criticism that if government can't control college costs, how is it going to do so with health care? If liberals can't keep the costs down of institutions that they largely run based on their philosophies, how can their beloved "Big G" keep health care costs contained? But I digress.

Colleges costs are not immune to the law of supply-and-demand. If you enact a large grant and guaranteed loan program and make 5 and 6-figure sums of money available to kids with little job history and very little credit history and most likely very little wisdom to weight costs and benefits, then we should naturally expect to end up with a "student loan crisis" as college costs rise. After all, it is almost obligatory for college administrators to lament their lack of funds, so when Johnny or Suzie shows up with a brand new shiny grant of $5000 from the taxpayers, the finance folks start figuring out where to spend it....raise some person's salary, build a new building, redo the college president's mansion, add an ancient Babylonian Entertainment major. Not to mention that many students probably go to schools they couldn't otherwise afford if not given monetary handouts in the forms of grants or loans.

I don't accept that there are "few opportunities for students to graduate without major debt". I'm sorry, but student loan debt is largely a self-imposed bondage. The military offers college tuition benefits. My employer offers college tuition benefits (which I used to put myself through the last few year of college...took me almost 8 years to get through college, but I did without any debt). There's plain old work. There may be some students who "need" to take on student loans to go to college because they may not live anywhere near one, but I imagine the vast majority are like my son. He wanted to go to a small out-of-state Christian college that offered him a small football scholarship....BUT he/we would have to potentially take out student loans to the tune of 20 to $30,000 depending on increases in the football scholarship as he progressed. We refused to do it. He could go to school here at Univ. of Memphis and not have any debt. But had we allowed him, he'd most likely be at Evangel and loaded with 20 or $30,000 in debt.

However, I would guess that most students simply justify taking out tens of thousands, some times 100,000+, in student loans to go the "best" school for their major. They could go in-state or close to home and live with the parents and have no debt or very little, but "you get what you pay for", so they graduate with 50 or 60k with a degree in art history, "womyn's studies" or "environmental justice" (yes, that is an actual major...at least according to the Nashville paper who quoted a student that had supposedly majored in it at Vanderbilt University). The payments come due and they can't find a job in art history and then we see them at an Occupy Wall Street rally protesting the rich and lamenting the "student loan crisis". Huh?

My youngest is a junior in high school and she refuses to take on any debt. She may not go to a school that makes U.S. News and World Report's "Top 10" rankings or such, but since where your went to school matters little in the end (contrary to what those rankings imply and what the Ivy League crowd would like for you to believe), she says she'll be going to wherever she can go without using the student loan "credit card". If that's locally at the UofM, she's cool with that. If she can put together scholarships for volleyball and others, she may look at Union University, Christian Brothers or others.

At any measure, with some rather modest help from us and my parents, we'll get 3 kids through college without any debt...well, one of them will have $3500 or so, but that's more of a footnote. We've told them that if they make the decision to not take on student loan debt, they'll be way ahead of many of their peers. One of my son's friends at church has $80,000 in debt and was working for a non-profit after college....why so much debt? Because she could get "free money" and kept changing majors. So she entered married life a year or two ago with an $80,000 student loan to saddle onto their married life. But she got an "education". Hooray!!!

[Dave Roberts]

ET, I'm very glad you have the access to education that you do. Memphis is a far different animal from the area in which I live. Let's look at it. While the community college branch (where my wife is employed) provides up to a two-year associate degree or vocational training in several fields, the closest four-year schools are VCU which is 65 miles north, Longwood which is 80 miles northwest, ODU which is 90 miles east, or North Carolina schools which would create out-of-state tuition costs for any one choosing to attend. I didn't include any private schools, but the possibility of living at home and commuting is virtually non-existent. In this high poverty area, more students qualify for Pell Grants than for student loans.

