Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein received an email Saturday night in which parliamentarians from around the world reaffirmed their support for Jerusalem as the Jewish state’s undivided capital, in a letter sent in honor of Jerusalem Day.
The letter was sent by the chairmen of Israel Allies Caucuses in 20 countries on five continents, as well as by two US senators known for their strong support of Israel, Republicans Mark Kirk of Illinois and Ted Cruz of Texas.
“From our capitals to yours, we, the chairmen, members and supporters of Israel Allies Caucuses in the US Congress and in parliaments around the world, congratulate all inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Jewish people and the nation of Israel on the 49th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel,” the signatories wrote.
“Jerusalem Day serves as an important reminder that only under Israeli control has the rights of all ethnic and religious groups to enjoy the city’s religious and cultural sites been preserved. Three thousand years of the Jewish people’s connection to Jerusalem, and the Israeli government’s track record of allowing freedom of worship for all religions in Jerusalem, compels us to affirm the importance of Israel’s sovereignty and legal rights to its historic capital.”
The signatories wrote that they join with peace-loving people around the world over in wishing Israel peace and prosperity.
Jordanna McMillan, Israel Allies Foundation director of outreach and communications, said the letter was initiated due to recent international effort to force Israel to make territorial concessions in Jerusalem.
“When world leaders pressure the State of Israel to divide its historic capital, our network of international legislators stand with a united Jerusalem,” McMillan said.
“The signatories of the Jerusalem Day letter represent and give voice to millions of people across the world, men and women of faith, those who believe in democracy, freedom of religion, human rights, justice and equality under the law – values that are shared by the Jewish state. On this Jerusalem Day, we wanted to remind the leadership and citizens of Israel that Israel’s allies are standing boldly by their side in the halls of power worldwide, remembering and celebrating an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”
The signatories included the co-chairmen of the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, Republicans Trent Franks of Arizona and Doug Lamborn of Colorado, and Democrat Brad Sherman of California. There were also signatories from the European Union Parliament, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, Switzerland, Latvia, Slovakia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina, Panama, Colombia, Chile and the Dominican Republic.
1a) NETANYAHU :YES to PEACE,NO to DIVIDING JERUSALEM
| By TOVAH LAZAROFF,JEREMY SHARON |
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| On Jerusalem Day, Netanyahu pledges to never abandon Kotel or cut ties to Temple Mount. |
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Sunday not to divide Jerusalem in his pursuit of a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
“The idea of a divided, split, wounded city is one we will never return to,” Netanyahu said as he spoke at a special ceremony at Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem to mark the unification of the city 49 years ago, during the Six Day War.
“We will never abandon the Kotel and our ties to the Temple Mount will never be denied,” Netanyahu said.
Later in the evening, at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, he said: “We will not be ousted from our city or our land. I will not oust people from their homes and we will not be ousted from our homes.”
He spoke of the important of Israeli rule to the vision of a heavenly Jerusalem that provides a safe haven for Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
“There was no peace [here] for the [three] religions until Jerusalem was under Israeli sovereignty. Someone was always dispossessed. It is only when we watch over the city, under Israeli sovereignty, that there can be freedom for the three religions.”
Netanyahu spoke as the international community was hardening its stance with regard to a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines, with east Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.
Over the weekend, the French launched an internationalized peace process to lay the parameters for what a final status agreement might look like.
Separately, Netanyahu has called for a regional peace process based on a revised 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. The initial plan spoke of an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines in exchange for normalized relations between Israel and the Arab world.
Netanyahu has said that the best way to achieve peace is through direct talks with the Palestinians.
“Israel wants peace. I want peace. I want to renew the diplomatic process to achieve peace,” Netanyahu said at Ammunition Hill. “But peace, if it’s achieved, will come through direct talks between us and our neighbors, at the end of which they will recognize that Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people.”
That peace can be achieved through direct talks has already been proved by Israel’s peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, Netanyahu said.
He recalled that a diplomatic process began almost immediately after the Six Day War.
