>Instead, he proposed a “work bonus” plan that passed as the EITC in 1975, the first program to exclude the poorest Americans from government assistance by phasing in benefits alongside earned income.
EITC was not initially designed as welfare, rather it was "supposed to be a temporary refundable tax credit for lower-income workers to offset the Social Security payroll tax and rising food and energy prices."[0]
TFA misses the blindingly obvious "wrong way" of providing income to poverty-level residents, which is to implement it via the income tax system. This unfairly burdens the IRS with enforcement of rules that actually have little to do with income tax, and leads to such things as accusations of racist audits when in fact an EITC audit is a very different thing from, say, an audit of business income and expenses (an EITC audit usually has more to do with eligibility of, and who gets to claim, dependents).[1]
[1]It is true that some taxpayers try to cheat on self-employment (business) income to maximize their EITC (either by over-reporting or under-reporting net profit), but does not apply to wage earners.
And all that's not even going into things like the pandemic business loans that were handed out like fucking candy, many to businesses that barely even existed at the time, to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, most of which were entirely forgiven after the fact.
But that's not socialism of course, that's not "financing bad decisions" and those people definitely 100% used all that money in their businesses and not for frivolous and unnecessary luxuries, so that's fine.
The hypocrisy in all these issues is absolutely mind-boggling. If you're rich, getting free money from the Government is just business as usual. If you're not, it's the worst thing in human history and you deserve to die.
> And all that's not even going into things like the pandemic business loans that were handed out like fucking candy, many to businesses that barely even existed at the time, to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, most of which were entirely forgiven after the fact.
It was a terrible system with malaligned incentives, but it was the government's attempt to not violate 5A. Had those loans not been handed out like candy, the gov would have violated 5A. You cannot seize private property for public good without just compensation. As it stands, I think many folks should sue the federal and state governments for 5A violations, especially if they did not receive true just compensation for the shutdowns.
> It was a terrible system with malaligned incentives, but it was the government's attempt to not violate 5A.
Is there a source for this? This seems incredibly shaky, basically saying that because of public health mandates, the government had to "repay" businesses for lost business/the inability to conduct business, which is just... not the same thing. Lost business is at best a nebulous "I might've made X" proposition, it's not nearly the same thing to, for example, say that the Government confiscated your truck which was worth $12,000 and should pay you as such.
Like, I can see the logic but this seems like something that should be handled in court, not pre-empted by the feds this way.
Had the government done the proper thing of letting consumers decide for themselves if they wanted to keep going to bars or gyms, there would be no issue. Businesses would have lost customers naturally and folded due to a lack of revenue.
But that's not what happened in the US. In many states, the state government forbade service businesses from operating and actively revoked licenses and/or fined businesses that tried to operate. [1]
Why did they force businesses to close? To prevent covid transmission. That is definitionly done for the public good and is therefore subject to 5A. Here is the relevamt text from the ammendment:
"""
... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
"""
A quick ddg search isn't turning anything up for ppp and 5th ammendment, but it's obvious it applies.
> Had the government done the proper thing of letting consumers decide for themselves if they wanted to keep going to bars or gyms, there would be no issue.
Oh this is going to be one of those conversations. I see. No thank you.
Well for starters, it isn't A versus B through Z, it's more like A through H vs I through Z. And the problem is that even if I through Z do stay home, the infections, transmissions and re-infections between A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H all carry with them a minor chance of a mutation in the virus itself, which can make it more threatening to more people, or transmit more effectively, what have you.
Secondly, a whole lot of the downplaying of COVID as a whole and the opposition to masks/mandates/business stoppages was decidedly not rational and was in fact deeply rooted in conservative/libertarian culture war nonsense. If you wanted to go out, without a mask, and open yourself to that risk in full understanding of it, fair enough. The thing is with the amount of disinformation it's extremely dubious how many people did that with that understanding. And, more to the point, that risk is simply not isolated to you, that actor: that risk is shared by you, your co-habitants, your neighbors if you live in an apartment or condominium, your coworkers if you worked in person, and anyone else you happened to be in contact with. And, due to the long incubation period before symptoms showed, it was entirely possible you could get infected and spend upwards of a week spreading it around before you even realized you needed to quarantine. So saying "I'm not concerned about covid" sounds fine on paper, but you're exposing numerous people through your decision to greater risk, and they should have a say in that too, don't you think?
And to be clear: I am not in the slightest opposed to giving businesses money to survive those weird circumstances, that makes complete fucking sense to me. The part that doesn't is that while business got hundreds of thousands of dollars, people got... what, $2,200? Over the course of a year and a half. Fucking peanuts by comparison.
> The part that doesn't is that while business got hundreds of thousands of dollars, people got... what, $2,200? Over the course of a year and a half. Fucking peanuts by comparison.
Yes, this is why I advocate for those impacted by the shelter in place orders to sue the federal government for 5A violations. Though to be fair there was extended unemployment benefits, so those would have to be considered in each person's assessment of harm.
> Well for starters,...
I don't necessarily disagree with your opinion regarding general transmission (though unless the entirety of the world self isolated for 14 days we were guaranteed to hit endemic status). But when the government shuts things down for that line of thinking, it is doing so for the good of the public's health. And we have 5A which says they owe people money. A lot of money!
Apart from considering folk rational, even when they fall for misimformation, I also acknowledge that the federal government had nowhere near enough funds to compensate everyone for sheltering in place, and therefore believe it is preferable to allow folks to make their own rosk assessments, despite knowing this outcome would lead to more loss of life.
*Also, another tidbit is that banks were compensated for lending ppp loans by a percent of the total loan's value, so bigger corporations were more likely to get a ppp loan because the bank received more money for the same amount of work. Corrupt incentives by design.
> Yes, this is why I advocate for those impacted by the shelter in place orders to sue the federal government for 5A violations.
Expecting common workers to SUE THE GOVERNMENT for lost wages is patently fucking absurd.
> I don't necessarily disagree with your opinion regarding general transmission (though unless the entirety of the world self isolated for 14 days we were guaranteed to hit endemic status). But when the government shuts things down for that line of thinking, it is doing so for the good of the public's health. And we have 5A which says they owe people money. A lot of money!
Again, this is conflating "confiscated private property" with "prevented potential revenue from being prohibited from conducting business." Even in the most charitable terms these are not the same thing for good reason.
Add to it, where does this stop? If the city shuts you down for health code violations, is that also pursuant under the fifth? If a crime is committed near your business and the police have to shut down the road, is that also? If the government fails to act on climate change and your business is flooded out in the rising oceans, how about that?
And for how long? If it's the first example that could be however long until they can inspect your remodeled/cleaned premises. If it's the second, it could be anywhere from an hour to several weeks depending what happened. If it's the second one, it might be for eternity. Are we calculating lost business revenue to your likely age of retirement then?
This whole thing is a bottomless pit of litigation and legal gray areas.
> Apart from considering folk rational, even when they fall for misimformation, I also acknowledge that the federal government had nowhere near enough funds to compensate everyone for sheltering in place,
Do you have evidence for that? Because we pumped about three trillion additional into the economy and nothing seems to have really happened.
> and therefore believe it is preferable to allow folks to make their own rosk assessments, despite knowing this outcome would lead to more loss of life.
Yeah I don't believe that at all. We curb individual liberty literally all of the time, in all sorts of ways, at all times and at a variety of scales because everyone having their own perfect bubble of autonomy leads to an utterly unmanageable society at scale. You don't have the freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater, you don't have the freedom to drive on the left side of the road, you don't have the freedom to build a 200 story skyscraper on your suburban lot, etc. etc. etc.
This hyper individualistic libertarian fantasy is just that: a fantasy.
> Again, this is conflating "confiscated private property" with "prevented potential revenue from being prohibited from conducting business." Even in the most charitable terms these are not the same thing for good reason.
