Prof. Somin writes that
It is indeed true that there are people who depend on government programs that should be abolished, and in some cases it would be unjust to simply cut them off immediately. But that doesn’t mean we should simply leave the programs in place forever. There is a wide range of options in between going cold turkey and feeding the addiction indefinitely. For example, we could lower program benefits without eliminating them completely. We can also continue paying current beneficiaries, but gradually eliminate the program for future ones (who generally rely on the program less). Another option might be to give some or all of the beneficiaries a lump sum “severance payment” to cushion them through the transition they face.There are also some relevant moral distinctions to be made between different classes of program beneficiaries. There is a difference between an ordinary citizen who relies on a program he or she had no hand in creating and a politically sophisticated, powerful interest group that aggressively lobbied for its establishment and perpetuation. That’s the distinction between, say, a low-income old lady who lives off a Social Security check and big agribusiness interests that lobby for massive farm subsidies and then whine about having become dependent on them.
In a small city like Whitewater, there’s vast spending on programs that are nothing up a kind of wasteful business welfare, while the city budget ignores pervasive poverty in favor of a narrow, and well-fed constituency. Our present direction is not merely wrong, but wrong also for being built on dodgy, absurd claims of success.