Those of you who follow me may know from my bio that I am writing a book on how and why value systems change in societies.  The book is called "The Genesis of Values", and I would like to set out some of its ideas in my blog, to get comments and reactions from readers.  I know that blog posts are usually very topical and meant to more or less stand alone, but I thought that readers might enjoy a chance to do something a bit different, which is grapple with some new theoretical ideas and help an aspiring author write his book.  So this is the first in what I hope will become a series of posts that lay out my theories on value systems, including political ones.

Posts on my book will have (GV) in the title, for Genesis of Values, so readers will be able to identify them, and will be numbered in the order they appear.  I will try to be diligent in responding quickly to comments, so that I can answer any reader questions, and discuss any issues that readers wish to raise.  I will also monitor the comments sections on GV posts after they drop off the listings, and respond to those as well, so that readers who wish to continue any discussions can do so.  Thank you all in advance for being my new editors!

Today I'd like to start by introducing a few basic ideas.  As a psychologist it's very natural for me to look to childhood influences as causes of psychological phenomena.  As a psychologist it's also very natural for me to think in terms of personality types that possess certain clusters of features, including personal values. 

Putting these two together, it would then be natural to think that values would be systematically influenced by personality, and personality systematically influenced by conditions during childhood, so the value systems of individuals would be influenced by conditions during their childhoods.  Psychologists routinely think in these terms concerning individuals, and I was very surprised when I found that other social scientists generally do not think in such terms concerning larger groups. 

The moment I started looking for correlations between changes in social and economic conditions and political changes a generation later, I found that they were everywhere.  The most obvious example is my own generation, which is the boomer generation born in the first two post-WWII decades.  This generation probably experienced one of the greatest improvements in conditions relative to its forebears that has ever been seen.  My generation grew up during a time of peace, prosperity, security, and optimism.  The prior generation, on the other hand, grew up during a terrible depression and a world war, a time of poverty, war, constant insecurity and fear of what the future might bring. 

The result of this, if childhood conditions influence personality and therefore values, should be a marked shift in value systems between these generations, and that is exactly what occurred.  As soon as members of my generation reached adulthood they began to challenge the norms that obtained in society, advocating for sexual freedom, resistance to authority, non-violence, rights for oppressed groups, and many other changes.  Also, this generational phenomenon was most definitely not confined to America, but occurred in the other advanced democracies at the same time as well. 

Of course this is not to say that everyone in the baby boom generation possessed this new value system, just as everyone in the prior generation did not possess the older one.  These phenomena are clearly statistical, which means that what changes is the likelihood and frequency of a particular value system under certain childhood conditions.  The baby boom generation had a distribution of value systems among its members that was noticeably different from its predecessor.

What this historical pattern clearly suggests is that hard times produce a more 'conservative' value system, while better times produce a more 'liberal' value system.  This is a reasonable first approximation.  Certainly, if we take a global-historical perspective, looking at societies around the world and throughout history, it is very obvious that affluence and prosperity are very highly correlated with more progressive value systems.  Before the Industrial Revolution most societies were hierarchical and authoritarian, organized around structures such as monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, slavery, and the like.  Similarly, poorer societies around the world today are much less likely to be democratic, and more likely to violently oppress minorities, women, gays, and any other culturally disadvantaged group.

It is tempting to think of the pattern of history as being 'progressive', in the sense of things steadily getting better, or more 'progressive' over time, but this pattern also works in reverse.  Nazi Germany is an excellent example.  In 1933, when Hitler came to power to great popular acclaim, Germany went into a period of violence and hatred unrivalled among industrialized nations, with a regime far worse than similarly advanced countries.  What made Germany so different?  Many theories have been advanced, of course, but I would note that Germany had seen extremely hard times for almost a generation.  Since 1914, Germany had experienced the devastation of WWI, followed by the hyperinflation of the 1920s brought on by war reparations, and then the Great Depression.  In 1933, a 'hardened generation' began to come to maturity, that had only known very harsh times, pushing the polity toward violence and repression, and by 1939 this cohort that had only known hardship was large enough to push the country into war.  Of course other factors were at work as well, but I believe that the 'hardened generation' hypothesis at least partly accounts for Nazism and the Holocaust.  (I will discuss this particular example in much more detail in a later post.)