I disagree. The gov forced businesses to shut down (1). That is not the same as preventing potential revenue (2).
(1) requires just compensation. (2) doesn't.
> If the city shuts you down for health code violations, is that also pursuant under the fifth?
If the code is in place prior to your business' operation, then no. If a new law forces a new code that renders an existing contract of yours void, I would see a case for compensation as the gov passed the law for the benefit of the public.
> If a crime is committed near your business and the police have to shut down the road, is that also?
This is an example of (2) above. The gov isn't forcing your business shut. A policy has prevented customers from reaching you, but your business is still free to operate.
> If the government fails to act on climate change and your business is flooded out in the rising oceans, how about that?
No private property was seized. No compensation owed.
> Do you have evidence for that? Because we pumped about three trillion additional into the economy and nothing seems to have really happened.
Quite literally we're in record inflation times. Some of that is due to supply side constraints, but a whole bunch of it was due to the three trillion pumped into the economy to prevent an economic contraction.
> You don't have the freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater
You do. See Brandenburg v. Ohio.
> We curb individual liberty literally all of the time, in all sorts of ways, at all times and at a variety of scales because everyone having their own perfect bubble of autonomy leads to an utterly unmanageable society at scale.
We have laws in place to restrict freedoms. We cannot ignore these same laws when they prescribe a remedy for seizure of non state property by the state.
> EITC was not initially designed as welfare, rather it was "supposed to be a temporary refundable tax credit for lower-income workers to offset the Social Security payroll tax and rising food and energy prices."[0]
Hah, that makes a lot of sense. The Social Security tax is suffocating for self-employed people at the bottom of the economic dogpile. 12.4% of your already-spent income is an impossible bill for low-income people to pay.
I, of course, diligently tracked my income and paid all taxes due. But... if your income is 'off the books', it's easier to just not pay Uncle Sam than to put a target on your back by filing possibly-indefensible returns.
> Then, to the dismay of advocates and recipients alike, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blocked the Democratic Party’s effort to make the expansion permanent, fearing, among other familiar concerns like the cost, that recipients would just buy drugs (the data shows that recipients spent the money on food, clothes, utilities, rent, and education).
This just in: when you give people who chronically lack resources some resources, they by and large use them to better their circumstances.
In other news, rain is wet and the sun will still be shining tomorrow.
So much of this is so clearly and evidentially and objectively based on the sheer, raging, burning hatred this country has for poor people. We will let a hundred struggling families starve if it means preventing one lazy bastard from getting food he didn't "earn."
Until we are ready to reckon with this pathological hatred of people who simply have less than us, we will never move forward as a society. The war on Poverty has nothing to do with fucking poverty, it is a war on poor people and it's the only one we've won lately.
Yep, this boomer and silent gerontocracy is why we ended up with the biggest wealth transfer FROM younger generations to them.
It's also how we got DARE garbage, of bandying around drugs to 6th graders and saying "doooont useeee theseeee", combined with lies like 'smoking a marijuanas will lead to your death!". (Massive kudos to Erowid, for debunking so much of these lies.)
But it's unsurprising the biggest gerontocratic welfare program has old fucks with antiquated and completely garbage views of humans.
The most egregious thing the Boomers did is they watered down the anti-monopoly laws. That was Bill Clinton's regime. I could be wrong on that, maybe it was Ronald Reagan's regime. Either way it was the Boomers.
The enemy of the success of Capitalism is monopolies.
> The most egregious thing the Boomers did is they watered down the anti-monopoly laws. That was Bill Clinton's regime. I could be wrong on that, maybe it was Ronald Reagan's regime. Either way it was the Boomers.
Ronald Reagan was born in 1911, 35 years earlier than Bill Clinton, and turned 70 years old right after he took office in 1981.
I meant it was the Boomers who voted him in. I suppose I should've made that more obvious as many readers where quite young at the time of Reagan or weren't even born then at all.
And to be clear I was referring to Boomers voted for Clinton. My bad.
In the 1980 Presidential election, won by Reagan with 51% of the vote, the oldest Boomers were 34 years old, the youngest 16, and thus not even eligible to vote.
According to the linked document, Carter slightly won voters under 30, whereas Reagan won voters 30+ with 55%. It's unclear how exactly 30-44 broke down, but in any case the total of that whole group was only 31% of the voters, and the oldest Boomers were 34. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1980
> And to be clear I was referring to Boomers voted for Clinton.
But you admitted that you don't even know whether Reagan or Clinton watered down anti-monopoly laws.
I know that Clinton watered down the anti-monopoly laws but wasn't sure if Reagan had watered down them considerably more than Clinton.
Why the confrontational tone? If you think I'm wrong couldn't you have stated so in a more gracious tone? Does all discourse on the internet where you don't like what the person is saying have to be hostile sounding in tone?
Your own original comment was confrontational and hostile: "The most egregious thing the Boomers did", "Either way it was the Boomers."
It's not even a question of what the Reagan and/or Clinton administrations did. The problem with your comment was the absurdity of throwing around the "Boomers" stereotype.
I think it's silly to blame everything on Boomers, a totally arbitrary slice of the population, who are in fact as demographically and politically diverse as any other age group. Moreover, it has now become commonplace for younger people to call everyone who is older them a "Boomer", regardless of whether that term is accurate, in a kind of willful ignorance.
No, not all Boomers are the same, and no, they don't control the world.
You're right, I was cavalier in my treatment of Boomers in my comment. I accept your criticism in that regard. Not all Boomers deserve blame. However, there was an embrace of laissez-faire economic philosophy that coincided with their "assuming the mantle". Many of them bought into Milton Friedman (Chicago school) economics and have refused to acknowledge what a massive mistake it was.
> However, there was an embrace of laissez-faire economic philosophy that coincided with their "assuming the mantle".
I dispute that Boomers ever assumed the mantle, as it were. They're a subset of the population. No generation has the mantle. Like I said, Boomers don't control the world.
Bill Clinton was the first Boomer President, so you might argue that they assumed the mantle then, but 1993 does not coincide with the embrace of laissez-faire economic philosophy. This occurred much earlier.
> Many of them bought into Milton Friedman (Chicago school) economics
Milton Friedman was born in 1912, a year after Reagan, and was an advisor to Reagan and to Margaret Thatcher, so I think it's quite a stretch to attribute this to Boomers. Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" was published in 1962, when the youngest Boomers weren't even born yet.
I wasn't intimating that Friedman was a boomer. I was getting at that Milton Friedman's Economic Philosophy was fully embraced by the Boomers. And Reagan and Thatcher were fully endorsed by the Boomer generation.
Boomers are the first generation in American History to hand their successive generations a lower standard of living.
And under Bill Clinton the Boomers certainly did assume the mantle. They certainly were in control in all facets of society. Also, Boomers revitalized Ayn Randism. She was dormant, a forgotten relic until they began to embrace her philosophy.
Sorry to disagree, but I don't think it is hatred and it is not a war.
I think it is indifference mixed with selfishness and a collection of many little or perhaps not so little power grabs. One example might be that poor people can't rent a flat somewhere they can have a good life, because everybody else is already there and this is expressed in a rent poor people can't afford.
Another little power grab: Call a taxi when it is raining heavily, and you beckon strongly and the taxi is stopping for you and not for the handicapped woman because the taxi driver saw you first. When you are already sitting you suddenly see the woman outside and you realize that she needs the taxi more than you. It is sort of an effort to get out and tell the taxi driver that she was first. It is easier for you to just drive away.
It is war if people expressly try to hurt poor people. But I just don't think that the majority of well-off people are this evil. They are mostly indifferent, selfish and enjoy the benefits of the power grabs they do.
This said, I agree with you that many people in the USA are strongly indifferent and selfish and they justify this with saying that they live in a meritocracy and that everybody had the same chance to be successful, and if a poor person is not successful it's their own fault. But that's not hatred nor a war.
