A week ago I provoked some discussion with a post on a 1970s experiment in providing a guaranteed minimum income to a rural community in Manitoba. I put up some back-of-the-envelope numbers that showed South Dakota could redirect half of…
Posts tagged as “welfare”
When I've helped people do their income taxes, I've pointed to the total tax (Line 63 on this year's 1040) and said, "That's your price for being an American." But what if taxes worked the other way? What if the…
Wherever Republicans may win tonight, they will likely claim a mandate to get rid of "Big Government," which translates as handouts for anyone other than their corporate pals in the military-industrial-agricultural-surveillance complex. But remember: all that "Big Government" that Republicans…
For more on the Rounds-Daugaard legacy, we turn to Todd Epp, who cites Census figures to report that the number and percentage of South Dakotans receiving public assistance since 2000 has gone up: In 2000, an estimated 4,078 South Dakotans…
Governor Dennis Daugaard and other leading South Dakota Republicans do not trust the federal government's ability to sustain funding enough to expand Medicaid. They do, however, trust the federal government enough to fund 41.5% of state functions: A report released…
Marion Michael Rounds's weekend press is the usual blap of vague policy pronouncements and wishful thinking: South Dakota common sense, national debt, EPA bad, go broke and die if you aren't working— —wait, what's that last one? [Rounds] wants to…
Some South Dakota conservatives think we should test welfare recipients for drug use. A U.S. District Court judge ruled this week that Florida's welfare drug tests are unconstitutional: Enforcement of the law was temporarily halted in October 2011 after the…
Michael Woodring reads a Forbes contributor and frets that we're misusing the word poverty. The Forbes contributor grumbles that it is inaccurate to say that 15% of Americans live in poverty: The 15% number is not the number living in…