So, it definitely seems to be the case that there are some kinds of correlations between circumstances during early life and the resulting value systems of different age cohorts.  But how can these be investigated systematically?  There is a big problem with just saying 'more liberal' or 'more conservative' as a way of describing value systems, because these words cover very many types of issues and also mean very different things in different times and places.  When people say 'more liberal' for example, in the modern American political context, they would generally mean a value system that is more tolerant of sexual freedom, less tolerant of violence, less sympathetic to authority and more sympathetic to those who are subject to authority, more inclined to want government to help the poor, and so on.  When people say 'more conservative' in the same context, they would usually mean the opposite. 

My approach has been to take a few of these major components of different value systems and to track them both independently and as parts of value systems.  For instance, I take attitudes toward pleasure, including sexual, as one major component.  I take violence and authoritarianism together as a second component.  (I originally tracked these separately because I felt that they were distinct from each other, but I found that they are very tightly bound together, enough so to consider them jointly).

I consider attitudes toward economic issues to be another distinct component.  How the economic component fits in, however, will have to be deferred until later, because attitudes on economic issues are so strongly affected by self-interest, not just by personal feelings of rightness and wrongness.  Economic issues are a hugely important part of political value systems, but they are very complex to analyze and I'll have to deal with them in a later post.  

With that in mind, I'll provisionally define Liberal (with a capital L) as meaning a value system that has relatively tolerant attitudes toward pleasure while being relatively intolerant of violence and authoritarianism.  Conservative, in this essay, means the opposite.  When I use these words, capitalized, that's all I mean by them at this point.  Thus Liberals would favor gay rights and gun control, Conservatives the opposite.  Liberals would be less likely to spank and more likely to allow children to call them by their first names (less authoritarian), Conservatives would be the reverse.  Liberals would be more likely to be pro-peace, Conservatives more likely to be pro-war.  Many other political issues could also be easily classified as Liberal or Conservative by referring to the dimensions of attitudes toward pleasure and toward violence/authoritarianism. 

So Liberals and Conservatives are polar opposites on the dimensions of pleasure/sex and violence/authoritarianism, with each being relatively permissive on one dimension while being relatively restrictive on the other.  Are there other value systems besides these?  Of course there are, because many people do not neatly fit the definitions of Liberal or Conservative used here.  More importantly, if we again take a global-historical perspective, it can be seen pretty quickly there are and have been societies that have value systems that cannot be classified as Liberal or Conservative.  What about these?

Using the analysis of different dimensions of value systems shows that there is actually a third major value system of global and historical significance, one that has never been precisely defined and named.  I call this value system Preconservative.  Preconservatives are relatively permissive and tolerant toward both pleasure/sex and violence/authoritarianism.  This is a value system that crops up in many different places, including many undeveloped authoritarian societies, including feudal aristocracies in earlier centuries.  It also occurs among privileged elites in wealthy societies today. 

In my book I try to explain the idea of Preconservatism by discussing a range of cultural practices from such societies, but in this post I'd like to do something different that I hope readers won't find frivolous.  A really perfect example of the Preconservative value system is actually the title character from the movie Borat, by Sascha Baron Cohen.  In this movie, Cohen pretends to be Borat, a man from a very poor village in Kazakhstan, who has come to America to meet people and interview them.  Borat introduces himself to unsuspecting Americans and films his interactions with them, which are hilarious. 

The humor in the movie comes from Borat's behavior, which is absolutely outrageous.  He attends a genteel Southern dinner party and blithely invites a prostitute, takes drivers ed and starts drinking hard liquor behind the wheel, offering some to the instructor, makes unbelievably sexist remarks to feminists, talks about the importance of killing Uzbeks to liberals, and so on.  Borat is an equal-opportunity offender, possessed of a value system guaranteed to astonish and insult both liberals and conservatives alike.  (Of course, the biggest insult was to poor, Preconservative Kazakhstan, which did not find the movie funny at all.)