The reason is seems fair to refer to it somewhat metaphorically as a war is this: you don't have to go back far in US (or human) history to find a time when the existence of poverty was view as a failure of the system. That is, poor people begging in the streets reflected on the economic and social systems, and reflected badly.
Somehow, as the US became rich enough and successful enough to end all of that, we switched the narrative. Today, poverty is a personal failure, the result of bad decision making, lax moral standards, lack of sufficient entrepeneurial spirit etc.
We've switched from "fighting poverty" to "fighting poor people who are fucking things up for the rest of us".
As with most things, we can blame Reagan and the political movement that shaped him. The aggression against people who need help has direct roots to Reagan's (in)famous welfare queen talking points, that were mirrored overseas with Thatcher and her ilk. This myth of these (not stated but implied to be) black women who were having all these children and cashing government checks to live a luxurious lifestyle. And like, yes, if you zoom out to the entire country, welfare fraud is a thing that occurs but the rate of it's occurrence is absurdly low, and moreover, the ones that do occur are far from living high on the hog off the public dole. There is NO evidence for any of that shit but it was all the conservatives banged on for for literal decades as they slashed the social safety nets to tatters and added more and more disgusting means testing and restrictions to what little benefits were left.
Right, this was sort of the point I made in another comment here.
I know that a solid safety net will result in some freeloading. But when I trade off the negatives of the limited freeloading that I believe will occur against the massive benefits of a population that is healthy, fed, housed, secure ... there's just no contest. If I have to pay a tiny bit extra because a few people are scamming the system, I frankly don't care, and I certainly don't advocate for the destruction of the entire system because of it.
In the USA (and UK) if you are poor you are considered a LOSER! Society in these two cultures is all about Winners and LOSERS. If you are not rich you are a LOSER. A LOSER is a pariah. Everybody loves Winners and hates Losers. If the game is rigged, then you lost because you didn't figure out how to manipulate it for your benefit. That makes you a loser.
This belief or philosophy or religion is also known as "Survival of the Fittest". Its a cult.
Should be 'If you are not trying to become rich you are a LOSER.' Not being rich only makes you a small l loser, which as we all know is what happens to a Winner who cannot support all of the deadweight of LOSERS cling to them and definitely not in no part due to the actions of the rich winners.
The belief in religion is called prosperity theology. I'm not sure this describes any philosophical definition of "survival of the fittest", as systemic issues rig "survival" towards people who already have the most resources, regardless of their fitness. This isn't a meritocracy.
I was looking at it as Survival of the fittest implying Winners and Losers. You are right that "prosperity theology" is essentially Evangelical Christianity in the USA.
This is the thing that bothers me about this conversation more than anything. It's like giving pain killers to someone who has pain—in some cases that may be the only real solution but arguably the vast, VAST majority of the time, there is a basic desire to do the same thing repeatedly hoping for a different outcome.
Giving money to people who aren't willing to change only perpetuates the problem. It's enabling them. Many people who were "formerly poor" will repeat the saying ad nauseam: poverty is a mindset. You can't "fix" poverty with money because money won't change their mind or their hearts.
IME, only small embedded organizations are good at helping folks out of this cycle. Because they are small, they know the area, they know the people, they know the cycle and they actually help people get out of that cycle.
But as we've seen time and again, those people are wrong. Giving people money helps, period. So either these people are simply ignoring facts, or they are not participating in good faith.
Political progress can be made only through meeting in the middle and negotiation, not by finger-pointing and accusing the opposition of being wrong. There's a reason millions of reasonable adults disagree with you (and who agree with you) - the truth is not clear-cut and complex and presents many seemingly contrary facts.
The attitude that poor people need "tough love" is extremely condescending, so yes, it's difficult to distinguish tough love from no love.
> many people simply don’t think welfare is going to actually help.
The article argues that this belief is not based on the empirical evidence.
I suspect that this belief is actually the result of a condescending attitude toward poor people rather than the cause of so-called "tough love" policies.
It seems to flow from the idea that “might makes right”, but you replace might with money.
If you make money you’re doing well. That idea can be extended to imply that being poor means you’ve done something wrong.
To me it echoes feudalist ideas like divine rule. The king deserved to be king, otherwise God would not have allowed him to be king. Therefore the king must be good.
In my opinion this way of thinking is formed by looking at existing hierarchies and retroactively defining morality based on those hierarchies. Which then leads to the idea that poor people must be poor because of something they did, how could the hierarchy exist otherwise?
This line of thinking also leads to the opinion that rich people do better, which does not consider that poor people might be doing the best they can under their circumstances, even if it is not the optimal strategy.
"Tough Love" would be some kind of "Three Strikes" type of deal where your UBI is cut off if you consistently fail to demonstrate some sort of basic function.
What you are alluding to is a "no love" stance (the standard conservative viewpoint). The idea that everyone should be able to "bootstrap" themselves out of poverty.
Yeah. It is a little too harsh. The point of my comment was that the standard conservative's stance of "No strikes and you deserve to starve" is more than a little too harsh.
So? Surely not all poor people have a "desire" to be poor (nobody wants to but I get the point of your post is maybe some people want to take actions that make them poor), and should we not help them? Furthermore, don't you think that the behaviours of the people who "want" to be poor are such because they can't afford nice things and turn to cheaper and more destructive forms of escapism, such as drugs?
You make it seem like we shouldn't give painkillers to people in pain because some people do stupid things that cause them pain. But the fact of the matter is that giving the money currently spent on poverty (because we do in fact spend a _lot_ of money on poverty) to the poor people directly is more efficient. They, again and again, make more out of a dollar than that dollar would have made if it were spent on, say, food banks. If the case for empathy doesn't work for you (and clearly it doesn't) then surely the case for efficiency of government spending should?
The poor are poor because they don't have money. If you give them money, they will no longer be poor, QED.
I say that somewhat jokingly, but I think it's basically true. AFAIK welfare/basic income studies have shown that giving people money directly tends to work really well for increasing their life quality long-term, even long after the payments end. I don't know on what basis you think the vast majority of poor people are poor because of a poverty mindset/being financially irresponsible.
The vast majority of the times people should use painkillers are for temporary injuries that will stop hurting in time. Helping people through this is good.
Likewise, for people who have chronic pain, if we have the capacity to help ease their pain, we should do that.
The question of what to do with the people who are enabled to avoid the work required to eliminate the source of their pain is a hard one, but I don't think that threatening people with starvation and homelessness is something we should aspire towards.
Poor people are overwhelmed by an endless list problems that are not a problem for us. A car breaking down or a kid getting a stomachache is a huge deal since they have no leeway at all, they cannot miss work days, they have to think carefully even about every little purchase, like groceries, etc. Their decision making becomes impaired. They are drowning in problems, and cannot see beyond the very short term.
Having a little help like the child tax credits allows them to get their head of the water and make better decisions for the medium and long term. (like improve their education, take better care of their kids, etc.)
Clearly the function of means checking is not to reduce costs as the process is expensive and the ROI compared to combatting tax fraud.
Clearly the function of means checking is not to restrict access to only those in need as it often creates hoops to jump through that can be impenetrable for those who need it the most.
So maybe the function of means checking is to do what it succeeds at doing, which is creating an "us" vs "them" distinction, to give even those scarcely outside the eligibility someone to look down on and accuse of fraud and being "welfare queens" and to maintain a negative attitude toward those in need while strengthening association with those on "your" side even if their financial situation is a thousand lifetimes removed from yours and poverty is only a bad month or health issue away.
Poverty means you consume more than you produce. I assume poverty here is money-poverty. Poverty is relative. The implicit question is how to distribute resources to individuals according to how much good they provide to society. Good is the meaning of life, reproduction/sustainability and creation/development/infinitePonzi, really complex to estimate. We have invented money as an abstract representation of resources (food, clothes, energy, services, attention).
