Our Social Network Conundrum

05/28/2008

Paul Munnis


During times of economic stress and recession, people appreciate why Democrats want a social safety net and fiscal assistance for people. They understand the value of a welfare system that sees them through a tough time.

As financial conditions worsen, people are forced to dip into savings like their retirement funds, just to get by.

People realize that they are about 30 days away from losing their whole life savings and assets. A couple of missed house mortgage payments, a job layoff, a major family illness, and then it’s over with. One goes from being middle class to being street people overnight.

In the meantime the credit card debt worsens and an increase in cash flow is required and just at a time when the heating bills are resuming.

It’s tough and extreme family stress is common. People are working their butts off and are falling behind and they get angry and who can blame them? The work day is full of a rolling rumor mill that the company is failing. Even the company execs are looking to a government helping hand to permit them to transition the business to a new product line or to expand into new avenues where demand exists and services and products are badly needed. But last year those programs were killed by the GOP when they opposed a legislative Bill to reinstate them.

When times are good the GOP sings it’s “No New Taxes,” siren song and people harmonize with it. When times get tough then people need food banks, clothing assistance, free school lunches for their kids, and a medical program to help them get through periods of prolonged unemployment. Food stamps become vital for families during this period.

During tough times people understand why interest rates need to be controlled and why credit card interest rates need to be regulated and why mortgage assistance programs are desperately needed.

In the good times it’s all about how people don’t need these programs, let’s cut them free-loaders off and let them pay their own way and take responsibility for themselves and their families. “This is America and it was built on old fashioned rugged individualism.” “Wear your flag lapel pin and show you are with us.” Etc.

During a recession people learn that we are indeed all pretty darn equal. The ethos that “I am driving a new F150 and he is driving a cheaper Toyota truck,” has little value when neither can afford the truck payments. Only people who are independently wealthy can make it during recession and we resent the shark that is price gouging us in order to take his family on a Barbados vacation while we sit in a mortgaged home and look for a job that will produce enough income to feed our families and make the mortgage payments.

The result is a sort of herky-jerky social situation. Democrats get into office mainly during recessions. Then they put in place the needed programs, they work to alleviate the pain and suffering, they get relief for people, yet for many the relief comes far too slowly. Then Democrats use tax money to create jobs and to invest so as to get the nation moving once more. As soon as the economy recovers then the GOP starts with the high taxes polka once more, the programs get killed off and the next time that something fiscally negative happens to the economy we are back at square-one.

Two Democratic programs manage to survive the cuts. The first is Social Security and the second in Medicare. Thank God for without them it would be a Charles Dickens world for our elderly.

Another problem is veteran benefits. We can look down the road and see what will happen when 165,000 troops come home and many are discharged or released back to civilian life. They will want their jobs back and some workers will be bumped to get them back while others will find that the company is history, the job is gone, and they are unemployed. At that time the programs that Democrats are now struggling to get implemented will be badly needed but today they are strongly opposed. We will get something through for our vets but as soon as we get economic recovery the GOP will attack the existence of those social programs for vets and tear them down.

Programs for kids seem to barely survive. Kids have no vote and no say. Healthcare is a good example. Right now many a parent wishes we had a better and more robust Minnesota Care health coverage program for kids. We don’t, a GOP priority in Minnesota has been to kill the program off, down-size it, and they have succeeded. The result is a program that is not adequate to meet the needs of families during financial recession.

People need jobs and it takes a two cent gas tax increase this year to create a base of 30,000 jobs. The GOP is acting like we amputated their right leg. Our roads are a mess, the jobs are badly needed, so come on and grow up and do what is needed for our society.

What we need to do is to figure out a way that we can design and install good social programs and when we implement them we do it with a self adjusting mechanism for funding increases during recession and funding reduction during strong periods of fiscal health. In other words the programs need to be self-scaling to the economy.

Note that the economy in Silicone Valley might be thriving while the economy in West Virginia coal towns could be darn tough. So we need to regionalize the formulas and direct the aid to where the pain is.

Is this possible? Can it be done? Can we build self adjusting social programs?

The answer is “Yes.” In this day of economic modeling, in these times of regional economic measurement then financial conditions can be detected, fed back into the economic models and the funding levels for social programs adjusted automatically by region. We can have regionally elastic social programs. The problem is keeping people from tampering with the models so as to direct federal money into their own accounts. We should be able to engineer monitoring systems that detect dishonest manipulation. The punishment will always lag the crime but the key thing is that people get caught and punished.

We have never done this sort of automatic adjustment to social programs before. All Federal social programs are based on national models. Most State programs are based on a pass-thru of Federal funds to support the State program. Federal Law makers leave it to the States to manage the economics of the State regions. In tough times the States look and find that the coffers are empty because there are no federal funds to help them with the needed program increases and so people suffer.

Come on folks, in this day and age when we can program a Mars expedition and manage it all the way to unpiloted touchdown and perform remote analysis of the composition of the Martian surface then surely we can design better and more intelligent self-regulating social programs for ourselves.

We need to do this now during recession for any attempt to do so when the GOP is in control of government will result in failure.

You know it’s true. Let the engineering begin.