In structural terms, what makes the movie work is that a Preconservative can offend Conservatives by his acceptance of sexuality and Liberals by his acceptance of violence, because Preconservatives are fine with both.  What makes the movie even funnier is that Cohen plays Borat as an earnest, sincere, guy who is completely unaware of his offensiveness and just wants to be friends with Americans. 

Before returning to Preconservatism, I have to make a general point about value systems, which is that they have things that they value, such as specific virtues.  The primary virtues valued by Liberals, I would argue, are things like compassion, empathy, nurturance and other qualities related to loving and caring for others.  The primary virtues valued by Conservatives, on the other hand, would be things like self-discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, and other virtues related to control of one's desires and impulses.  (Of course, both groups would also value each other's primary virtues as well, but the emphasis and degree would differ.) 

Preconservatism also has primary virtues, and these are in the area of power, strength, and dominance for those in the elite, and obedience and submission for those who are not.  This is shown in Borat as well, when he enters a room and goes into an elaborate kissing ritual with the men in the room, while completely ignoring the women.  Here he is demonstrating deference to people of higher status and disregard for those of lower status, which is also typical of Preconservatism (remember that violence and authoritarianism go together).

Moving away from Borat, this Preconservative trinity of pleasure, violence, and authoritarianism can be seen quite often.  The Roman Empire was of course famous for it, with its orgies, and its circuses in which people were torn to shreds.  Aristocracies throughout history have often been this way.  Feudal lords had sexual rights with their serfs, were the ones who were expected to do battle in war, and of course had complete authority in their domains. 

Preconservatism is ultimately a product of the psychology of dominance and submission.  The psychology of dominance is that dominant individuals do as they please and should be admired for their dominance and obeyed.  The psychology of submission is that voluntary submissiveness is honorable and should be rewarded.  (By the way, the word 'islam' is Arabic for 'submission'.) 

Preconservatism will be most prevalent under conditions of scarcity and poverty, for reasons determined by evolutionary psychology, which will be explained in a later post.  Its most fundamental characteristic, however, is its association with attitudes of dominance and submission.  It exists, therefore, wherever people lead lives of dominance, which includes both primitive societies and also includes the elites of modern-day societies.  Many economic conservatives in America today are Elite Preconservatives in my classification of value systems, because they are tolerant of both sex/pleasure and violence/authoritarianism and operate according to attitudes of dominance, with its resulting reduction of empathy.

In the philosophy of science theories are classified in a hierarchy according to whether they are descriptive, explanatory, or predictive.  My theory of value systems is all three, but we are still in the descriptive part, because objects of study need to be precisely described and classified before they can be explained and then predicted.  Having described and classified value systems according to certain of their components, the next step is to describe when and where they occur. 

In Western societies the historical pattern has been to move from a Preconservative stage, to a Conservative stage, and ultimately to a Liberal stage (I call this the Western Trajectory).  These transitions, however, are not automatic, but depend on continued economic progress.  It is very important to note that this means quite different patterns of progress regarding violence/authoritarianism versus pleasure/sex.  Violence/authoritarianism goes (roughly) from high to medium to low as societies move from Preconservative to Conservative to Liberal, while restrictions on pleasure/sex go (again, roughly) from medium to high to low.  Restrictions on pleasure/sex actually increase during the early stages of social/economic progress. 

The most obvious example of this pattern is Great Britain.  In its Preconservative stage it was a monarchy, its transformation to Conservatism began with the Protestant Reformation and culminated in the Victorian era, and it eventually became a Liberal society during the 20^th century. I'll save the details for a later post. 