Those same entities who wanted to broker a peace deal on Israel’s behalf “had abandoned the Jewish state when it fought for its existence against the Arab armies that surrounded it [in 1967].
“This did not bring peace then, and it will not bring peace today,” he said. “Each international dictate only distances peace,” he emphasized, “and will only strengthen the will of the Palestinians not to hold direct talks.”
The Palestinians insist that Israel must recognize their right to a national homeland, but refuse to accept a Jewish one, Netanyahu explained.
“Those who deny that Israel is the home-land of the Jews, who deny our claims to Jerusalem and turn the Temple Mount into an instrument of incitement and hatred have a long way to go before they are ready for peace,” he said.
He spoke of the wave of Palestinian violence that has claimed 34 lives since September.
“We will continue to fight terrorism and prove that terrorism will not deter us. We are in Jerusalem, not by charity, but by right,” he said.
The prime minister spoke about his memories of Jerusalem before the Six Day War, including the Jordanian snipers atop city walls, areas of no-man’s land and minefields, saying that such a situation would never return.
He described the 1967 conflict as “a war of salvation which removed an existential threat to the state,” and recalled what he described as a “great spirit” which took hold of the nation at the time, as well as the declarations of soldiers written on military vehicles, saying that there would never be another Auschwitz or another Masada.
“I remember the spirit of our fighters then, and it is in the merit of this spirit that our situation changed from one extreme to the other. And it was proved once again that the only guarantee of our existence is our ability to defend ourselves, to guarantee the safety of Israel,” he said.
The prime minister also recalled the soldiers who died in the battle for the capital, saying that Jerusalem Day was dedicated above all else to the fighters who fell in the war to liberate the city.
He also spoke of the newfound freedom to visit the Western Wall, having been limited to merely viewing it from a distance since the establishment of the state.
“I remember when I went to the Western Wall, a day or two after the liberation,” he said, ”and I remember the masses of people, and I touched the stone, and I remember the intense emotions that I felt like everyone else. This feeling was felt by the entire nation, in Israel and in the Diaspora.”
He said that Israel had a right to Jerusalem which is not dependent on international compassion.
Only because of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem did it turn into an open city to all three great monotheistic faiths, something which has not been the situation for generations.
“Israel respects all faiths, defends the holy sites of all faiths, and we are building in Jerusalem for all its residents – Jews and Arabs together – neighborhoods, parks, cultural facilities and libraries.”
President Reuven Rivlin also addressed the audience at the ceremony, saying that the city of Jerusalem reflected Israeli society in general, and declaring that bringing together all sectors of the population was a “national mission.”
The president sounded a note of criticism toward the Israeli education system, which he said failed to bring Jewish and Arab pupils together at any stage, adding that the lack of contact between the two communities had created a situation where Jewish pupils see Jerusalem as only a Jewish city and Arab pupils see it as only Arab.
“We must remember that Jerusalem is a microcosm of Israeli society as a whole, and the task of bringing together all its communities and tribes is a national mission,” said Rivlin.
“If we remember, that we are not doomed to live together, but we are destined to live together, Jerusalem will be not only a city of the past, but also a city of the future,” he said.
In his speech to the Central Rabbi Kook Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Yeshivat Mercaz Harav, Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett accused Netanyahu of being “disloyal to the Land of Israel.”
“You cannot be in favor of the Land of Israel in Hebrew and form a Palestinian state in English,” Bennett told the yeshiva students.
“Only when we will be sharp and determined will the world let us rest,” Bennett said.
Sources close to Netanyahu urged Bennett to behave more responsibly and stop attacking the prime minister.
1b) Liberating Our Jerusalem
by Daniel Greenfield
When Jordan's Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city-- the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem possible.
Since then, the annexation and ethnic cleansing has become an international mandate. It would be inconceivable for the international community to denounce an ethnically cleansed group which survived attempted genocide for moving back into its own city. It is, however, standard policy at the State Department and the Foreign Office to denounce Jews living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been ethnically cleansed by Muslims, as "settlers" living in "settlements," and describe them as an "obstruction to peace." Peace being the state of affairs that sets in when an ethnic cleansing goes unchallenged.
