Social safety net

We've seen a lot of debates at the national level over work requirements in safety net programs.

But what if those debates actually miss what's most important when reforming welfare?

How can you climb the economic ladder when you're disincentivized from even stepping on it? You can't.

Josh, we've had the chance to talk about these issues a lot, to collaborate in some various ways.

We've been on the same stage at AEI and elsewhere.

But the reason I want to talk to you this week is because you actually have a new paper on the issue of how to reform the social safety net, how to make it more truly upwardly mobile, where you dive into what states are doing as well.

So sort of in this ongoing conversation of How can we improve our nation's social welfare system? That's what we're going to talk about today.

We'll, of course, include the paper in the show notes with a link.

And yet they are cutting literally millions of children off of that.

All total, a trillion dollars cut to social safety net programs in the United States and Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, $4 trillion, if you're sitting there saying, oh, we're saving money.

No, we're not.

$3 trillion difference because they have made a $4 trillion cut in taxes for billionaires.

You have said, somewhat famously, that other countries have social safety nets, the US has women.

And, and you argue that it's kind of intentional and systematic that women have become the social safety net in the US.

But plenty of harm was being done at points where Trump was not president.

Forcing people to manage risk on their own has left many families and communities teetering on the edge of collapse, and yet we haven't, in part because we have women holding it together, filling in the gaps both in our economy and in our social safety net.

So women are the default caregivers for the children, for the sick, for the elderly, and they're also the ones who are disproportionately filling the lowest paid jobs in our economy, jobs oftentimes in essential service sectors that are too labor-intensive, but also too necessary to be both kind of profitable and broadly accessible.

The investigation into the alleged rape at Cornell University in 2024 was botched by the local district attorney as well.

We're not looking at, at the fact that this is a community issue.

In countries where there are very low levels of per capita children in foster care and very low numbers of adoption and a need for substitute caregiving, they have robust social safety nets.

These are countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland.

People will, because they're Americans or US citizens.

US citizens will say, "Ah, socialism." Okay.

Well, we're already spending $34 billion.

What if we shift and we invest, invest that money into social safety nets that reduce the need for substitute caregiving, including when a woman is pregnant and not sure that she can raise her child because she doesn't have access to things like affordable childcare-

Exactly

But a lot of government spending, the majority of government spending, goes to assist those one third of the population which are either unemployed, elderly and don't have enough superannuation or have no superannuation, those that are disabled... those that are single parents, students.

So nobody really makes a hullabaloo of the fact that the current inflationary pressures are not about government spending because government spending is there to ensure that people at least have the basic necessities of life and that we leave nobody behind and we try to patch up those holes in the social security net Who speaks about the Washington buffoon, the unnecessary war in the Middle East which is dragging on and on and on? The fact that we're using government spending, billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars, up to $400 billion, to ensure we have this so-called special relationship with the United States of America.

And when you talk about you need to increase interest rates because there's inflation.

Why is there inflation? Well, there's inflation not just because of the war, but because these major private corporations continue to post record profit after record profit after record profit.

So what are we trying to do? instead of clawing back some money from some of the richest people on the planet who use their spare money to support, you know, political parties like Divided Nation and the Liberal National Party, instead of that...

We have calls, as I said before, for decreased government spending.

Oh, no, but not decreased government spending as far as AUKUS is concerned, but decreased government spending as far as NDIS is concerned, as far as Medicare is concerned, as far as the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is concerned, as far as the Social Security Net is concerned.

Oh, no, there's too much taxpayers' money.

It is going to be hugely crazy when 5%, 10% of us lose our primary occupation, maybe, because of AI.

So thinking about how we're in a veil of ignorance moment and how we can invest in a social safety net to protect us against, I think, the disruption we will face is

a hugely important endeavor.

Thank you.