Readers at tpmcafe are most interested in American politics, and America has shown this historical pattern also, with some differences.  Colonial America began, of course, as a transplant society from Great Britain, and the northern and southern colonies were quite different.  The northern colonies were quite clearly Conservative in their value system, in fact extremely so, with the Puritans actually classified as Early Conservative in my system.  (Early Conservative societies are impoverished, very repressive and, well, puritanical.  Iran and the Taliban would also be in this category.)  The south, however, was just as clearly Preconservative.  It was hierarchical, authoritarian, and violent, but not Puritanical.  (In fact, a gracious, genteel, aristocratic-type lifestyle was the ideal.)  Slavery, of course, like serfdom, is a mark of Preconservatism. 

As America progressed economically, the north progressed socially from Early Conservative to Late Conservative. Late Conservatives tend to be political activists, as first demonstrated in Great Britain, where Late Conservatives abolished the slave trade and worked to help the poor while at the same time crusading against vice.  The Late Conservative period in the American north is what we now call the Progressive Era.  We tend to think of this as an early form of present-day liberal values, but the Progressives actually had more in common with present-day religious Conservatives.  They wanted to abolish Preconservative injustices such as slavery, but also favored Prohibition and strict laws against pornography, prostitution, and vice in general.  As the north continued to make economic progress during the 20^th century, it eventually moved from Late Conservative to Liberal in that century's latter decades. 

The south has followed this classic trajectory also, but with an enormous delay.  It began with a Preconservative system and regressed instead of making progress during the 19^th century because of the Civil War and Reconstruction.  In fact, it didn't start to move out of its Preconservative value system until after WWII.  People of my generation and older remember the tremendous resistance to equal civil rights for blacks, which is indication of thinking conditioned by attitudes of dominance, the hallmark of Preconservatism.  The south has progressed greatly since then on those issues, and is now in a Late Conservative stage.  (Societies can and often do skip an Early Conservative stage if economic growth is very rapid, going directly from Preconservative to Late Conservative.  This is happening throughout Asia.)  The south now is religious, patriotic, fairly repressive sexually, and very activist in its politics, just as the Progressives were a century before.  The difference is that the southern Late Conservatives of today find themselves resisting social change instead of initiating it, as the Progressives did, because they are at the trailing edge rather than the leading edge of the changes. 

The western regions of the country are more complicated.  Today's Republican party really has three geographic regions in which it is still very strong.  They are the south, the great plains states, and the Mormon belt.  The plains states have probably remained Conservative due to constant out-migration of more Liberal members to urban areas, and now have small populations.  The Mormon region shows the same pattern as the south, going from Preconservative to Late Conservative.  Mormonism began as an authoritarian polygamous sect with a significant history of violence.  Polygamy is, pure and simple, sexual privilege for elite males, and is another clear marker of Preconservatism, like slavery.   Mormonism today, however, is no longer polygamous, less violent and authoritarian, sexually repressive, and politically activist. 

Other areas of the west show that an activist Late Conservative stage usually occurs just before the onset of Liberalism.  California is a good example: previously Republican, elected Ronald Reagan governor twice, now reliably Democratic.  Colorado and Nevada are just now undergoing the same transition.  Both used to be reliably Republican, and Colorado in particular was known as a center for evangelical Christianity, now both are trending Democratic. 

Other areas demonstrate this also.  Virginia was, like Colorado, known as a hotbed of religious activism, and has recently trended Democratic also.  North Carolina and Florida are showing similar trends.  In my own New York metro region the Long Island suburbs used to be very solidly Republican and now vote Democratic and are clearly Liberal. 

This pattern makes it possible to see the political trends in America over the past fifty years and, more important, to make predictions.  America has mostly moved in a Liberal direction over the past half century, with the exception of the south and the Mormon belt, which have moved toward Conservatism, but from a Preconservative base.  The turn toward political conservatism in the 1980s was a result of the south moving firmly into Conservatism, combined with a reaction to the poor economy of the 1970s.  Since there are very few remaining areas in America that are Preconservative, the movement toward Conservatism cannot continue, while the movement from Conservatism to Liberalism will continue.  This means that if reasonably good economic conditions persist, then an American transition to European-style Liberalism is inevitable. 