Describing Jewish homes in Jerusalem, one of the world's oldest cities, a city that all three religions in the region associate with Jews and Jewish history, as "settlements" is a triumph of distorted language that Orwell would have to tip his hat to. How does one have "settlements" in a city older than London or Washington D.C.? To understand that, you would have to ask London and Washington D.C. where the diplomats insist that one more round of Israeli compromises will bring peace.
They say that there are three religions in Jerusalem, but there are actually four. The fourth religion is the true Religion of Peace, the one that insists that there will be peace when the Jews have been expelled from Judea and Samaria, driven out of their homes in Jerusalem, and made into wanderers and beggars once again. Oddly enough, this religion's name isn't even Islam-- it's diplomacy.
Diplomacy says that the 1948 borders set by Arab countries invading Israel should be the final borders and that, when Israel reunified a sundered city in 1967, it was an act of aggression, while, when seven Arab armies invaded Israel in 1948, it was a legitimate way to set permanent boundaries. When Jordan ethnically cleansed East Jerusalem, it set a standard that Israelis are obligated to follow to this day by staying out of East Jerusalem. To violate that ethnic cleansing endangers peace.
Vice President Biden was so upset that the Jerusalem municipality had partially approved some buildings in the city during his visit that he threw a legendary hissy fit. Hillary Clinton stopped by MSNBC to tell Andrea Mitchell that, "It was insulting. And it was insulting not just to the Vice President who didn't deserve that." David Axelrod browsed through his thesaurus and emerged on the morning shows calling it an "affront" and an "insult." Two for the price of one.
Editorials in newspapers denounced the Israeli government for this grave insult to the Obama Administration."Israel's Provocation", the Chicago Tribune shrieked in bold type, describing it as a "diplomatic bomb" that went off in Biden's face. The Atlantic, eager to get in on the action metaphors, described Israel slapping Biden in the face. A horde of other columnists jumped in to depict the Israelis kicking and bashing the poor Vice-President, while holding his head in the toilet.
Whether Joe Biden was the victim of the Jews or the Jews were the victims of Joe Biden is all a matter of perspective. The Hitler Administration was quite upset to find that Jewish athletes would be competing in the 1936 Munich Olympics. When you ethnically cleanse people, they are supposed to stay ethnically cleansed. It's in poor taste for them to show up and win gold medals at the Olympics or rebuild their demolished synagogues. It's insulting to the ethnic cleansers and their accomplices.
That sounds like a harsh accusation, but it's completely and undeniably true.
When Muslims move into a Jewish town, poor Joe doesn't come crying that he's been bombed with a diplomatic affront and slapped with a Menorah. When Muslim countries fund Muslim housing in Israel, there are no angry statements from Clinton and no thesaurus bashing from David Axelrod. Muslim housing in Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel is not a problem. Only Jewish housing is. The issue is not Israel. If it were, then Arabs with Israeli citizenship would get Biden to howl as loudly. It's only the Jews who are the problem.
The entire Peace Process is really a prolonged solution to the latest phase of the Jewish Problem. The problem, as stated by so many diplomats, is that there are Jews living in places that Muslims want. There were Jews living in Gaza before 1948, but they were driven out, they came back, and then they were driven out again by their own government in compliance with international demands. Now only Hamas lives in Gaza and it's as peaceful and pleasant without the Jews as Nazi Germany.
But there are still Jews in the West Bank and they have to be gotten rid of. Once enough Jews have been expelled, there will be peace. That's not a paragraph from Mein Kampf, it's not some lunatic sermon from Palestinian Authority television-- it is the consensus of the international community. This consensus states that the only reason there still isn't peace is because enough Jews haven't been expelled from their homes. The ethnic cleansing for peace hasn't gone far enough.
