What Duncan Black Said

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown has proposed a tax on employers whose employees are still forced to rely of food-stamps, medicaid, and other social welfare programs.

Black, better known as Atrios observes, that Democrats have a penchant for byzantine solutions, that these turn out to be sub-optimal policies and worse politics.

He believes that this bias against simple and universal is stupid, or has he pithily states, "Raise The Damn Minimum Wage":

This is a constant maddening Dem approach to policy. Basically there's meaningful opposition (and probably some intellectual agreement with this opposition) to a very simple idea. So someone comes up with a much more complicated solution to achieve essentially the same thing (but not really because it's really complicated) premised on the idea that maybe they can sneak that idea through because the lobbyists won't notice. Then you still don't get your complicated solution - or at least by the time it does get through the lobbyists it's even sh%$tier - and you don't even get credit for campaigning on a simple idea.

There is a sort of myopia among Democratic Party legislators that grasps for half measures when a full measure is better policy that has more of a political upside.

Like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.