Monday Miscellany, 9/16/24

Welfare and Our Fiscal Woes

Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and mandatory work requirements, time-limits, and other reforms quieted down a contentious political issue.  But today, welfare as a huge block of government spending is back in the form of “means-tested” payments and benefits (that is, those available only to people with low-incomes).

In fact, former Texas senator Phil Gramm and current Texas congressman Jodey Arrington say that our federal government’s fiscal problems derive not from the cost of Social Security and Medicare, as is often assumed, but from social-welfare spending.  Consider these statistics from their Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled Welfare Is What’s Eating the Budget (behind a paywall):

Means-tested social-welfare spending totaled $1.6 trillion in 2023. Welfare spending now absorbs an astonishing 72.6% of unobligated general revenue (total revenue net of Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes and premiums and mandatory interest on the public debt) and is larger than the claims against unobligated general revenue by Social Security (4.1%), Medicare (23.5%) and defense (37.2%) combined.

Since funding for the War on Poverty ramped up in 1967, welfare payments received by the average work-age household in the bottom quintile of income recipients has risen from $7,352 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars to $64,700 in 2022, the last year with available household income data. This 780% increase was 9.2 times the rise in income earned by the average American household.

As a result, they say, “After counting all transfer payments as income to the recipients and taxes as income lost by taxpayers, and adjusting for household size, the average households in the bottom, second and middle quintiles all have roughly the same incomes—despite dramatic differences in work effort.”

Gramm and Arrington say that the United States redistributes 29.4% of its gross domestic product, which is the highest of any developed country next to France, which redistributes 30.1%.

Gramm and Arrington are counting not just cash payments, as in welfare as we knew it before Clinton, but other benefits, such as government-paid healthcare via Medicaid, food stamp debit cards, refundable tax credits, and 100 other programs.  They say that the Census Bureau, in not counting these kinds of benefits, leaves out 88% of the transfer programs that go to those it defines as poor.  When they are added in, that cuts down the number of Americans below the poverty line by 80%.

Is it ungenerous to be bothered by these expenses?  Is it un-Christian, since we are commanded to care for the poor?  Then again, Gramm and Arrington’s  point is that as many as 80% of the beneficiaries are not really poor, though perhaps they would be if the transfers were cut off.  Is this system an injustice to the next two higher income levels who make about the same as those who don’t work?

The Problem with Ranked-Choice Voting

An election reform that some jurisdictions around the world have adopted is ranked voting.  In this system, voters cast a ballot ranking the candidates in order of their  preference.  If their top choice is eliminated, their vote goes to their second choice; if that candidate is also eliminated, their vote goes to their third choice, etc.  The numbers are crunched and a winner is declared.

In the United States, some 20 cities use this method, along with the states of Maine and Alaska.  This year in a congressional election, Alaska is realizing the problems with this method.

Alaska begins with a single open primary for all candidates in a race.  Everyone running, whatever their political party, is on the ballot.  The top vote-getters go to the final round, the general election, which is rank-choice.

Alaskan voters picked their top four candidates for its sole congressional seat in the House of Representatives. When all was said and done, the winning four were the incumbent, Democrat Mary Petolta (50.9%), Republican Nick Begich (26.6%), another Republican, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (19.9%), and another Republican, Matthew Salisbury (0.6%).

But the two Republicans with the lowest number of votes quit the race to rally around Begich.  That left two slots in the required four-way, rank-choice runoff, so the fifth and sixth place finishers moved up into the final run-off.  Number 5 was John Wayne Howe of the Alaskan Independence Party, winner of 621 votes, whose platform is for Alaska to secede from the Union to become its own nation.  Number 6 was Eric Hafner, with 467 votes, a Democrat.

So now, two Democrats will be running against one Republican, potentially splitting the Democratic vote.  The problem is, Hafner isn’t even a resident of Alaska.  He is in prison in New York.

Democrats have sued to keep him off the ballot, since state law requires representatives to be residents, but a state judge has ruled that he must be included in the run-off.  Said the judge, although a candidate must be an Alaska residence “when elected,” that day “has not yet arrived,” and “the court cannot make any factual finding about the future.”

Voters must rank the four, which means that the fringe candidates would pick up lots of 2nd, 3rd, or 4th place votes. Unless Alaska Democrats make their second choice a Republican, and unless Republicans make their second choice a Democrat, a fringe candidate could get lots of second-place votes, which could theoretically amount to something.

Also in this election, Alaskan voters will vote up-or-down on an initiative that would get rid of ranked-choice voting.

Artificial Intelligence Providing Both the Music and the Audience

Generative Artificial Intelligence can now generate music, songs, and entire bands.  AI-generated pop songs posing as human-made works of art are now rampant on streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Prime, and YouTube.

Michael Smith used AI to generate thousands of songs and posted them on streaming sites.  He then took the next step of programming bots to play his songs.

Spotify pays a fraction of a penny–$0.003-.$0.005–for each listen.  Smith racked up 661,440 streams per day, distributed among all his songs so as not to attract attention, which earned him annual royalties of $1,207,128.

Smith has been indicted in North Carolina for wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering.

AI music raises a host of other legal issues.  And watch this video for the extent of the problem and why it matters.