While SNAP (food stamps) was created to help poor people, it was also created and became the domain for the Department of Agriculture, as a way to increase food consumption and to help the farmers who were not as profitable as their Congressmen wanted them to be. Indeed, it was sold as helping reduce farm surpluses back in the late 1960's. I agree that there should be more local input to how it administered, but today the conservative movement has shifted the War on Poverty to the War on the Poor. They are blamed for their own plight. That is not acceptable to me as a Christian. Yes, poor people have made bad decisions, but the child of a single teenage mother whom nobody wanted and who had never been encouraged toward anything is not the one who made the bad choices.

One of the great failures in small-town and rural areas was the "welfare to work program" of the 1990's. There are jobs out there, but often they are 20 to 40 miles from the persons who need them. Poor people do not have dependable personal transportation, and there is no public transit available outside of urban areas, and even in cities, that transit is of poor quality and timing. If we can help people have jobs, then that is good, but the de-industrialization of America which has been a deliberate government program favoring off-shore manufacturing, has gutted the job market for people who are poor or who have limited skills.

ET, you and I began with "white privilege" and with encouragement to achieve. Most of those in poverty did not have that advance on their start.

[Sandy]

[Haruo]

And Washington and several other states have taken steps to increase medical coverage funding or some such other charity provision in order to raise it to a level where the Congressional Republicans effort to severely reduce food stamps will be untriggered and thousands of folks who would otherwise have to eat cold turkey if the food bank had it will be able to continue to use their EBT cards.

[William Thornton]

Food stamp error rate is between 5 and 6% in GA. The state administers the program but fed dollars pay it; hence, lack of incentive to avoid waste, $138m overpayment in 2013.

[Dave Roberts]

[William Thornton]

[Dave Roberts]

One statement that troubles me is the idea that federal aid in poverty is against the constitution. How does one "promote the general welfare" short of helping one's neighbor as a function of government?

[Sandy]

[ET]

Dave, beware, I'm about to unload the dump truck in a series of posts....that beeping sound you hear is getting closer. Been detoured doing other things, so I'm just getting back.

Here is the first of four posts in response:

1) (Regarding student loans) Yes, we can ALWAYS come up for a need for ANY government program, but that doesn't mean that it should be a FEDERAL program nor the size of the current one. The situation you describe doesn't mean we should just drop big piles of cash/debt on kids fresh out of high school. Then, when a large portion of them lack the wisdom to spend other people's money wisely (that is rarely ever done even with adults), find themselves without a job and a truckload of debt, they wish to claim a "crisis" is at hand....but it's one largely of their own making, but we are their enablers with such programs. It amazes me the regular frequency that folks call into Dave Ramsey's radio show with $50,000+ in student loan debt to end up with a degree in art history or something....yet we enable it as taxpayers.

2) I do not buy your "War on the Poor". There are conservative organizations all over the place that simply have different ideas about how to administer such programs or even argue that the feds shouldn't be the ones doing it or that they are severely mismanaged. But try to reform any of them and you get a commercial of Republicans pushing an old lady off a cliff in a wheelchair or accusations of Republicans trying to send people into starvation.

3) Your "de-industrialization of America" is a myth. The number of people employed in manufacturing in this country has been largely steady for 50+ years. It's fluctuated a bit, but has stayed in the 15-20 million range. What has drastically changed is the percentage of jobs that are manufacturing. Just as the percentage of people who were farmers has dropped from some 90% plus down to 2 or 3% over the last century and a half, so has the percentage engaged in manufacturing. However, manufacturing output gas gone up 700% plus over the last 50 years even as fewer and fewer people are employed in that field as a percentage of the population. If you want, I can send you the related presentation by some economist at one of the Federal Reserve meetings a few years ago. If you like 'DATA' and charts such as the ones Keith usually brings to a discussion, then it's a slide presentation you will love.

4) There are parts of America that are hurting for skilled workers/tradesman. has made this one of his goals: educating young people about the need for skilled craftsman/tradesmen in America. According to his site, there's 600,000 jobs out there if someone has the skills....but we've become OBSESSED in this country with the idea that EVERYONE should go to college and we'll throw around money to get you to go.

[ET]

[ET]

[ET]