E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

Tax and Spend, or Face The Consequences
The economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.

The battle will be over how to get the economy's winners to pay for an increasingly costly poor. In a future with higher taxes, the divide between rich and poor would be the central economic challenge.

The last great hope may be to design a more efficient tax system. Much of the present system takes from people with one hand then gives back with the other, after bureaucracy eats its share. Taxes for Social Security, Medicare and roads all show elements of such recycling. A more efficient system would tax only where there is a need for some specific public good or a transfer to the poor.

Unfortunately, such measures are only stopgaps. In the end, we may be forced to learn to live in a United States where, by stealth, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" becomes the guiding principle of government -- or else confront growing, unattended poverty.
And the Big Zero is just the one to lead us there.
This is ridiculous. It's not that hard for most people to acquire the kind of skills necessary to work in a warehouse or a McDonalds or as a Walmart greeter, merely a willingness to work. As for stealth taxing, the poor will move to the states with the best benefits, the rich will move across the borders to states with lower taxes... as has been happening for years. And last I heard, President Obama refused to give California a handout, so there isn't likely to be much help for struggling states from this administration. Gregory Clark, professor of economics at the University of California at Davis (according to the blurb at the bottom of the op-ed) is doing a bit of propagandizing here trying to create submission to his idea of what the future should be.

Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2009-08-10
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=276209