I am bewildered by those who profess to be idealists, interested in the public good, rather than power. If your conception of the public good is served by, for example, hiding the economic cost of your program from the majority of American voters by making it a (lousy, inefficient) tax credit, instead of paying for it out of tax revenue, then in what way is your idea of the public good compatible with a democratic vision?

It is incredible to me how often this idea occurs to me, and how seldom it seems to occur to others: If there is a transfer from class A to class B, make it explicit. When you propose making an hidden transfer explicit, people often climb the wall with annoyance. Why? Because the whole point of many hidden transfers is that they are politically viable only because they are hidden. If you like the transfer, you’ll want to keep hiding it.

Hey! Maybe that’s my new favorite Constitutional amendment idea. The Explicit Transfer Amendment! Under the ETA, raising the minimum wage is unconstitutional. Levying extra taxes on business owners or consumers and transferring the money to low-income workers is not. The point is just that the transfer is obvious. If there is a political constituency that is hurt by it, they’ll be able to see that, and speak up for themselves in the political process.

I think this falls out of Rawlsian principles of public justification, for what that’s worth.

Charles Murray offers a plan that would eliminate all income transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels—including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, and corporate subsidies—and would substitute an annual cash grant of $10,000 for life, beginning at age twenty-one.