There will be peace when all the Jews are gone. That much is certainly undeniable. Just look at Gaza or Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan, which has a grand total of two Jews, both of them in their seventies. Or Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria where peace reigns now that the Jews are gone. Some might say that violence seems to increase proportionally with the number of Muslims, but we all know that would be a racist thing to say. On the other hand suggesting that violence increases with the number of Jews living on land that Muslims want, that's just diplomacy. A common sense fact that everyone who is anyone in foreign policy knows to be true.
How will we know when the Muslims have gotten all the land that they want? When the violence stops. Everyone knows that agreements mean nothing. No matter how many pieces of paper are signed, the bombs and rockets still keep bursting; real ones that kill people, not fake ones that upset Vice Presidents. The only way to reach an agreement is by groping blindly in the dark, handing over parcel after parcel of land, until the explosions stop or the Muslims fulfill their original goal of pushing the Jews into the sea.
That's the wonderful thing about diplomacy if you're a diplomat and the terrible thing about it if you are anyone else without a secure way out of the country when diplomacy fails. And diplomacy in the region always fails. Camp David and every single agreement Israel has signed with Muslim countries aren't worth the paper they're written on. The only peace treaty that counts is the one made by tanks and rifles. It's the one made by Israeli planes in Egyptian skies and Israeli soldiers walking the border. It's the one made by Jewish farmers and ranchers, tending their sheep and their fields, with rifles strung over their backs. The only peace that's worth anything is the peace of the soldiers and settlers.
In 1966, Jerusalem was a city sundered in two, divided by barbed wire and the bullets of Muslim snipers. Diplomacy did not reunite it. Israel pursued diplomacy nearly to its bitter end until it understood that it had no choice at all but to fight. Israel did not swoop into the fight, its leaders did their best to avoid the conflict, asking the international community to intervene and stop Egypt from going to war. Read back the headlines for the last five years on Israel and Iran, and you will get a sense of the courage and determination of the Israeli leaders of the day.
When Israel went to war, its leaders did not want to liberate Jerusalem, they wanted Jordan to stay out of the war. Even when Jordan entered the war, they did not want to liberate the city. Divine Providence and Muslim hostility forced them to liberate Jerusalem and forced them to keep it. Now some of them would like to give it back, another sacrifice to the bloody deity of diplomacy whose altar flows with blood and burnt sacrifices.
As we remember Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, it is important to remember that the city is united and free because diplomacy failed. The greatest triumph of the modern state happened only because diplomacy proved hopeless and useless in deterring Muslim genocidal ambitions. Had Israel succumbed to international pressure and had Nasser been as subtle as Sadat, then the Six-Day War would have looked like the Yom Kippur War fought with 1948 borders-- and Israel very likely would not exist today.
Even as Jews remember the great triumph of Jerusalem Day, the ethnic cleansers and their accomplices are busy searching for ways to drive Jews out of Jerusalem, out of towns, villages and cities. This isn't about the Arab residents of Jerusalem, who have repeatedly asserted that they want to remain part of Israel. It's not about peace, which did not come from any previous round of concessions, and will not come from this one either. It's about solving the Jewish problem.
As long as Jews allow themselves to be defined as the problem, there will be plenty of those offering solutions. And the solutions invariably involve doing something about the Jews. It only stands to reason that if Jews are the problem, then moving them or getting rid of them is the solution. There is less friction in defining Jews as the problem, than in defining Muslims as the problem. The numbers alone mean that is so.
Jerusalem Day is a reminder of what the real problem is and what the real solution is. Muslim occupation of Israel is the problem. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the problem. Muslim violence in support of the Muslim occupation of Israel and of everywhere else is the problem. Israel is the solution. Only when we liberate ourselves from the lies, when we stop believing that we are the problem and recognize that we are the solution. Only then will the liberation that began in 1967 be complete.
Only then will we have liberated our Jerusalem. The Jerusalem of the soul. It is incumbent on all of us to liberate that little Jerusalem within. The holy city that lives in all of us. To clean the dross off its golden gates, wash the filth from its stones and expel the invaders gnawing away at our hearts until we look proudly upon a shining city. Then to help others liberate their own Jerusalems. Only then will we truly be free.
