Clearly you didn’t read the papers that I linked they also cited this paper.
Tanner, Michael. 1996. The End of Welfare. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.
Has it really? By that token a charitable mandate is a government construction. The mandate maintains certain levels of overall charity by government force even when the morality of the people is low and they are less likely to give on their own. I don’t know how you are judging efficiency and effectiveness of the government. Is it by the prevailing wages they pay, or perhaps by the fact that it is a job for government workers rather than a cause, or perhaps the government acting as a middleman in an industry they also regulate. What about fairness is that regressive social security tax fair? How are we to judge fairness? What does it mean?
That is Quite an opinion. If you act selfishly and the government finds out they will strip you of your assets and make you dependent upon the system which you have cheated. I highly suggest that you give selflessly.
They don’t have a strong influence on the Obama administration. They did on the Bush administration - and look how that turned out.
Mormons tithe today. But my understanding is that they don’t get to pick who they tithe to, they tithe to the church which distributes the money. So it is a lot more like a tax than it is your plan.
No, the charities would do the “education.” Do you get mailings from charities? Do you see charity ads in TV and in magazines and on-line? Who is going to pay for these? The charities, out of the donations. And who gets the money? The ones representing the greatest need or the ones with the best ads? What happens to the kids being served by charities which don’t advertise very well, or aren’t the cause of the month?
As for volunteering, exactly how many charities can you volunteer in? Especially if you have a job and family, What about those helping people far away from you?
In addition, the greatest need occurs during recessions, exactly when giving will be reduced. The government still can help, what about when there is 10% unemployment?
BTW, who certifies that the charity is legitimate? Don’t tell me that they will be - lots of Silicon Valley companies don’t do United Way anymore since they had corruption at a high level. And that was local. Do you want people to get ripped off, or do you want a massive bureaucracy? Your choice.
hi Joshuagenes, it is good idea but it may create several problems for local charitable authorities. firstly, local authorities can’t handle the whole population due to smaller size of charitable organizations as compared to Governments. Secondly, local authorities can perform illegal activities and may not distribute charitable money to deserving people. thirdly, everyone will bound to pay 10 percent flat rate which may be created several problems to low income inhabitants.
Another problem which I don’t think has been mentioned, although I could be wrong, is that donating to charities doesn’t eliminate the middle man. Charities are middle men. The only way to eliminate the middle man is to help someone directly, yourself. Furthermore, charities, being non-profits, have all the pathologies of governments. You’ve got an organization handling money that isn’t really theirs and no one really has any incentive to make sure it’s spent wisely. And a lot of people actually get pretty rich working in the non-profit sector.
The system we have now, where you pay taxes and get deductions if you give to charity, works best. The best system of all would be one in which we give everyone the personal help they need, but that’s never going to happen. Most people are generous enough to give to the poor, but they don’t actually want to have them around, which is why charities that actually help poor people directly often have a hell of a time getting a permit to set up an office. Middle class folks don’t want poor people in their neighborhoods.
If relying on private charity was such a great system for thousands of years as the OP claims, then why did government start spending on social causes in the first place?
Well, that’s a little more complicated. Part of it was that charities weren’t always operating where there was need, but another part was the stigma. The government wants people to feel entitled to help and not feel humiliated by it. The government is wrong, of course. We actually got the worst of both worlds. Welfare does stigmatize, AND the recipients often feel entitled to it. Great way to create societal fissures.
Because the levels of giving are much too low for the task, poorly distributed, and non-government groups are typically more corrupt and less efficient.
Tithes, as others have said. Thing is… someone has to control what a person’s income actually is, right? So, I would have to give 10% (of my total income or after taxes?) to a charity and do so in a form I’d be able to report to the government. That would mean I’d be making a single payment, just for ease of paperwork. I say “of my total income or after taxes”, because - are we supposed to turn road maintenance into a charity?
Another issue with private charity is that often it would be led by a person or small group of people, and end when they died. Those who thought forward and had the power for it would set up a fund, but this wasn’t something the immense majority of people had the power or means to do until relatively recently. And even those which got set up would sometimes get discontinued; lands and other sources of income granted to privately-funded hospitals, hospices, orphanages or schools sometimes got “redistributed” by a greedy government, or one which had been set up with a royal fund got dropped during a budget redistribution (they were considered personal charity of the king or queen who’d founded the place, but he or she had left a mandate to keep it funded).
Charities exist for, well, charity. Governments spend the bulk of their money on non-charitable purposes, giving far more money to the politically powerful constituencies than the people who actually need it. Since these entitlements for the middle class and wealthy are necessary to maintain public support for aid to the poor, that money has to be counted as an overhead expense.
Also, take those administrative expenses estimates with a grain of salt. Most government programs don’t aggressively fight fraud. Fraud is waste, and thus also must count towards overhead when comparing the relative efficiency of government vs. the non-profit vs. the profit sector.
Robert Woodson stated: “on average, 70 cents of each dollar budgeted for government assistance goes not to the poor, but to the members of the welfare bureaucracy and others serving the poor.”
The Michael Tanner paper you provided states, “Yet this year the federal government will spend more than $668 billion on at least 126 different programs to fight poverty.”
Is it your belief that of the $668 billion spent by the US government on poverty programs, that only $200 billion will actually reach the poor, and the rest is basically non-productive overhead?
Well, they’re really not similar at all, are they? In Obamacare the mandate is to purchase coverage for yourself to cover catastrophic injury or illness that would otherwise be paid by the population as a whole. It is to combat a free rider problem. There are no free riders in SS (to simplify it to the one program that the OP seems to be focusing on with his comments about helping his grandparent).
An old-age retirement pension system similar to Obamacare would be a marketplace of defined benefit plans that kick in at 72 (or whatever). Everyone would be mandated to purchase coverage for themselves or pay a fine. There would be no SS, but rather your minimum income in retirement would be defined by the plan you chose.
This may or may not be preferable to the current US mandatory retirement pension plan - YMMV.
The interesting thing (well, to me at least), is that charitable organizations are intricately tied up in our broken health care system as well. A decent percentage of hospitals (all of the main ones in my city, at least) are non-profits. If we want to focus on health care I think the current system is a bit of a warning against allowing charities to run the show.
What’s your/the problem with IPS?
I once calculaated how much money churches would have to raise to take care of all people in need in one area. I figured they would have to triple their income, at least, and that would still leave their own programs short. Central to the OP’s plan is “charities” which by definition are voluntary. Tell me how to do that. If by law, then its not charity. The Libertarian cite did not include figures on serving a whole population in need. The govt. is supposed to; charities usually choose a niche and restrict themselves to it. (because they don’t have money enough)
By “stripped of their assets and made dependent upon the system” you mean all of their assets, right? Because if it was just some of their assets, they wouldn’t be dependent on charity.
So, if someone fails to pay what amounts to a 10% tax, you advocate a penalty equal to all of their assets.
House, car, bank account, family business, the fridge with all of the food in it, clothes, insulin, oxygen bottles, wedding ring, the retirement nest egg that took a lifetime to build. All gone in a puff of confiscatory smoke.
For underpaying on a the functional equivalent of a tax bill. Not for murder, or grand theft, or arson, or producing chemical weapons in the garage. Nor for failing to pay federal income tax, or FICA, or state taxes. Only for your special pet tax.
That’s one important tax, there.
The Institute for Policy Studies? They’re about as credible as the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Seriously, fringe groups - left, right, or whatever - are usually out on the fringe for a reason. If an idea is sensible it gets embraced by the masses and becomes part of the mainstream consensus. The ideas that can’t make that transition are almost always bad ideas.