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Tim Worstall: Progressive poverty programs aren't finding takers



Amid the pandemic, last December, Congress started offering money to help cover unpaid rent.

So far, the government has managed to spend 6.5% of the allocated resources on that generous rent-coverage offer. Only 1 in 10 families eligible for the new child tax credit is currently signed up. A similar failure to pick up the money afflicts the emergency broadband fund. In fact, nearly all programs for the truly poor fail in this manner.

This is one fault at the heart of the progressive project. The world is a complex place. Changing it is difficult. It isn't possible to effect change just by sweeping into power in Washington and writing a few checks. Effective change requires the very thing that government and bureaucracy simply are not good at – getting down and dirty in the weeds and managing the details.

The progressive project depends upon the idea that there are certain levers to be pulled in society. Progressives tend to believe that if they can get the right people into the control room, they'll have the power to bend the world in the correct direction. Not just bend it, but direct it.

But the world doesn't work that way. There is no credible control room for a society with 330 million people. There is no method of directing, in any detail, something as chaotic as an economy. Our proof?

Progressives are finding it difficult to give away free money. By their own estimations, 90% of the people who should be receiving it aren't getting it. If it's not possible to do something as simple as this, then curing the climate, abolishing inequality, providing good jobs, and all that just isn't going to be so easy, is it?


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Posted: July 26, 2021 Monday 10:54 AM