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2)
A Guaranteed Income for Every American
Replacing the welfare state with an annual grant for every U.S adult is the best way to cope with job displacement and to revive our civic culture, argues Charles Murray
When people learn that I want to replace the welfare state with a universal basic income, or UBI, the response I almost always get goes something like this: “But people will just use it to live off the rest of us!” “People will waste their lives!” Or, as they would have put it in a bygone age, a guaranteed income will foster idleness and vice. I see it differently. I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a coming labor market unlike any in human history and that it represents our best hope to revitalize American civil society.
The great free-market economist Milton Friedman originated the idea of a guaranteed income just after World War II. An experiment using a bastardized version of his “negative income tax” was tried in the 1970s, with disappointing results. But as transfer payments continued to soar while the poverty rate remained stuck at more than 10% of the population, the appeal of a guaranteed income persisted: If you want to end poverty, just give people money. As of 2016, the UBI has become a live policy option. Finland is planning a pilot project for a UBI next year, and Switzerland is voting this weekend on a referendum to install a UBI.
The UBI has brought together odd bedfellows. Its advocates on the left see it as a move toward social justice; its libertarian supporters (like Friedman) see it as the least damaging way for the government to transfer wealth from some citizens to others. Either way, the UBI is an idea whose time has finally come, but it has to be done right.
First, my big caveat: A UBI will do the good things I claim only if it replaces all other transfer payments and the bureaucracies that oversee them. If the guaranteed income is an add-on to the existing system, it will be as destructive as its critics fear.
Second, the system has to be designed with certain key features. In my version, every American citizen age 21 and older would get a $13,000 annual grant deposited electronically into a bank account in monthly installments. Three thousand dollars must be used for health insurance (a complicated provision I won’t try to explain here), leaving every adult with $10,000 in disposable annual income for the rest of their lives.
People can make up to $30,000 in earned income without losing a penny of the grant. After $30,000, a graduated surtax reimburses part of the grant, which would drop to $6,500 (but no lower) when an individual reaches $60,000 of earned income. Why should people making good incomes retain any part of the UBI? Because they will be losing Social Security and Medicare, and they need to be compensated.
The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper.
Finally, an acknowledgment: Yes, some people will idle away their lives under my UBI plan. But that is already a problem. As of 2015, the Current Population Survey tells us that 18% of unmarried males and 23% of unmarried women ages 25 through 54—people of prime working age—weren’t even in the labor force. Just about all of them were already living off other people’s money. The question isn’t whether a UBI will discourage work, but whether it will make the existing problem significantly worse.
I don’t think it would. Under the current system, taking a job makes you ineligible for many welfare benefits or makes them subject to extremely high marginal tax rates. Under my version of the UBI, taking a job is pure profit with no downside until you reach $30,000—at which point you’re bringing home way too much ($40,000 net) to be deterred from work by the imposition of a surtax.
Some people who would otherwise work will surely drop out of the labor force under the UBI, but others who are now on welfare or disability will enter the labor force. It is prudent to assume that net voluntary dropout from the labor force will increase, but there is no reason to think that it will be large enough to make the UBI unworkable.
Involuntary dropout from the labor force is another matter, which brings me to a key point: We are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were. I’m familiar with the retort: People have been worried about technology destroying jobs since the Luddites, and they have always been wrong. But the case for “this time is different” has a lot going for it.
When cars and trucks started to displace horse-drawn vehicles, it didn’t take much imagination to see that jobs for drivers would replace jobs lost for teamsters, and that car mechanics would be in demand even as jobs for stable boys vanished. It takes a better imagination than mine to come up with new blue-collar occupations that will replace more than a fraction of the jobs (now numbering 4 million) that taxi drivers and truck drivers will lose when driverless vehicles take over. Advances in 3-D printing and “contour craft” technology will put at risk the jobs of many of the 14 million people now employed in production and construction.
The list goes on, and it also includes millions of white-collar jobs formerly thought to be safe. For decades, progress in artificial intelligence lagged behind the hype. In the past few years, AI has come of age. Last spring, for example, a computer program defeated a grandmaster in the classic Asian board game of Go a decade sooner than had been expected. It wasn’t done by software written to play Go but by software that taught itself to play—a landmark advance. Future generations of college graduates should take note.