My father and I fight about this a lot. His take is that if you give peiple money, they won't work, which will be bad. I understand his complaint, but the empirical evidence for it is that, when welfare was tied to having children, people apparently gamed the system by using less money on their kids than the welfare provided. This seems like it's probably most american's understanding of a welfare system, and my father is totally unwilling to consider that this problem of incentives can be remedied, though he is reasonably easy to convince of the value of giving employees negotiating power to quit their jobs and be able to survive.
For me this is where the entire argument lies. A basic income (that does not depend on children) asserts the right to subsist without a job. Employment can offer you a better life, but it should not be able to offer you life itself. An employer that wields that carrot also wields that stick, and can exploit the difference to incredible social harm.
> His take is that if you give peiple money, they won't work, which will be bad.
There are a lot of people with money (high net-worth) that work (have some position in a company that they could get fired from), e.g. Jeff Bezos, many if not all CEOs, etc.
So your father's take is either A) false, or B) what people with money are doing is not work, and is therefore bad.
>There are a lot of people with money (high net-worth) that work (have some position in a company that they could get fired from), e.g. Jeff Bezos, many if not all CEOs, etc.
The exception doesn't prove the rule. Just because some really driven people are willing to be a CEO when they have far more money than they could ever need, doesn't mean that the average burger flipper is going to continue working at mcdonalds if his living expenses were fully paid by the government.
> when they have far more money than they could ever need
There is a kind of brain rot that can set in on wealthy people that makes them see their net worth as their score. It's not about need or comfort. All that matters is hitting a higher score.
You linked to specifically to the Self-actualization section which, critically, includes this line: "To understand this level of need, a person must not only succeed in the previous needs but master them"
I would say it is more like a twisted perversion of the hierarchy of needs where all levels are broken down to a single abstraction: Net worth = Score
What makes you think all Bezos thinks "Net worth = Score"? What if he simply wants to build the best e-commerence/cloud conglomerate there is, and that happens to coincide with amazon share prices going up? After all, the better job he does at running amazon, the more investors will value it.
Maybe he doesn't. I have no way to know how he actually thinks. My point is that once a person becomes that wealthy, the practical value of a dollar becomes essentially meaningless to them. Its the idea that more wealth is automatically better. If they just make Amazon more profitable it will be better.
Couldn’t it be the case that it’s much harder for poor people to find employment they enjoy as much as CEOs enjoy theirs? Or that ultra-rich CEOs are able to reach that status in part because their work ethics is an extreme outlier?
Of course. The only reason people work is because the expected value of their work maximizes their utility curve when compared to the opportunity costs. I go to work because I need money to live. I find employment by maximizing the pay I'm able to get conditional om my skillset and preferred job functions.
But I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others.
> But I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others.
This is a good example of a "thought-terminating cliché"[0]. In this case, the statement assumes its own veracity, which makes it difficult to respond to in a discussion.
Ironically by invoking "thought-terminating cliché", you are partaking in the very offense you accuse the parent of. Is it fair to redistribute wealth from people who are working, to give it to people who don't? There's plausible arguments for both sides, but rather than trying to argue for why we should, you drop a link to some fallacy on wikipedia and call it a day.
> Is it fair to redistribute wealth from people who are working, to give it to people who don't?
I kinda think you missed the point. This is actually just another one of those clichés. Surely you can see how this sort of communication doesn't promote a healthy discussion. Is there an argument that you want to make or are you just going to demand that someone argue against your cliché?
>I kinda think you missed the point. This is actually just another one of those clichés. Surely you can see how this sort of communication doesn't promote a healthy discussion.
And sticking to calling out fallacies while failing to discuss the object level question is?
>Is there an argument that you want to make or are you just going to demand that someone argue against your cliché?
1. if you look carefully I'm not the person that you originally accused of using "thought-terminating cliché"
2. You really haven't really presented any arguments for the original argument was a "thought-terminating cliché". All you did was assert that was the case and posted a wikipedia link.
I am the original commentor. My intention was to form an assertion that could be disproved via a counterexample.
Let me try again:
Why should citizen A have to involuntarily transfer their private property gained through voluntary economic transactions to citizen B?
I'm not sure how you appease you other than to have simply not bothered with my comment; perhaps that would have been better. Still, seeing the mistake -- as I see it -- and ignoring it to move on to something else doesn't seem necessarily better.
> And sticking to calling out fallacies while failing to discuss the object level question is?
In this case, an honest attempt at raising general discussion quality, even if it happens to lower it in the immediacy.
> 1. if you look carefully I'm not the person that you originally accused of using "thought-terminating cliché"
Yes, but you did use such a cliché in your response which seemed to have demanded that I argue against said cliché ("... but rather than trying to argue for why we should, you drop a link to some fallacy on wikipedia and call it a day.")
> 2. You really haven't really presented any arguments for the original argument was a "thought-terminating cliché".
Indeed, and I am still not even sure specifically what point they intended to argue. I don't know what a coherent response would look like other than to point out why I can't seem to form a more coherent response.
--------------
Anyway, back to the initial statement.
> I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others.
It seems to be commonly decried that "people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should [not] be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others" and rarely asserted that "people with less fortunate life circumstances should be allowed the opportunity to take risks with their productive time rather than being forced into employment as soon as they reach adulthood".
Your point is that I could start with this explanation or otherwise include it in my initial comment -- which is fair enough! I suppose I might subscribe a bit too much to a "Socratic" method of teasing out another person's thoughts rather than supplying my own.
> and rarely asserted that "people with less fortunate life circumstances should be allowed the opportunity to take risks with their productive time rather than being forced into employment as soon as they reach adulthood".
I don't deny this assertion. I deny the method of achieving this outcome whereby private property is stolen/taxed involuntarily from others to achieve it.
People with worse initital conditions are absolutely free the opportunity to take risks with their productive time. I believe that the risk should be funded voluntarily by either charity or lrivate capital. Involuntary funding necessarily leads to less efficient economic outcomes.
For what it’s worth, I don’t mean to say that your comment specifically denies this idea. More lamenting the assumptions that are made.
> People with worse initital conditions are absolutely free the opportunity to take risks with their productive time.
I agree but the risk is much less for a person who can get by on an allowance from their parents or are afforded a place to stay rent-free; failure can be effectively punitive with life-long consequences without such a safety net.
> Involuntary funding necessarily leads to less efficient economic outcomes.
Why do you believe this? Not that I mean to deny it outright but I often see this claim and I cannot recall seeing strong evidence of it. From an epistemology perspective, I don’t see how people “know” this such that they feel comfortable stating it so brazenly.
> I agree but the risk is much less for a person who can get by on an allowance from their parents or are afforded a place to stay rent-free; failure can be effectively punitive with life-long consequences without such a safety net.
I don't disagree, but I also don't think the solution to this is to steal from those that started with better initial conditions.
> Why do you believe this? Not that I mean to deny it outright but I often see this claim and I cannot recall seeing strong evidence of it.
Basic economics. Money taxed from you and then allocated elsewhere means that you're worse off. This is acceptable to some degree: public goods. It is unacceptable when the gov does it to provide non public goods. In this case, UBI is a non public good. You would rather spend the money that is redistributed from you on anything else. In the event that your best use of the money was to give to people that needed UBI, you would do that voluntarily. So in all cases, those being taxed are no better than they were before, and in the worst case they are all worse off.
Example:
Let's say you have $100 and can live off $50. You really want to provide clean water to a community by charitably giving, and that would cost $40. The gov imposes a tax rate of 50%. Of the 50%, 10% goes to public goods, and 40% goes to teaching lions how to drive cars.