This is not guaranteed, however, because we now face a potential Depression.  The Great Depression of the 1930s caused a temporary reversal of the political transformations that accompany economic progress, and this could happen again.  (Remember that the effects of economic conditions on social values are time-lagged, because conditions during childhood affect values during adulthood.  The Great Depression caused America to adopt more liberal economic policies while it was going on, but also resulted in social Conservatism in subsequent decades.)

Of course, this prediction about American politics is not yet based on an explanatory mechanism for these values system changes, but only on the observation of patterns and the assumption that they will continue to hold true.  In subsequent posts I will detail the underlying psychological processes that cause values to shift as they do in response to changing conditions.  I will also bring economic issues into the discussion.  After that, I will show how this theory also explains values shifts in non-Western societies (there are actually several trajectories that societies can follow). 

I hope all you readers find this interesting enough to read and comment on.  Any time it becomes boring, please tell me.  I have been working on this, on and off, for many years, and recently I find myself in an odd situation.  For the past few years I have been making predictions based on my theory and watching them come true.  This has made me try to push myself to articulate my ideas, but I need some feedback about how to do it.  Thanks for reading. 

"Geez, these lefties are clueless!  Can't even tell when someone's trying to help them.  They think the way politics works is that they explain to everyone else what right and wrong is, and everyone else agrees.  It would make them really annoying if it didn't also make them so easy to manipulate. 

This thing with Rick is working out beautifully.  Now that I'm President, gays are the new blacks, the new angry outsiders, and this is my Sister Souljah move.  The Left flips its lid over a harmless symbolic gesture, I look really reasonable to everyone else, and my plan to govern with 70% of the electorate behind me so I can override filibusters is perfectly on track.  

That'll help with the stim plan, and with climate change and energy independence and health care.  Hey, I'm gonna need all the political support I can get to push that stuff through the Senate.  Then once the stim plan starts to work and we get some results from the other stuff too, I'll have enough political capital to fight the culture wars. 

Boy, the Lefties are gonna feel silly when I start with that.  I won't push gay marriage, but there's no point, because it's a state issue, not a Federal one.  But I'll reform DOMA so the Federal gov't recognizes gay marriages and civil unions in states that have them. Then, once married gays can file joint income tax returns and get those thousand other Federal marriage breaks it'll push the Overton Window on this issue so much farther to the left that gay marriage will start popping in all the blue states. 

I'll have to do something about the gay-military thing, too.  That's a tough one, because those military guys are such giant homophobes.  Some of them think that if there's a gay guy within a thousand yards of them they'll catch it.  Thank God those guys are trained to obey orders. 

Probably I'll start by allowing gays to serve openly in the Reserves and National Guard, and really enforcing the Don't Ask part of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. If I have a couple of commanders demoted for conducting witch hunts, the others will get the message.  Oh, and anyone who does get kicked out or did before gets an honorable discharge.  That way everyone will see the writing on the wall and the guys who can't handle it will have time to leave.  Then I'll have a commission study the reserves and say that it's great and we'll do it for the rest of the military. 

Before I do that, though, I probably should do something about that U.N. Declaration on gay rights.  My God, people are still going to jail for being gay in half the world!  So primitive.  It's mostly the Muslim and African countries, so they'd have a total shit fit if a black President with a Muslim name started lecturing them.  Their people probably like me better than their own leaders, so I bet the leaders will ease up big time on this if it looks like I'm going to make a big deal about it.  That helps me on this issue politically because everyone in the U.S. will agree with that except the wingnuts, and they'll make the whole antigay agenda look really awful.  

Hey, I'll bet Rick would help with that!  He may be against gays getting married, but he doesn't want to see them getting executed or spending their lives in jail for it, I'm sure of that.  And I'll bet he'd love to make all the Lefties look like idiots by proving he's not a hater.  Note to self: call Rick." 

