Alrighty then. Got sidetracked for a second with that discussion about employment but I still had a thought or two about transfer payments. You remember transfer payment, right? Robin Hood was big on the transfer payments. Spreading the wealth around, as Joe the Plumber might tell you. Anyway, there are both moral and economic arguments against transfer payments which are pretty good and not racist.
But as a good listener to the not-at-all-biased information presented on National Public Radio, I’ve heard some good arguments for transfer payments. One came in the form of the story Edith Caldazo, a single mother living in New York City on $16,000 a year of income. How could she possibly do that? With help from the people of the United States of America, of course. Plus Edith sounds pretty disciplined. But it’s not like Edith is really getting ahead in life. She sounds safe, healthy, and reasonably happy but her life is still pretty hard.
The person who is getting ahead of his peers is her son. While other kids in similar circumstances have lives filled with uncertainty, Edith’s son has a stable home, encouragement for education, and some ideas about his future. So by taxing more well off people and giving support to people like Edith, we are not so much investing in her generation as we are in the next generation. This is a concept around which Geoffrey Canada has built a whole program to combat poverty. His pitch to parents is that they might not make it out of poverty themselves, but they can break the cycle for their children.
Which is good for the kids, but what’s in it for the rest of us? A more efficient development of our intellectual capital for one thing. It’s a whole lot easier to start educating a child at a very young age than to catch her up later on. Some kids get so frustrated with the process of remediation in schools that they act out, get in trouble, and get further behind very quickly. In the process, we miss out on some brains with the potential to lead our economy, government, and culture in the increasingly competitive global society.
So an opportunity which might have otherwise been lost has been saved. That’s good. A potential governmental crisis can also be diverted. It’s easy to pick out a trend in history of governments that crumbled, states that failed, when the gap between rich and poor became too great. Thomas Jefferson was working against this trend with both the Northwest Ordinance and his statute abolishing concentrations of inherited wealth. Such moves counteracting the concentration of wealth among a few were considered essential to the creation of a democracy.
And in addition to the economic and political efficacy of transfer payments, there is a strong moral argument in their support. In a secular country, no religious institution can express a moral sentiment of our society; however, our government can. That caring for the least among us is a moral imperative is a belief many if not most of us share. I do believe in the system of private non-profits we have in this country, and I have witnessed how philanthropy can be the most profound expression of a person’s life. Our life as a nation can take on greater meaning as well when we devote at least a portion of our collective resources to the benefit of those who need it most.