With the tax rate, you cannot afford to provide clean water and instead must fund lion drivers. Without the lion drivers included in the tax, you could easily afford to provide clean water.
Can we agree that shouldn't be the case? Or if we decide the state has a say in some capacity, you can give your children up if you don't want their burden?
Not sure how that was your takeaway from my comment. I was challenging the parent comment’s assertion that CEOs continuing to work after gaining riches implies that poor people would still seek out employment if they were given basic income.
> I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others
First, this is an extremely toxic attitude.
Second, do you really think that people living paycheck-to-paycheck in jobs that are just barely tolerable enough to keep them from quitting are "maximizing their utility curve when compared to the opportunity costs"? Much more likely is they are stuck at a low local maxima because they can't afford to spend 2 weeks looking for a job that would better fit their skillset and preferred job functions.
> Much more likely is they are stuck at a low local maxima because they can't afford to spend 2 weeks looking for a job that would better fit their skillset and preferred job functions.
Yes, that is quite possible, and I believe my comment covered that possibility by constraining their poaition against the opportunity cost. In this case, the opportunity cost of working is not searching for another job. But if you can't afford food while searching for another job, obviously you should work.
Hence! why I am a proponent of private charity. Under those same conditions, said person could go to their church, local org, etc. and see if anyone would be willing to assist them in a job search or while they did search. This solution is much preferable to me than involuntary theft of money from everyone to support a maybe chance of finding something else.
Not everything has to be under a chrurch. It was just the classic example.
Plus it's not the reorganization of the same systems. I propose a completely voluntary system. It is more economically efficient than thr state run system.
Yes, of course! A system of voluntary cooperation! We can work together as a community to decide how we use our resources in the most economically efficient way!
Obviously people are busy so we can't expect every single person to work directly on every single decision so probably the first thing we would need is a way to, lets say, "elect" specific individuals who can be entrusted to make decisions on everyone's behalf. Then those people can decide how much money we all contribute and how to spend that money in the most economically efficient way.
You are right, this is such a good idea! Why aren't we already doing it that way ... ?
Very cute, but there is actually a difference: the gov is only supposed to provide public goods. Voting either directly or through a representative still can lead to a scenario where the gov steals from some to give to others.
Here is a real-life example:
I live in the Portland metro. A couple of years ago, voters decided to vote to tax my income above a threshold to pay for preschool for people who have incomes below the threshold of taxation.
This does not lead to increased economic efficiency. Every year I now have to pay $x dollars directly to other people's children under the threat of state violence. I would much rather put that money in my child's 529. Or use it to pay for my child's daycare!
This isn't increased economic efficiency. It is literal theft.
> the gov is only supposed to provide public goods
This is simply not how it works. "The Government" is just what it's called when The People work together to solve shared problems.
Taxation is not theft just because you voted against it and lost.
I wouldn't pretend to have enough information to determine exactly how efficient Portland's redistribution of wealth through taxes and schools is, but basic logic tells us that several moderately well educated people should likely be more efficient overall than several uneducated people plus one exceptionally well educated person.
> but basic logic tells us that several moderately well educated people should likely be more efficient overall than several uneducated people plus one exceptionally well educated person.
I'm not arguing that having a greater number of educated people wouldn't be more productive. I'm arguing that redistributing wealth involuntarily is less efficient.
"""
Economic efficiency implies an economic state in which every resource is optimally allocated to serve each individual or entity in the best way while minimizing waste and inefficiency.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul necessarily leaves Peter worse off. The solution is not pareto optimal, and therefore cannot be a solution in a maximal efficiency.
Furthermore, in the daycare example, the solution necessarily creates deadweight loss. Robbing me to pay for someone else's daycare now increases daycare demand, which given a fixed supply, makes daycare more expensive for everyond, myself included. So not only am I paying for someone else's kids to go to daycare, but now I have to pay more for my kids to go to daycare to outcompete the demand they now present with their free money.
> Taxation is not theft just because you voted against it and lost.
If your city's population got together and voted to tax people who post on HN at 99% to fund banquets for children, would you similarly not consider that theft?
A community pooling money then using that money to buy things that the community needs is not "Robbing Peter to pay Paul". "Robbing Peter to pay Paul" means "shuffling debts around". That's not what is happening here.
> If your city's population got together and voted to tax people who post on HN at 99% to fund banquets for children, would you similarly not consider that theft?
This is why courts and judges exist. Obviously that would be an unreasonable tax under normal circumstances that no rational judge would uphold.
> But I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others.
Therefore inheritance should be illegal, because it potentially allows for the capability of spending stored productive capacity on a full life of leisure.
Couldn’t it be the case that a universal basic income that gives low-wage workers more choice would increase competition among their employers, resulting in low-wage work becoming more enticing?
Those who already do it and others who might consider this type of work. If they didn't depend so much on it, maybe (for example) employers, customers, etc would have to treat them with more respect.
Even if it isn't viable to increase the pay, the work could be made more pleasant if people took more persuading to take it.
The issue with this argument is that low wages are basically marginal. E.g. a low wage earner could get $100 dollars UBI or $200 dollars working a job. A CEO, on the other hand, could get $100 UBI or 11 million working a job. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely getting out of bed for the extra $10,999,900. I might not get out of bed for the extra $100, however.
This is an indication that there is some kind of either:
1) artificial suppression of the value of the low wage job
2) artificial inflation of the value of the CEO's job
or, more likely: 3) Both.
If I knew that I'd never be out on the streets no matter how bad things got, because I at least have the money to pay rent and buy food, there's no chance I'm working anything but BS jobs for random spending money. p=1, but still, I doubt I'm that unique.
My job is difficult and takes a lot of work to get the skills necessary to do it. Who's going to take over my job? Probably nobody, but that's just my (extremely uneducated) guess.
> If I knew that I'd never be out on the streets no matter how bad things got, because I at least have the money to pay rent and buy food, there's no chance I'm working anything but BS jobs for random spending money. p=1, but still, I doubt I'm that unique.
You can already do that.
Are you claiming that the only reason you have your current job is to avoid the remote possibility of being out on the streets?
>Are you claiming that the only reason you have your current job is to avoid the remote possibility of being out on the streets?
Being "out on the streets" because you don't have a job is hardly a "remote possibility". It's a virtual certainly unless you have a massive cash hoard built up.
> Being "out on the streets" because you don't have a job is hardly a "remote possibility". It's a virtual certainly unless you have a massive cash hoard built up.
Few people have a "massive cash hoard" built up, yet lots of people lose their jobs. And if you're willing to work "BS jobs for random spending money", as the OP said, then you probably won't remain unemployed for long.
I don't get it. Is your argument that because the homeless rate is 0.18% in the US, that if you had no income and drained your savings, that the probability of you ending up on the streets is minuscule? How do you think you'll acquire housing if you don't have any money?
>And if you're willing to work "BS jobs for random spending money", as the OP said
Are we reading the same comment? Here's his previous comment:
>there's no chance I'm working anything but BS jobs for random spending money
> I don't get it. Is your argument that because the homeless rate is 0.18% in the US, that if you had no income and drained your savings, that the probability of you ending up on the streets is minuscule? How do you think you'll acquire housing if you don't have any money?
>4) Thus, homelessness is not a virtual certainty if you lose your job.
>People almost always find a way to avoid homelessness, typically by finding a new job.
So you're basically agreeing with the original commenter? I read his comment as basically saying the only reason he works at his job is to keep a roof over his head, and that if you don't work you'll eventually be homeless. He's not claiming that getting fired means you're going to be homeless.
> So you're basically agreeing with the original commenter?
No.
> I read his comment as basically saying the only reason he works at his job is to keep a roof over his head
Yes, that's also my reading of the comment.
> if you don't work you'll eventually be homeless.