Exactly how bad is the job situation going to be? An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study concluded that 9% of American jobs are at risk. Two Oxford scholars estimate that as many as 47% of American jobs are at risk. Even the optimistic scenario portends a serious problem. Whatever the case, it will need to be possible, within a few decades, for a life well lived in the U.S. not to involve a job as traditionally defined. A UBI will be an essential part of the transition to that unprecedented world.
The good news is that a well-designed UBI can do much more than help us to cope with disaster. It also could provide an invaluable benefit: injecting new resources and new energy into an American civic culture that has historically been one of our greatest assets but that has deteriorated alarmingly in recent decades.
A key feature of American exceptionalism has been the propensity of Americans to create voluntary organizations for dealing with local problems. Tocqueville was just one of the early European observers who marveled at this phenomenon in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the time the New Deal began, American associations for providing mutual assistance and aiding the poor involved broad networks, engaging people from the top to the bottom of society, spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens.
These groups provided sophisticated and effective social services and social insurance of every sort, not just in rural towns or small cities but also in the largest and most impersonal of megalopolises. To get a sense of how extensive these networks were, consider this: When one small Midwestern state, Iowa, mounted a food-conservation program during World War I, it engaged the participation of 2,873 church congregations and 9,630 chapters of 31 different secular fraternal associations.
Did these networks successfully deal with all the human needs of their day? No. But that isn’t the right question. In that era, the U.S. had just a fraction of today’s national wealth. The correct question is: What if the same level of activity went into civil society’s efforts to deal with today’s needs—and financed with today’s wealth?
The advent of the New Deal and then of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society displaced many of the most ambitious voluntary efforts to deal with the needs of the poor. It was a predictable response. Why continue to contribute to a private program to feed the hungry when the government is spending billions of dollars on food stamps and nutrition programs? Why continue the mutual insurance program of your fraternal organization once Social Security is installed? Voluntary organizations continued to thrive, but most of them turned to needs less subject to crowding out by the federal government.
This was a bad trade, in my view. Government agencies are the worst of all mechanisms for dealing with human needs. They are necessarily bound by rules applied uniformly to people who have the same problems on paper but who will respond differently to different forms of help. Whether religious or secular, nongovernmental organization are inherently better able to tailor their services to local conditions and individual cases.
Under my UBI plan, the entire bureaucratic apparatus of government social workers would disappear, but Americans would still possess their historic sympathy and social concern. And the wealth in private hands would be greater than ever before. It is no pipe dream to imagine the restoration, on an unprecedented scale, of a great American tradition of voluntary efforts to meet human needs. It is how Americans, left to themselves, have always responded. Figuratively, and perhaps literally, it is in our DNA.
Regardless of what voluntary agencies do (or fail to do), nobody will starve in the streets. Everybody will know that, even if they can’t find any job at all, they can live a decent existence if they are cooperative enough to pool their grants with one or two other people. The social isolates who don’t cooperate will also be getting their own monthly deposit of $833.
Some people will still behave irresponsibly and be in need before that deposit arrives, but the UBI will radically change the social framework within which they seek help: Everybody will know that everybody else has an income stream. It will be possible to say to the irresponsible what can’t be said now: “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act together. Don’t try to tell us you’re helpless, because we know you aren’t.”
The known presence of an income stream would transform a wide range of social and personal interactions. The unemployed guy living with his girlfriend will be told that he has to start paying part of the rent or move out, changing the dynamics of their relationship for the better. The guy who does have a low-income job can think about marriage differently if his new family’s income will be at least $35,000 a year instead of just his own earned $15,000.
Or consider the unemployed young man who fathers a child. Today, society is unable to make him shoulder responsibility. Under a UBI, a judge could order part of his monthly grant to be extracted for child support before he ever sees it. The lesson wouldn’t be lost on his male friends.
