Wednesday, October 24, 2018

A New Kind of Federalism

Me responding to a comment here.

The comment included the following:
For Democrats who hate having their money sent out of state, the centuries-old solution staring them right in the face is decentralization and federalism

The obvious problem with federalism for Democrats is that states do not have enough ability to tax because it is not hard enough for people to move to another states. It is the same adverse selection problem that caused communist limit emigration.

Since the Federal Government's main comparative advantages are collection tax and defense, I think it would be interesting in they collected the taxes as they do today but sent the SS, Medicare and most of the other non-defense money that they currently spend to states on a per capita basis and write laws demanding (amend the constitution to allow that) that the states provide for the elderly (SS, Medicare) and poor in some reasonable way. The states and locals could still have there small taxes or not. Some states might even pay a dividend or return of some of the taxes.

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