t0llyb0ng says:

UBI or Universal Basic Income is analogous to Milton Friedman’s negative income tax, to which he devoted a segment on his PBS TV show in the late ’70s.  Mr. Friedman argued that the present income tax structure is regressive, whereas his negative income tax would be progressive.  If you didn’t have any income, IRS would pay you X.  If you got a job & started making money, IRS would pay you less.  Soon you’d be making all your own dough & wouldn’t need their help any more at all.  At that point you would start paying tax to the IRS instead of the other way ’round.

The idea was to move individuals & families away from the scourge of eternal welfare, which over time ruins entire generations that can’t stop suckling at the welfare teat.  Mr. Friedman’s solution was meant as a temporary stopgap to help those without income.  It was a no-questions-asked policy.  If you needed the money, they just paid you.  The rationale there was the realization that it’s cheaper to just hand out the money than it is to attempt to police & punish all the slackers & cheats that will always have the tin cup out.  Cheaper & more beneficial to society at large than the stingy, punitive environment we find ourselves in today.  Untold billions could have been saved over the decades.  But we are collectively too dumb to grok the concept & so it will never be made law.  (JCD hates that word “grok” which I first ran across in Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

The pileup in the blinding snowstorm happened on I-94 on the Indiana Turnpike south of Michigan City, Indiana & not in the state of Michigan.

Esperanza says:

Superintendent David Doty said that his office had received complaints from concerned parents and decided to head off any problems before the school opened in 2013. If you do decide to make any adjustments to blog posts, you should probably do it in such a way that your readers are kept in the loop.