Or consider teenage girls from poor neighborhoods who have friends turning 21. They watch—and learn—as some of their older friends use their new monthly income to rent their own apartments, buy nice clothes or pay for tuition, while others have to use the money to pay for diapers and baby food, still living with their mothers because they need help with day care.
These are just a few possible scenarios, but multiply the effects of such interactions by the millions of times they would occur throughout the nation every day. The availability of a guaranteed income wouldn’t relieve individuals of responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It would instead, paradoxically, impose responsibilities that didn’t exist before, which would be a good thing.
Emphasizing the ways in which a UBI would encourage people to make better life choices still doesn’t do justice to its wider likely benefits. A powerful critique of the current system is that the most disadvantaged people in America have no reason to think that they can be anything else. They are poorly educated, without job skills, and live in neighborhoods where prospects are bleak. Their quest for dignity and self-respect often takes the form of trying to beat the system.
My version of a UBI would do nothing to stage-manage their lives. In place of little bundles of benefits to be used as a bureaucracy specifies, they would get $10,000 a year to use as they wish. It wouldn’t be charity—every citizen who has turned 21 gets the same thing, deposited monthly into that most respectable of possessions, a bank account.The more fortunate members of society may see such people as obstinately refusing to take advantage of the opportunities that exist. But when seen from the perspective of the man who has never held a job or the woman who wants a stable family life, those opportunities look fraudulent.
A UBI would present the most disadvantaged among us with an open road to the middle class if they put their minds to it. It would say to people who have never had reason to believe it before: “Your future is in your hands.” And that would be the truth.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His book advocating a universal basic income, “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State,” was first published by AEI in 2006. A revised edition will be out later this month.
2a)
What’s Killing Jobs and Stalling the Economy
A toxic regulatory brew, from Dodd-Frank to state licensing laws, has poisoned the formation of new firms that drive growth.
By Marie-Jose Kravis
An economy that has struggled for growth for seven years showed fresh signs of trouble Friday with a sobering jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls climbed by a mere 38,000 in May—the fewest since September 2010. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that a record 94,708,000 Americans were not in the labor force last month, as the labor-force participation rate fell to 62.6%, from 63% two months earlier.
When thinking about what has stymied the U.S. economy, I sometimes recall a biology lesson about the role that cell death plays in explaining embryonic development and normal growth of adult tissue. In economics, as far back as Joseph Schumpeter, or evenKarl Marx, we have known that the flow of business deaths and births affects the dynamism and growth of a country’s economy. Business deaths unlock resources that can be allocated to more productive use and business formation can boost innovation and economic and social mobility.
For much of the nation’s history, this process of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” has spread prosperity throughout the U.S. and the world. Over the past 30 years, however, with the exception of the mid-1980s and the 2002-05 period, this dynamism has been waning. There has been a steady decline in business formation while the rate of business deaths has been more or less constant. Business deaths outnumber births for the first time since measurement of these indicators began.
Equally troubling, the latest analysis of Census Bureau data by the Economic Innovation Group points to the increasing concentration of new business formation in a smaller number of U.S. counties. The findings show that 20 counties account for half of new businesses and that most counties had fewer business establishments in 2014 than in 2010. Even accounting for so-called dynamic counties, the total number of firms in the U.S. remains lower than it was in 2004.
As the Economic Innovation Group shows, the 1990 recovery registered a net increase of over 420,000 business establishments, or a 6.7% increase. The numbers for the 2000 recovery were 400,000 and 5.6%. Since 2010, the number of new business establishments has grown by only 166,000 or 2.3%.
One explanation for this subpar new business formation is the overall pallid U.S. recovery. Today’s new-normal 2%-growth economy doesn’t inspire vigor or confidence. Likewise the collapse, until very recently, of real-estate values, and the imposition of tougher standards on personal credit cards, have constrained traditional sources of credit for startups. Banks have tightened lending criteria and many regional and community banks have disappeared.
