Worse than Stale Bread

Is it my imagination, or do the 21 finalists in the Service Employees International Union's SinceSlicedBread.com "new ideas" competition sound quite a bit like the policy wish-list you'd expect from these guys? I mean, did SEIU really need to survey the countryside to discover, "Wow, we think single payer health care, a constantly rising minimum wage and huge government jobs programs are terrific ideas!"

Not to mention that even this layman sees serious economic problems with most of the finalist proposals:

• Making college tuition tax deductible doesn't make college more affordable for the poor. If you hand everyone who wants to send their kids to college $10,000, colleges will just raise tuition by $10,000, and the same people who could afford it before can still afford it, thanks to the tax deduction, and colleges are $10,000 richer per student. Not to mention that the deduction saves more money for the middle-class and rich, who are in higher brackets! Many of the poor pay no income tax at all, so the deduction for them would have no value.


• Pulling the youngest (and on average healthiest) people out of the private health care pool would result in truly skyrocketing costs for everyone else.


• I don't even want to think about what would happen when a government-chartered corporation is in the business of allocating capital, deciding which small businesses should and shouldn't exist.

The ultimate organized labor candidate, Dick Gephardt, was flogging many of these ideas in his ill-fated presidential campaign (so ill-fated, the SEIU endorsed Howard Dean!), e.g. he described SSB's "Ownership of Retirement Assets" as "Portable Pensions". It's hard to believe a clever website is enough to turn stale bread big government into gourmet public policy.

The "ordinary people" who devoted far more time than I to this foregone conclusion of a PR stunt seem to agree.