Likely, yes. But the question isn't work vs. no work. The question is working at the OP's so-called "difficult" job vs. working at less difficult jobs. That's why the issue of homelessness is mostly irrelevant.
My strong suspicion is that the OP works at a "difficult" job, which presumably pays a lot more than "BS jobs", because the OP actually aspires to a more luxurious standard of living than the bare minimum.
Given the OP's other comments, e.g., the OP's job "takes a lot of work to get the skills necessary to do it", and given the fact that this is Hacker News, I'm assuming that the OP is a relatively well-compensated member of the tech industry. When the OP says, "Who's going to take over my job? Probably nobody", as if a well-paying job in the tech industry is somehow the "price" of avoiding homelessness, I dispute that.
It's kind of like when engineers defend working on unethical projects "because I have to feed my family", despite the fact that the vast majority of people feed their families without 6-figure incomes and stock options.
You know how people have a weight their body likes to sit at? As you eat less, some processes will slow down to maintain that caloric intake level; as you eat more, they'll kick up. I'm basically claiming I'm like that. I'm only doing what's necessary to get my paycheck. Obviously I don't pick the laziest, lowest-income job that I can find. I wouldn't be able to quickly save for retirement that way.
But yes, I pick my jobs almost exclusively to support my not-working hours.
> Obviously I don't pick the laziest, lowest-income job that I can find.
How is that obvious when you literally said, "there's no chance I'm working anything but BS jobs for random spending money"?
> I wouldn't be able to quickly save for retirement that way.
This is precisely my point. You didn't choose your job simply to avoid homelessness; it has nothing to do with homelessness, as you now admit. You chose your job to maximize your income.
You need to find a better hobby. Going to meetings, filling out time cards, watching HR training videos, attending post-mortems with scrum masters who have no idea what a "point" is in agile, and having to wake up earlier than I want for work are absolutely not things I enjoy.
Obviously I'd still code, it'd just be random fun stuff, whenever I feel like contributing, until some other hobby demands my attention. Within the structure of employment, even fun work tasks can become tiresome.
My job doesn't really involve those annoyances. Obviously I have some meetings and things that aren't really super engaging. But I enjoy what I do, I like everyone I work with, and I have a good work-life balance.
As a UBI proponent, I will offer this in rebuttal. If you give labor additional negotiating power over capital, (the two coarsely defined players in this game) you will see shortages, and capital will lose a lot of value. This includes the middle class, who saved up peanuts and now have to pay people real money to do work. Those people will genuinely get screwed.
Hyperinflation is a real possibility, and UBI needs to be tuned pretty tightly to prevent it.
An employer that wields that carrot also wields that stick, and can exploit the difference to incredible social harm.
It is especially cruel that in the US, so many benefits are tied to employment. It means employers have this huge power over workers and also makes sure that it is almost impossible for some workers to invest the time and money in themselves required to gain the skills needed for better employment opportunities.
I'll admit it is arguable that there might be better ways to raise tax revenue than we currently are, but has anyone thought about maybe not entering the workforce because of income tax?
Not sure if this was the GPs point, but the US taxes wages (i.e., work) in addition to income, so every dollar spent on work gets more taken out of it than every other dollar.
Not entering the part-time, entrepreneurial workforce due to self-employment taxes is absolutely a thing because the bite taken out is quite large.
Wage taxes absolutely need to go, but they are tied to Social Security / Medicare, so the elite in both parties are unwilling to touch them, albeit for different reasons.
Yes. I DIY tons of stuff, instead of working more hours in my core competency, because the economics of hiring it out are all screwed up.
Sometimes it’s ludicrous, why the hell am I, a desk jockey, doing a brake job?
Why is it more cost effective to build a retaining wall myself, with basic tools, rather than working extra hours and paying someone that does it as a career? (Btw, that retaining wall is going to last 100years).
Income tax is a form of overhead. Not just changing the economics of “saving a dollar is like making 2 dollars”, but ups the price of things.
A corporation, mainly paying taxes on its profits, not all revenue, would never have this magnitude of dilemma between outsourcing vs in-house.
This is why I prefer shifts towards taxing destruction (like carbon taxes, stranded capital) instead of taxing production.
Better in material terms, but worse in other metrics. Full time employment means you barely have any time or energy for your life outside of work. I really doubt a lot of people would chose to be subjected to that, just to have a bigger house or to be able to go for expensive vacation. I'm guessing much more people would be willing to go part-time, but that is a not very efficient in many industries.
> His take is that if you give peiple money, they won't work, which will be bad.
Even if I were to concede his first point (which I'm about 50% willing to do - I accept that there are actually "lazy" people in the world who will lack any intrinsic motivation to do stuff), that doesn't mean that his implication - it will be bad - follows.
When considering social policy, it is almost always going to have some good effects and some bad effects. So what we need to ask is not "is it good or bad that some people will not work if we give people money?" but rather "does the good from giving out the money outweigh the bad?"
I think that the answer is unequivocally yes. Your dad might disagree, but he'd have to explain why the bad is bigger/worse than the good.
The money solves problems, if I'm interpreting the article correctly. We usually don't concern ourselves with accountability for other government spending (from corp tax breaks for R&D to FEMA shelters/tarps, and not forgetting the infinitely juicy supply contracts, big4 consulting fees).
Why do you feel that poverty-relief is different to these other types of government spending? Why should it be held to a higher standard? What are your values?
Right there is where you suggest that accountability MUST be 'ensured'. This is a very high accounting standard to set, much higher than normal for any federal programs that I'm aware of. I don't understand why you feel that a program that relieves a core ill of society (poverty) should waste no money. Anything that reduces poverty makes the rest of government services cheaper, as it so closely relates to crime. Is it that you don't trust the decision making of the individuals just because they're poor? If not, then what is it you expect?
> Children should not be poor, but how can you ensure accountability on the part of the parents?
What the TFA shows is that when you give parents money unconditionally they do overwhelmingly spend it on their children. Once that is understood, you must evaluate any system for measuring accountability against the cost of that very low rate of abuse.
If the means testing costs more than it saves and/or wrongly rejects too many people then whats the point of having it?
I'm not sure why you are ignoring what I'm saying. I assumed "enough money every month to fully cover basic food, basic shelter, and basic expenses" was very clear.
I can try to make it simpler for you.
"Every Month" means monthly. So, twelve times per year.
"Basic Food" means things like rice, bread, carrot, celery, onion, potato or raw meat. Obviously this can vary slightly per person but in general enough for a month will mean five to ten pounds of each of those, so called, "staple" foods.
"Basic Shelter" means walls and roof that contain a bed, bathroom, kitchen, and heating. In practice, this is just called "rent". Like with the food, what this specifically looks like in any given place will vary.
Finally, "Basic Expenses". This means things like clothes, phone & electric bills (though, it's not too unreasonable to consider electric as part of your 'shelter' as well), travel expenses (gas, train tickets, bus fare), simple repairs, batteries, light bulbs, etc.
I'm sorry this has been so confusing for you but it does get just a little bit more complicated. You see, the actual cost of these things may vary depending on what they are and where they are from. For example, in New Mexico we may consider cornmeal and green chili peppers to be necessary inclusions as staple foods. Air conditioning may also be considered a housing necessity. Compare this to, for example, Maine, where air conditioning may not be considered a necessity and cornmeal and green chili peppers would likely not be considered a staple food and other foods would be considered instead.
Everything that is wrong with the way most of the political class pretends to fight poverty can be traced back to one principle: Divide and Conquer
Solving a problem is a very stupid idea if:
- your wealth depends on not solving it
- people keep voting for you to solve it
Not to get too political, but this equally applies to politicans who have chosen "foreigners" as their issue. A former friend of mine who turned neo nazi once asked me in a discussion to give him one reason not to vote for $horrible_xenophobic_party. My reason was that they won't solve his problem with foreigners. The last time they had been in government the migration was higher than during the social democratic government before and after. If they would have solved it, they would have taken away the number one topic for which people keep voting them. They are interested in power, corruption and neoliberal economics, the foreigner schtick is just a vehicle to get there.