Many studies have also attributed the slow rate of business formation to the regulatory fervor of the past decade. Some point to the deadening effect of the Dodd-Frank law, which is 23 times longer than the Glass-Steagall Act passed in response to the 1929 Depression. One part of Dodd-Frank, the so-called Volcker rule pertaining to bank investments, has 1,420 subsections. Then there is the Affordable Care Act.
It is not clear to what degree these laws affect business formation, but in a 2010 report for the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration, researchers at Lafayette University found that the per employee cost of federal regulatory compliance was $10,585 for businesses with 19 or fewer employees, compared with $7,755 for companies of 500 employees or more. Large and established businesses navigate through rules and compliance requirements. Small and new businesses often find them prohibitive.
Don’t just blame the feds. State and local regulators have also hampered new business initiatives, notably through the growth of occupational licensing. In 1950, 5% of workers required a license or certificate. Today that number is close to 30%. Fortunetellers, party planners, florists, shampoo assistants, cosmetologists, manicurists, beekeepers, librarians and many others have joined the ranks of licensed workers. As the rate of private-sector unionization has fallen, occupational licensing has become a new barrier to entry into the workplace and a tool to protect incumbents from competition.
Consumer protection from shoddy services, dangerous products, health and safety hazards is essential. But as the Texas Supreme Court showed in a recent ruling that licensing of eyebrow-threading is “useless,” licensing often has less to do with public safety and more with handicapping competitors. Fear of the gig and sharing economy, and growth in teleworking across state or local boundaries will undoubtedly stir existing businesses to step up their self-protective lobbying.
A July 2015 White House study found that licensing requirements vary substantially by states, irrespective of political leadership. Ohio imposes licenses on 33.3% of workers; in Florida it’s 28.7%; in California, 20.7%; and in Nevada, 30.7%. Sixty occupations are regulated in some way in all 50 states, with 1,110 occupations regulated in at least one state.
Certain demographic groups, such as immigrants and military spouses, are more heavily penalized by these licensing measures. For immigrants, the tedious and costly process of obtaining a license often delays their integration into the workforce. Thirty-five percent of military spouses work in professions that require state licenses, but they are also more likely to move across state lines than civilian counterparts, requiring multiple and lengthy relicensing reviews.
This is clearly an area for bipartisan action to harmonize regulatory requirements among states, increase multistate compacts to promote greater mobility and impose sunset reviews of licensing requirements.
Another troubling economic undercurrent is the decline of churn in the labor force. The flow of unemployed to employed has declined from close to 30% in 2007 to 16% at the trough of the recession to roughly 20% over the past two years. There has been a shift from full-time to part-time work, and the flow of workers to and from jobs has been dropping since the early 2000s, despite the drop in the unemployment rate.
In every quarter during the 1990s, six of every 100 workers moved to new jobs, while 5.5 out of 100 workers left their jobs. When they are not fired, many employees move from firm to firm, or different jobs within their firm in search of broader experience, better pay, better prospects for career-building and advancement or greater compatibility with personal needs. Historically, young firms have been dynamic job creators, but they now account for a smaller share of new hires, down from about 38% in the late 1990s to roughly 33% today, according to the Kauffman Foundation.
March data from the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that 5.3 million workers moved to a new job, down from 5.5 million in February. Close to five million left their jobs compared with 5.2 million in February. The good news was that there are now 1.4 unemployed workers for every available job, down significantly from 6.7 workers for every available job at the worst of the recession, and that 60% of workers are changing jobs willingly.
The ominous news is that these improvements haven’t been accompanied by sustained productivity growth. Measuring productivity is the subject of much debate, and there is considerable dispute about the impact of technology. Nevertheless, almost three decades of slower churn in the flow of business formation and business deaths, of less-dynamic labor markets, and of flat income growth point urgently to the need for better policy.
Washington and state governments need to wake up and remove obstacles to investment, new business formation and labor mobility. Encouraging investment in human capital and productive infrastructure is essential, and so is moving to financial and interest-rate conditions that promote investment and growth. That might give American investors and workers the bounce they deserve. What we’ve been doing so far hasn’t worked. Time for something new?
Ms. Kravis is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
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