Andy Kessler caricatures as Marxist the idea of a “guaranteed income” that Karl Marx himself opposed and Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman championed in the form of a “negative income tax” that was rejected by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1969 (“ A Universally Bad Idea ,” Inside View, Oct. 22).
The negative income tax was intended as a direct cash-grant substitute for the existing welfare system whose administrative cost Ronald Reagan used to rail against. It preserved the incentive to work by deducting from the benefit received only an increasing fraction of any (increase in) income earned below a targeted […]
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