If I were President 4: some social programs

In earlier posts I said I would stop the War on Drugs. I would do so because it hasn't worked. We've spent a great deal of money on the "war," and yet drug use is higher than before the War on Drugs was declared. If I remember correctly, in Economics 101 we are taught "the quantity supplied is related to the quantity demanded" such that price will act to equalize the quantity demanded and the quantity supplied, also called an economic equilibrium. If we want to reduce the usage of drugs in the US, there are two ways to do it: limit the quantity supplied or reduce the quantity demanded. The War on Drugs failed to do the first, and the jailing of people for minor drug offenses did not reduce demand, so where does that leave us?

It turns out there have been pilot programs which reduce the likelihood of teens and young adults getting involved with drugs. These programs cost a fraction of police enforcement of drug laws. Further, if the number of drug offenses is reduced, prison overcrowding would be reduced. According to the Bureau of Justice, 21% of state prisoners and 55% of federal prisoners are in for drug offenses. In numbers, this is half a million people... and most of those are either users or low-level dealers, and a large majority are minorities. The US has the largest per capita incarceration rate... even higher than China's, odd considering that country's regular jailing of dissidents.

One other contribution to the high rate of incarceration is minimum required sentences and the so-called "three strikes" laws. If judges had more leeway in sentencing there would be fewer people in jail, even if they sentence the same number of people they did before, just because of the shorter terms many of these prisoners would get.

So far this has been a lot of talk. What I would propose in a budget is a reduction in the drug enforcement agency and a commensurate increase in the number of prevention and treatment programs. In addition, I plan a number of reforms to improve the overall standard of living, which will also act to reduce the number of drug users. Such reforms include government works projects, particularly for infrastructure improvements (modeled after FDR's WPA projects); an increase in the minimum wage to place incomes of those workers above the poverty level; a more equitable tax structure (which I will discuss in the next post); and other improvements I have not fully thought out yet.

Next are two social programs I'll touch on: Social Security and Medicare. Please read this post. In that post I wrote:

... the real fix to Social Security is to eliminate the cap on taxable income for Social Security taxes, or at least make it a reasonable number (say, $1,000,000) and then index it for inflation....

Finally, the real social program in trouble is not Social Security but Medicare. To fix both problems, the Social Security tax should be lowered to 4%, the Medicare tax raised from 1.7% to 4%, and have no caps on income subject to these taxes. Today the combined weight of these two taxes is 7.8 percent, so the change I suggest would retain about the same weight (it's actually a 0.2% tax increase, which is very slight) but resolve both problems for the foreseeable future.

As a final comment in this post, I draw your attention to evidence-based social programs that work. Please give that website a read.

Next post: taxes.