With poverty it is very similar. Many political parties take poverty as a decoy to explain why the policy they wanted to do anyways will solve it. E.g. cutting social security or ramping up police funding. Actual policies that help have to do with taxing the rich more, giving poor people the access to education and solving basic needs so they can actually make use of that access etc.
This is not directly related to your comment but the funny thing about the "trickle down" metaphor is that it actually makes a very strong case against Reaganomics. "Water", in the metaphor, is obviously money and as we all know water (for the most part) "trickles down" from places where there is less of it to places where there is more of it. The rich get richer. The poor stay poorer. Without regular and constant application of outside force in the form of regulation, taxation, redistribution of wealth, monopoly breakups, etc (in the metaphor, this is represented by the Sun) all wealth eventually pools in the few oceans and everywhere else is barren.
It's funny because the "trickle down" metaphor has been made up by a Democrat humorist [1]. On the same note, why would you think it was made up for Republicans?
I think there's some more important factors to add. Many of these problems are exceptionally complex and have no universal solution due to the chaotic nature (i.e. perturbations in initial conditions cause large variations). Often politicians are presenting simple solutions and the voters also are asking for simple solutions. So politicians consider what can be done within an election cycle and voters are not considering the effects of policy often have delayed onsets and the effects will not honestly be known for several election cycles. This is especially interesting to see as many people choose the president based on the current state of the economy. This is conditioned on several bad premises: 1) the president is the major driver of the economy, 2) policies have immediate effects (or at least short term onsets), 3) the economy is predominantly politically driven. These are all examples of short term thinking but there are more complex interactions at play as well. We haven't even talked about congress. Some of these things aren't even true under dictatorships. I'm not sure why we frame them this way but I think it is a destructive feedback loop.
Do economists share any culpability here? I thought their job was to apply their sharp minds and apply "systems" to achieve certain goals (not limited to addressing poverty). What if we compare it to other sciences?
Say we didn't understand flight as well as we do, and we have this problem where planes keep crashing, maybe 2-3 a year (like it was in the 1980s-1990s) and instead of getting to the bottom of it and fixing the underlying problem, aerospace engineers and expert pilots just shrugged their shoulders, "whelp, that sucks.." and kept up the status quo?
What if in the late '70s this new virus started spreading among gay men, and doctors just shrugged and said "well we can treat the symptoms and make our best guess how to avoid it, but damned if I know what's going on..."? How long would we keep awarding academic medals, increasing professors' salaries (and of course tuition), and lauding these doctors as heroes if they never advanced the state of their art?
Why are economists shielded from a similar failure in their chosen profession?
So there's a theory/program that will end poverty (because the brilliant minds in economics thought of/simulated/tested it?) but politicians won't allow it to be implemented? I'm not implying anything with that question, please answer directly.
People often get this wrong. The goal of economics is not to fix economic systems, any more than the goal of psychology is to make the human mind perfect, or the goal of political science is to guarantee that your candidate wins every election.
What these all have in common is they are merely descriptive sciences, not engineered solutions to specific problems. Understanding how something works currently, is not the same as having the tools to make it work better.
To use a similar example to the one you gave - the common cold is one of the most common and well-studied illnesses known to man, but there is no vaccine for it. Lazy scientists? No, it's just that not every problem has an easy solution.
>What if in the late '70s this new virus started spreading among gay men, and doctors just shrugged and said "well we can treat the symptoms and make our best guess how to avoid it, but damned if I know what's going on..."? How long would we keep awarding academic medals, increasing professors' salaries (and of course tuition), and lauding these doctors as heroes if they never advanced the state of their art?
I mean, we still can't cure aids, nor can we cure cancer, and we still haven't figured out how to stop aging. If you cherry pick the right examples you can make any field seem like bunk.
I would say you're cherry picking. HIV went from death sentence to a nuisance. So again, I ask, why haven't economists made similar progress? I guess they just like winning medals and appearing elite, without actually contributing anything?
Well for one, in medicine you can run randomized trials across thousands or even millions of patients. The public don't want their economies turned into guinea pigs for economics experiments, so they have to stick with natural experiments, which greatly limits progress. A better comparison would be the public health response to covid-19. Even today we don't really know whether lockdowns were worth it or not.
>I guess they just like winning medals and appearing elite, without actually contributing anything?
The EIC doesn't exist because of some Randian ethos at the heart of American politics, and I believe most Democrats and some Republicans are in favor of reform, but you actually have to pass a law to get reform, and unfortunately that has resulted for the last 20+ years in a complete breakdown of our system.
I see our social safety net abused on a daily basis on my role, and I also am keenly aware that both parties use it as a campaigning tool, because single moms in the city working two jobs either receive too much, or too little government support, depending on who is campaigning for what.
We really need to start making goal-focused policy decisions in the US, especially when it comes to social support and education. When I read about the justification for the strong social safety net in many parts of Europe, it doesn't sound like a socialist hellscape to me, it sounds like common sense.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadEITC was not initially designed as welfare, rather it was "supposed to be a temporary refundable tax credit for lower-income workers to offset the Social Security payroll tax and rising food and energy prices."[0]
TFA misses the blindingly obvious "wrong way" of providing income to poverty-level residents, which is to implement it via the income tax system. This unfairly burdens the IRS with enforcement of rules that actually have little to do with income tax, and leads to such things as accusations of racist audits when in fact an EITC audit is a very different thing from, say, an audit of business income and expenses (an EITC audit usually has more to do with eligibility of, and who gets to claim, dependents).[1]
[0]https://www.epi.org/publication/ib370-earned-income-tax-cred...
[1]It is true that some taxpayers try to cheat on self-employment (business) income to maximize their EITC (either by over-reporting or under-reporting net profit), but does not apply to wage earners.
But that's not socialism of course, that's not "financing bad decisions" and those people definitely 100% used all that money in their businesses and not for frivolous and unnecessary luxuries, so that's fine.
The hypocrisy in all these issues is absolutely mind-boggling. If you're rich, getting free money from the Government is just business as usual. If you're not, it's the worst thing in human history and you deserve to die.
It was a terrible system with malaligned incentives, but it was the government's attempt to not violate 5A. Had those loans not been handed out like candy, the gov would have violated 5A. You cannot seize private property for public good without just compensation. As it stands, I think many folks should sue the federal and state governments for 5A violations, especially if they did not receive true just compensation for the shutdowns.
Is there a source for this? This seems incredibly shaky, basically saying that because of public health mandates, the government had to "repay" businesses for lost business/the inability to conduct business, which is just... not the same thing. Lost business is at best a nebulous "I might've made X" proposition, it's not nearly the same thing to, for example, say that the Government confiscated your truck which was worth $12,000 and should pay you as such.
Like, I can see the logic but this seems like something that should be handled in court, not pre-empted by the feds this way.
But that's not what happened in the US. In many states, the state government forbade service businesses from operating and actively revoked licenses and/or fined businesses that tried to operate. [1]
Why did they force businesses to close? To prevent covid transmission. That is definitionly done for the public good and is therefore subject to 5A. Here is the relevamt text from the ammendment: """ ... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. """
A quick ddg search isn't turning anything up for ppp and 5th ammendment, but it's obvious it applies.
[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2023/03/nj-gym-owners-who-defied-mur...
Oh this is going to be one of those conversations. I see. No thank you.
Person A decides they have a low mortality risk from catchimg covid. They go to the gym.
Persons B, C,..., Z all decide their riak of mortality from covid os too high, and they don't go to the gym.
The gym cannot stay open unless at least 2 people subscribe. Therefore the business shuts down.
How is this unreasonable?
