Re: Culling the proles with crypto anarchy

[Felix Lee <flee@teleport.com>]

> "The Work Welfare Trade-Off: An Analysis of the Total Level of Welfare
> Benefits by the State" by Michael Tanner, Stephen Moore, and David Hartman,
> September, 1995.  It's at <http://www.cato.org/research/pr-nd-st.html>.  

actual report is at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-240.html

offhand, I don't have a basis for grokking the numbers,
because I've never been an unwed mother with two children
under 5yrs old.  if they had done numbers for a single male
with no children, I'd have a better chance of knowing how
attractive welfare would be over random lowpaying jobs I
used to have.

I find it very odd that the study does an elaborate benefits
calculation for a mother without a job, but doesn't do a
similar calculation for a mother with an entry-level job.
this would be a directly meaningful comparison.

instead, it tries to convert welfare benefits to "pretax
wage equivalent", which is just silly.  people with a pretax
income of $30k/yr probably have a health plan paid for by
their employer, which invalidates the comparison being made.

something else that's iffy is inclusion of median housing
assistance paid out by agencies, rather than median received
by the sample population.  this means the model individual
is a nonworking unwed mother of two infants who gets housing
assistance, rather than just any nonworking unwed mother of
two infants on welfare.

report rejected:
  meaningless numbers
  thesis not supported by the evidence
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