Guaranteed Income: The Christian Solution to Our Economy

I’m about to perform a healing. For those non-believers out there… like magic, it will terrify and then delight you. Maybe it’ll scare the jesus into you.

I warn even the staunchest Christian; this will test your mettle. It will clench your teeth and stiffen your spine. But, Tea Party babies, I love you! Have faith! This idea will end unemployment, and the Fed will never be allowed to print money again. In God We Trust.

And God wants us to provide every unemployed American citizen a Guaranteed Income of $10,400 per year.

Fifteen million Americans are unemployed. Even if this program INCREASES the number of people calling themselves unemployed, I want to guarantee all of them, as long as they choose to stay in the program, a check from the Government for $200 per week.

But, there’s a catch. God’s in the details…

Instead of 99 weeks, Unemployment Insurance will end at three months. After it runs out, the unemployed will be allowed to enter our new Guaranteed Income system:

1. There’s no more minimum wage.
2. They have to take any job offered.
3. If they slack off at work and they keep getting fired, they are out of the program.
4. Payments decrease to zero as they earn towards $9 per hour– but on a schedule that still incentivizes them to earn more.

Once someone is in the Guaranteed Income program, their resume goes into the GI website, and if you offer them $2 per hour to pick up dog sh*t in your yard, they pick up dog sh*t. If a call center offers them $3 per hour for forty hours, they earn an extra $120 per week.

Poof! There’s no more unemployment. God said, “Let there be light.”

When there’s no lower limit on what an idle worker can be paid, every available hand will be viewed by every other person in society as a super cheap way to get some extra work done. We’ll go looking for layabouts. And the market will figure itself out.

Imagine the millions of low cost economies that are now possible.

My favorite example is childcare. Under the new model, a hypothetical entrepreneur starts a large scale low cost DayCare center for kids. She combs through GI database looking for loving stay-at-home mommies who joined the Guaranteed Income program for the extra cash, and offers them $3 per hour, minus $1 per hour for each child they bring to work with them.

Now a mommy at work with her two kids is receiving $200 from the government and $40 from her employer every week, and she’s working full time.

The entrepreneur can now offer families DayCare that costs half of what it costs today.

This means it is less expensive to get your house cleaned, your yard picked up, and your clothes laundered. Low cost labor frees all of us to be more productive.

Tea partiers, I KNOW this is hard, but we OWE IT to fellow citizens to put an end to idleness once and for all. This is the Christian solution.

When our government created the Minimum Wage, we created a massive class of unemployable workers. The fact is many millions of people are not worth $7.25 per hour. This means that no matter how crafty the entrepreneur, he will not be able to make a profit off their labor; and if profit is impossible from their labor, the unskilled will be idle.

Progressives and evil economists like to talk about “excess capacity” and “aggregate demand”, but when we didn’t have Minimum Wage, we never had excess capacity… everyone worked, or they starved.

The Protestant work ethic all but implies that idleness is immoral. A Guaranteed Income system makes idleness almost IMPOSSIBLE. What’s more, a Guaranteed Income system allows ALL of us to be more productive because we can pay less for the jobs we normally do ourselves.

Now watch this miracle. Currently our Federal Reserve is tasked with fighting inflation and unemployment. So when we have 9.5% unemployment, the Fed is legally justified in printing money. Right now we are dealing with another $600BILLION in Quantitative Easing. Gas prices are up. Food prices are up.

But, with Guaranteed Income, we have no unemployment, so the Fed has one rule: don’t print money. This means our future prices grow much more slowly.

The costs are negligible.

Assuming this program is wildly popular and another 5MILLION people claim to be unemployed, then we will have 20MILLION in our Guaranteed Income system. The cost? $208BILLION.

It is only $58BILLION more than we spend on Unemployment Insurance ($150BILLION). This is less than a tenth of Medicare, Social Security, or Defense. $58BILLION is less than five percent (5%) of Obama’s stimulus during the toughest of times.

And this assumes all 20MILLION are working for $3 per hour. If they make more than $3 per hour, the government pays less than $58BILLION.

What is it worth in tax revenue to put 20M idle bodies to work?

What is it worth to your savings to have 2% less inflation per year over the next ten years?

What is it worth to get low cost services and be more productive with your own time?

What is it worth to never hear the word “stimulus” again?

It is worth $58BILLION. We are not heartless. We are tricky and smart.

Tea Party babies! I know there are some of you that will gruffly say, “NO!” You will insist we should not even have a Minimum Wage. And you are right. But we cannot let perfect be the enemy of the good. When Tea Party politicians call for Guaranteed Income to replace Minimum Wage and Unemployment Insurance, progressives will be smote; they will be forced to argue nakedly for laziness.

This is a winning political issue. This is the loaves and fishes. It will give and give and give.

Minimum Wage truly is the “Devil’s tool.” They say God works in mysterious ways. Guaranteed Income works in an obvious way: it ensures there are no idle hands.