Welcome to the world as run by “progressives,” where death row inmates get unemployment benefits. They are, after all, unemployed, so why not? Except this isn’t actually a plan but just a reality, which is a rather larger warning about a world run by liberals.
The story comes from California, agreed by all to be the most liberal state in the union. One of the COVID-19 reaction plans was the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program funded by the federal government. If a person is self-employed, a small contractor, or if there is some other reason he doesn’t get regular unemployment insurance, then he can get access to assistance. It’s a decent and sensible thing to offer.
Like all unemployment plans, this was run by the states. California didn’t run its part of it so well. At one point, the federal government was paying out for 7 million people, and California thought only 2 million of those were righteous.
We could say that’s Washington’s fault, except that now, the other shoe has dropped. Inmates in the California penitentiary system worked out how to claim unemployment. The known number is 35,000 claims for $140 million in benefits. Current estimates are up to $1 billion, and 133 of the state’s 700 death row inmates are known to be among those claims. Some $420,000 in benefits have been paid to the death row inmates. The numbers are expected to climb.
How did this happen? California, that most liberal of states, you will recall, and one that truly believes in the power of government, does not cross-match unemployment benefits to the prison rolls, unlike most other states. Thus, there is this great gaping hole through which taxpayer money can be stolen.
In detail, this is an illustration of Milton Friedman’s four ways to spend money: You can spend your own on yourself, your own on other people, that of others on yourself, or that of others on other people. If there’s some bottomless bucket of tax money, then who cares how it is spent and upon whom? The bureaucrats don’t care, and why would they? They don’t exactly have skin in the game at either end, the paying it or receiving it. It is one reason why that ideal of “more government” doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t contain the positive feedback that makes the system efficient.
If you need evidence that more government doesn’t work very well, think about it: Checking the unemployment register against the prison rolls is not rocket science. With that being said, it’s a useful guide to life that we want to have less of the things that don’t work well and more of those that do.
After all that, we come to the serious question. How do we punish someone already on death row for stealing unemployment benefits? Tickle them? Or are they already laughing too hard?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