There is an interesting discussion going on at tpmcafe about what ended the great depression, led by Paul Krugman.  It's great, but something seems to me to be missing from the discussion.  It's inequality.

There are clear historical correlations between income inequality and financial instability. Inequality increased during the early 20^th century, peaking in the late 1920s, when we had asset bubbles that led to a crash and the Great Depression. Then, inequality was greatly reduced during the 1945-1973 period, which was financially stable. After that it started rising again, and so did instability, which became increasingly problematic after the brief stock market crash of 1987. Inequality now has again reached 1929 levels, and 1929-level financial instability is also occurring, with the financial system now in a constant state of crisis. I am very surprised that no one is talking much about a causal connection.

It also seems to me that the cause-and-effect links are pretty obvious. When inequality increases, more people experience absolute declines in their standard of living, and go into debt in attempts to maintain their consumption. Also, people at the top of the income distribution have much more money, which creates much higher demand for financial instruments and this leads to bubbles in financial assets. Ultimately, you would expect two things to happen that would reinforce each other: bubbles burst and debtors default, and then you would have a massive disappearance of wealth and a resulting crash in demand.

This is pretty much what happened with the Great Depression, and it's also a very good description of what is happening today.  This would imply that policies to reduce inequality are a long-term necessity. Am I missing something?

Inequality was reduced after the Depression by the New Deal safety net programs such as Social Security, and also by a very progressive income tax, with very high tax rates for the wealthy.  Conservatives like to claim that this kind of progressive taxation stifles growth, but the postwar period turned out to be a Golden Age economically, with strong growth and little or no financial instability. 

I truly wonder why this issue does not get more discussion.  I have searched regular Google and Scholar.Google,com for books and articles on this relationship, and find very little.  I'm not an economist, so there is probably a literature on it that I'm not familiar with, but I also have a suspicion that this topic may be ignored for political and ideological reasons, some of which may be subconscious.  If high inequality could be demonstrated to be bad for the economy as a whole, then a lot of wealthy interests would be threatened. 

If needs to be reduced, how could this be done?  Well, going back to the more progressive income tax would be an obvious answer, as would taxing capital gains in the same progressive fashion.  So would improving the safety net, with government-sponsored health care.  Stillidealistic has an excellent suggestion in this area on her current blog post "How's This for an Outside the Box Idea?"  Her proposal is to pay parents to stay home with their children, at least while they are young.  In addition to giving children more time with their parents, this would contract the labor supply and drive up wages.  It should be pointed out that this occurred after WWII when many women who had worked during the war left the labor force and had children, and the result was an economy in which a single earner made enough to support a family.   

A great deal of thought is being given to the topic of how best to stimulate the economy.   Overall spending seems to be falling off a cliff, with consumer, business, and state and local government spending all declining sharply.  In order to prevent the natural acceleration of this process caused by lower spending from the newly unemployed, economists and policymakers have largely reached a consensus that the federal government must step in and boost its own spending to rescue the economy.  This fiscal stimulus is now seen to be just as necessary as the banking rescue plan adopted recently.

The question then becomes: what is the best way to do this?  Obama and his economic team are proposing a combination of tax cuts, public works, increases in the social safety net (unemployment insurance, food stamps, heating assistance, etc.), and aid to states and localities.  Figures discussed are in the range of $500-$700 billion. 

The difficulty here is that consumer spending constitutes about two-thirds of overall spending in the economy, and too large a fraction of the proposed stimulus program is channeled to the other components of spending, such as construction and direct spending by government, and not enough to consumers.  The consumer component, tax cuts and safety net increases, is difficult to estimate from readily available information, but seems to be in the range of only $100-$200 billion, and a large fraction will be in the form of tax cuts to those who are well enough off that they will not need to spend them. 

