I’m not one of them, but certain people on the RIGHT side of the aisle support this idea.
- Pro-traditional family groups, wanting to encourage the idea of stay-at-home moms and of intact families having more children.
- A minority of deficit hawks. Conceding that a certain portion of your population is going to end up on welfare anyway, cutting to the chase and just cutting them a lump-sum check every month would eliminate dozens of overlapping welfare programs, and allow a lot of bureaucracies, bureaucrats and spending to be cut.
Milton Friedman among others advocated the latter point.
And frankly we are going to reach a stage where so many jobs are automated that this will become the only way to avert social chaos.
I’m one of them. Cut SSI. Cut TANF. Slash and burn HHS food stamps. Get rid of WIC. Kill SSD. Nix free school lunches. Kill a gazillion welfare programs in favor of a single program. Watch anyone that cuts a check on the first and is bankrupt by the fifth depend on family. Give me a flat tax. Maybe Friedman wasn’t bonkers.
I’d rather it happen before the riots that accompany %50 unemployment due to robo-nano-3D print-AI-globalist-whatever revolution but I’m not picky.
How disturbing is it that -conservative- economists are passing around an unemployment rate of 50+? I don’t see the family surviving that.
I dunno about Milton Friedman being on the right. He always struck me as a guy like Will Rogers. A leftist with a down-home presentation and a lot of natural ability for cracking jokes. I think of Friedman as a conservative-leaning Keynesian. In his day, that was saying a lot for him, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think he was an Austrian.
It would be added to, not replace, all the payments and allowances and credits now extant. Those stay at home moms, the ones who want this type of stipend would exult in the new ability to pay for an abortion or three every year and drink a lot more sodas or wine and do a lot more drugs.
Considering that Welfare is only 30% efficient (70% is wasted in the bureaucracy) this is the lesser of two evils, but it is still evil