Trigger warning: I'm going to do a little agreeing with Joe Manchin here, on the question of what they call means testing, or income- and wealth-based restrictions on who gets government assistance:
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia has a ready retort to fellow Democrats who say shrinking the party’s social safety net bill will mean depriving vulnerable populations of critical resources: Limit access to every program in the ambitious measure to only those Americans who need it most.
Or maybe not so much Manchin as Tim Kaine of Virginia,
“In the same way that we have higher tax rate on people who make more, I think some programs should phase out on people who make more,” he said.
Still, lawmakers need to be mindful of complexity, Mr. Kaine cautioned, and some programs are more conducive to such limits than others. For example, the push for universal prekindergarten and community college access should be treated as an extension of the public school system, which is open to all comers, Mr. Kaine said.
This is an issue I used to be very hot and heavy on a year or two ago, with the advent of Yangism and the Universal Basic Income that was not actually going to be an income for anybody, and would in my view operate to increase economic inequality: the poorer you were, the more of your lousy $1000 a month you would have to spend on bare necessities, while the rich could invest all of it, for instance putting it in the kids' college fund (poor parents don't have college funds), and directly widening the wealth gap.