What should policymakers do?  In the 1960s and 1970s a widely discussed policy option was the negative income tax (NIT), a progressive idea that was championed by conservative economist Milton Friedman.  In the NIT, the idea of a progressive income tax is extended so that poor people pay negative tax, which means they receive money from the government instead of paying it.   Currently, the federal government does have a negative income tax, called the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), but it is relatively modest, with outlays in the range of $35-$40 billion annually, and does not cover non-earners, who tend to be the poorest.  

I would propose a much, much, larger NIT, which would return at least $1000 to every household.  Those in the top four deciles (tenths) of the income distribution (the top 40%) would receive $1000, those in the fifth decile would receive $2000, the sixth decile would receive $3000, and so on, with the bottom decile, or poorest tenth of the population receiving $7000.  With about 115 million households in the U.S., this would cost roughly $355 billion annually, which is still only half of the upper figure discussed for a necessary stimulus package.  Over 80% of the NIT money would go to the bottom half of the income distribution in this scenario, with the roughly 20% for the upper half accomplishing the necessary purpose of creating widespread political support.

The moral arguments for a negative income tax have always been clear and simple.  It relieves economic suffering on the part of those who suffer most, and it significantly reduces income inequality.  The counterarguments, which are strong and, to me, usually persuasive, are that in weakens incentives to work (this has been tested and demonstrated empirically) and that it is unfair to those who are hardworking and productive to take their money and give it to others. 

The important, point, which I don't believe has been made by anyone else, is that under conditions of severe economic recession, these counterarguments do not apply.   Incentives to work may be weakened somewhat, but this will have no effect on labor markets and overall labor force participation because the demand for jobs will still exceed the supply of them so greatly that available jobs will continue to be filled quickly.  In fact, pushing people to work more due to hardship would only cause the displacement of willing workers with unwilling ones, which makes the economy less productive, not more. 

As for the argument that an NIT is an unfair burden on productive workers, this also does not apply because here the NIT is only using money that must be spent anyway in order to stimulate the economy.  In fact, the best way to minimize the taxpayer burden of a stimulus program is to maximize the degree to which stimulus checks are actually spent by consumers.  Therefore, a program that predominantly targets the poor, who will need to spend money immediately, actually keeps the long-term burden on taxpayers to a minimum. 

People may argue that this program will be a political non-starter because no one wants to give money to the poor.  I disagree.  First, this proposal is sound economic policy.  Second, it gives money to everyone without raising taxes, creating buy-in on the part of many taxpayers.  Third, and most telling, it costs only half of what Congress has already given to banks.  If it is politically possible to give $700 billion to negligent wealthy bankers, whom no one regards as deserving, then it must be politically possible to spend only half of that on everyone in the country. 

The way to do this would be to label it as a temporary expansion of the EITC, for the purpose of maintaining consumer spending while the economy is in recession.  The payments would last until the unemployment rate drops below 6%, when they would be cut in half.  When the unemployment rate drops below 5%, the payments would end. 

This program would be an enormous help to those who are suffering the most.  People who have to choose between food and medicine, people who can't pay their bills, who are in danger of homelessness, all would be helped.  Many working poor could replace possessions that are old and worn out.  Some would junk very old cars and buy newer used cars.  And all this alleviation of human suffering would also keep the economy afloat.  Win-win. 

Many people will doubt that enacting such a program is possible.  We should consider the example of the Bush administration.  While generally incompetent, they were masterful at using whatever circumstances were at hand to create political pressure for policies that were not inherently popular.  They did this with 9/11 to start a war with Iraq, and with the financial crisis to divert enormous sums to investment banks.  While I would never copy their morality or their policies, their political playbook should be studied.  Their now exists an economic crisis that has the nation scared.  If the Bush administration could use crises to frighten the country into bad policies, why can't the Democrats use one to frighten the country into good policies?

We have a progressive President and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.  We also have a crisis for which this proposal is perfectly suited.  If enacted, it would boost consumer spending significantly and immediately, unlike many other interventions, which take up to a year before they work.  This could prevent the current economic crisis from getting much worse.  Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate, says 'Go big', on stimulating the economy.  This is the way to do it.