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There are obligations you agree to and obligations that are forced upon you. If I agree to deliver 10 widgets to you then back out, I've backed out of an obligation I agreed to. If government says I need to deliver 10 widgets to you then I back out, I've backed out of an obligation that has been forced upon me. Obligations that are forced upon people seem like takings to me. If I had any faith in older supreme courts I'd wonder why they weren't considered 5th amendment violations.
I would be somewhat fine with this solution if they also kept track of the costs of these mandates, possibly by allowing partial tax write offs for anyone complying with them. I'm not really firmly fixed on a particular solution for this problem, just firmly in the position that it is a problem.
A mandate without funding is just a sneaky tax and spending scheme that doesn't get added to the government balance books and has far less oversight and checks/balances than other forms of spending. Even if you are a big government liberal there are good reasons to dislike this kind of scheme. There are not unlimited resources, and unless you only care about one particular pet issue that is using one of these mandates without funding then there is less wealth available for all other issues. Take this pet example:
All businesses must spend about $10k to accommodate a particular disability. The disability can also be fixed with a surgery. Fixing the disability for everyone would average out to about $5k per business. The government in this case could tax the businesses $9k each, spend $5k paying for fixing the disability, and then have $4k in tax revenue left over. The business is happier with this solution, the disability is solved for all cases (and places that get exclusions from ADA aren't also excluding people with the disability.)
I am Libertarian, but I also was an Economics Major in college. The ADA stuff bothers my economist side just as much as it bothers my libertarian side. If I am going to have a government doing things that I don't like, can I at least ask that they not do it stupidly and waste a bunch of money?
Sure! And I think the government should absolutely be deciding how much money it should be spending on say the ADA per person (assuming we decide it should be done at all which is of course not a given!). But I think then leaving it up to the person to have to coordinate on which businesses to target, is basically wasting the reason why governments are useful at all, which is coordinating these kind of issues.
And you will get no argument from me that governments should be do much better at keeping track of what is paid for what and the costs vs benefits of x. I was in government (local and central) long enough that I am certain I have had several rants about it.
As I mentioned, not too attached to the particular solution I had. Just that this is a problem. So I don't think we disagree too much.
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