I agree with your main points, but did your closing sentence need to get racist?
It suggests that the success of Asian immigrants is not due to their race at all, it's due to their culture. And that this culture can be emulated by people of other races to achieve similar success. That's the exact opposite of the racist view, which would be that Asians are richer than black people because Asians are better than black people.
I don't think great things in civilization get done solely out of people needing to work the bare minimum to survive anyway; if that's all they were going to work, just paying them $10k subsistence is not a huge loss to society, and even pretty cheap by the standards of the other stuff we spend money on. Actually it'd be a pretty sad commentary on civilization if it were only the threat of literally being homeless/starving that inspired people to work; that's what it was like in subsistence-farming days, but surely a wealthy country can move beyond that, and make the baseline something higher, even if only "ramen + crappy apartment"? Plus, I think we'd make it back in how much it'd increase entrepreneurship if people felt more confident in a safety net being there if they failed (people from lower-class backgrounds w/o a family safety net, in particular, are very afraid to leave steady jobs if they have one).
Thats 30 million times ten times one thousand. Thats 300 billion dollars. That is ten times the cost for the war in Iraq back in 2001 and 2002 (both years). How on earth do you think the US could pay that considering that it has a deep deficit in the first place?
And in any case, one purpose is to be a replacement for the current piecemeal programs we have, which aren't cheap to begin with. Food stamps + Section 8 + EITC currently costs about $150 billion per year, plus some additional amount in bureaucracy and litigation due to complex rules, plus some additional economic damage caused by market distortion due to the fact that food stamps + section 8 aren't normal cash (EITC is better for that). That leaves maybe $100-150b, some of which is probably also redundant with existing welfare programs (I just picked three big ones), or about 3-4% of the federal budget.
If you want to keep it budget-neutral, how about an across-the-board 3-4% cut to all other budget categories in return? Or, we could just, as you point out, remove the temporary "overseas contingency operations" (Iraq/Afghanistan wars) supplement to the regular DoD budget, which is $125b in 2012, returning the DoD to its baseline budget. If I had a line-item veto pen I could pretty easily come up with another few hundred billion in savings if you'd like (cut agriculture subsidies, cut Medicare Part D, transition TSA/air-traffic-control to being fully user-fee-funded, do another round of domestic military-base closures through a BRAC-like process, etc., etc.). :)
And it's not like that $300 billion just disappears into a black hole. Because poor people need it to live they are spending it immediately, which multiplies out across the economy, certainly more so than a war does. And I'm not even counting the human life cost of war. So yes, just giving people $10K a year isn't that bad considering what we have done.
I just love the thinking though: "we've spent all this money to kill people for no reason and now you expect us to feed Americans?!?!"
You're correct that we do spend a lot of money piecemeal to get some semblance of a safety net, which is one reason even libertarians like Hayek and Friedman suggest it would be better to just actually provide a direct safety net, in a much less distorting way, instead of this crazy mixture of special-case and bureaucratic safety nets. The main people promoting those seem not to be libertarians but nanny-state conservatives who want to somehow make sure that someone's food stamps are spent on food and not beer. To me, as a more libertarian-leaning sort of person (albeit in teh Hayekian sense), if they're getting $100 in assistance, I don't give a damn what they do with it past that point. Give it in cash, and if they squander it on vodka instead of buying food, well then that's their problem at that point.
I don't really believe your threat. Is the only reason you work because you couldn't live a $10k/yr subsistence living otherwise? You're not actually interested in creating things, exchanging value with people, etc.? That's certainly not the case for myself or most people who care about technology; I couldn't imagine sitting around playing call of duty all day, living off ramen in a cheap hovel in a bad neighborhood, if that option were offered to me tomorrow. Taxes certainly aren't much of a deterrent; once you add up all the exclusions and whatever I pay an effective 20% tax rate or so, and I'm not even in one of the lowest tax brackets.
I'm unconvinced by neoclassical arguments by Friedman et al. on "distorting" for two reasons. Firstly there's nothing inherently wrong with introducing further "distortion" into the market unless you subscribe to the evidently false proposition that no person's ability to optimise their spending habits with respect to their budget constraint can be improved upon; that you're making individuals and society worse off for buying them healthcare when they expressed more interest in a hire-purchase agreement for a state-of-the-art pickup truck. I believe quite the opposite: people receiving government money aren't entitled to spend it on anything they want, and even with imperfect information a technocrat, will often be better at allocating some of that cash than the average welfare recipient.
Secondly, given differences between incomes, propensities to consume and the ease of introducing new supply into the market, a simple flat subsidy can distort markets more than targeted payments. Converting payments such as government funded health insurance to cash would have the effect of inflating the prices of ramen and particularly crappy apartments (since welfare recipients can live without the health insurance, albeit for less long, and there's not enough decent apartments in many areas). Given the relatively fixed supply of housing, people who already owned rental property would capture more benefit than any other industry, ironically because they chose to use their capital in a relatively unproductive manner. On the other hand, hospitals might be worse off, losing part of their customer base and seeing cost increases (notably unskilled labour). Since the government has the choice in how they distort the market, I'd rather they subsidise healthcare professionals than slum landlords.
I totally agree with your point about bare minimum safety nets encouraging innovation. Even those poor who are never going to launch world-changing startups might consider a stab at freelancing in an area they're more capable in than dishwashing once the risk of not having regular income is removed.
That's partly because being an immigrant in itself filters out the people to lazy to leave their home country.
In cases where that isn't true, Asian immigrants aren't generally any more successful than other immigrants. For example, the Hmong population in the U.S., who mainly came as refugees from the Southeast Asian wars, has a very high poverty rate even 35 years later (around 30%, versus a U.S. national average of 10%).
Edit: never mind - I read the wrong post.