Secondly, a whole lot of the downplaying of COVID as a whole and the opposition to masks/mandates/business stoppages was decidedly not rational and was in fact deeply rooted in conservative/libertarian culture war nonsense. If you wanted to go out, without a mask, and open yourself to that risk in full understanding of it, fair enough. The thing is with the amount of disinformation it's extremely dubious how many people did that with that understanding. And, more to the point, that risk is simply not isolated to you, that actor: that risk is shared by you, your co-habitants, your neighbors if you live in an apartment or condominium, your coworkers if you worked in person, and anyone else you happened to be in contact with. And, due to the long incubation period before symptoms showed, it was entirely possible you could get infected and spend upwards of a week spreading it around before you even realized you needed to quarantine. So saying "I'm not concerned about covid" sounds fine on paper, but you're exposing numerous people through your decision to greater risk, and they should have a say in that too, don't you think?
And to be clear: I am not in the slightest opposed to giving businesses money to survive those weird circumstances, that makes complete fucking sense to me. The part that doesn't is that while business got hundreds of thousands of dollars, people got... what, $2,200? Over the course of a year and a half. Fucking peanuts by comparison.
Yes, this is why I advocate for those impacted by the shelter in place orders to sue the federal government for 5A violations. Though to be fair there was extended unemployment benefits, so those would have to be considered in each person's assessment of harm.
> Well for starters,...
I don't necessarily disagree with your opinion regarding general transmission (though unless the entirety of the world self isolated for 14 days we were guaranteed to hit endemic status). But when the government shuts things down for that line of thinking, it is doing so for the good of the public's health. And we have 5A which says they owe people money. A lot of money!
Apart from considering folk rational, even when they fall for misimformation, I also acknowledge that the federal government had nowhere near enough funds to compensate everyone for sheltering in place, and therefore believe it is preferable to allow folks to make their own rosk assessments, despite knowing this outcome would lead to more loss of life.
*Also, another tidbit is that banks were compensated for lending ppp loans by a percent of the total loan's value, so bigger corporations were more likely to get a ppp loan because the bank received more money for the same amount of work. Corrupt incentives by design.
Expecting common workers to SUE THE GOVERNMENT for lost wages is patently fucking absurd.
> I don't necessarily disagree with your opinion regarding general transmission (though unless the entirety of the world self isolated for 14 days we were guaranteed to hit endemic status). But when the government shuts things down for that line of thinking, it is doing so for the good of the public's health. And we have 5A which says they owe people money. A lot of money!
Again, this is conflating "confiscated private property" with "prevented potential revenue from being prohibited from conducting business." Even in the most charitable terms these are not the same thing for good reason.
Add to it, where does this stop? If the city shuts you down for health code violations, is that also pursuant under the fifth? If a crime is committed near your business and the police have to shut down the road, is that also? If the government fails to act on climate change and your business is flooded out in the rising oceans, how about that?
And for how long? If it's the first example that could be however long until they can inspect your remodeled/cleaned premises. If it's the second, it could be anywhere from an hour to several weeks depending what happened. If it's the second one, it might be for eternity. Are we calculating lost business revenue to your likely age of retirement then?
This whole thing is a bottomless pit of litigation and legal gray areas.
> Apart from considering folk rational, even when they fall for misimformation, I also acknowledge that the federal government had nowhere near enough funds to compensate everyone for sheltering in place,
Do you have evidence for that? Because we pumped about three trillion additional into the economy and nothing seems to have really happened.
> and therefore believe it is preferable to allow folks to make their own rosk assessments, despite knowing this outcome would lead to more loss of life.
Yeah I don't believe that at all. We curb individual liberty literally all of the time, in all sorts of ways, at all times and at a variety of scales because everyone having their own perfect bubble of autonomy leads to an utterly unmanageable society at scale. You don't have the freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater, you don't have the freedom to drive on the left side of the road, you don't have the freedom to build a 200 story skyscraper on your suburban lot, etc. etc. etc.
This hyper individualistic libertarian fantasy is just that: a fantasy.
I disagree. The gov forced businesses to shut down (1). That is not the same as preventing potential revenue (2).
(1) requires just compensation. (2) doesn't.
> If the city shuts you down for health code violations, is that also pursuant under the fifth?
If the code is in place prior to your business' operation, then no. If a new law forces a new code that renders an existing contract of yours void, I would see a case for compensation as the gov passed the law for the benefit of the public.
> If a crime is committed near your business and the police have to shut down the road, is that also?
This is an example of (2) above. The gov isn't forcing your business shut. A policy has prevented customers from reaching you, but your business is still free to operate.
> If the government fails to act on climate change and your business is flooded out in the rising oceans, how about that?
No private property was seized. No compensation owed.
> Do you have evidence for that? Because we pumped about three trillion additional into the economy and nothing seems to have really happened.
Quite literally we're in record inflation times. Some of that is due to supply side constraints, but a whole bunch of it was due to the three trillion pumped into the economy to prevent an economic contraction.
> You don't have the freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater
You do. See Brandenburg v. Ohio.
> We curb individual liberty literally all of the time, in all sorts of ways, at all times and at a variety of scales because everyone having their own perfect bubble of autonomy leads to an utterly unmanageable society at scale.
We have laws in place to restrict freedoms. We cannot ignore these same laws when they prescribe a remedy for seizure of non state property by the state.
Hah, that makes a lot of sense. The Social Security tax is suffocating for self-employed people at the bottom of the economic dogpile. 12.4% of your already-spent income is an impossible bill for low-income people to pay.
I, of course, diligently tracked my income and paid all taxes due. But... if your income is 'off the books', it's easier to just not pay Uncle Sam than to put a target on your back by filing possibly-indefensible returns.
This just in: when you give people who chronically lack resources some resources, they by and large use them to better their circumstances.
In other news, rain is wet and the sun will still be shining tomorrow.
So much of this is so clearly and evidentially and objectively based on the sheer, raging, burning hatred this country has for poor people. We will let a hundred struggling families starve if it means preventing one lazy bastard from getting food he didn't "earn."
Until we are ready to reckon with this pathological hatred of people who simply have less than us, we will never move forward as a society. The war on Poverty has nothing to do with fucking poverty, it is a war on poor people and it's the only one we've won lately.
It's also how we got DARE garbage, of bandying around drugs to 6th graders and saying "doooont useeee theseeee", combined with lies like 'smoking a marijuanas will lead to your death!". (Massive kudos to Erowid, for debunking so much of these lies.)
But it's unsurprising the biggest gerontocratic welfare program has old fucks with antiquated and completely garbage views of humans.
The enemy of the success of Capitalism is monopolies.
Ronald Reagan was born in 1911, 35 years earlier than Bill Clinton, and turned 70 years old right after he took office in 1981.
And to be clear I was referring to Boomers voted for Clinton. My bad.
In the 1980 Presidential election, won by Reagan with 51% of the vote, the oldest Boomers were 34 years old, the youngest 16, and thus not even eligible to vote.
According to the linked document, Carter slightly won voters under 30, whereas Reagan won voters 30+ with 55%. It's unclear how exactly 30-44 broke down, but in any case the total of that whole group was only 31% of the voters, and the oldest Boomers were 34. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1980
> And to be clear I was referring to Boomers voted for Clinton.
But you admitted that you don't even know whether Reagan or Clinton watered down anti-monopoly laws.
Why the confrontational tone? If you think I'm wrong couldn't you have stated so in a more gracious tone? Does all discourse on the internet where you don't like what the person is saying have to be hostile sounding in tone?
Your own original comment was confrontational and hostile: "The most egregious thing the Boomers did", "Either way it was the Boomers."
It's not even a question of what the Reagan and/or Clinton administrations did. The problem with your comment was the absurdity of throwing around the "Boomers" stereotype.
I think it's silly to blame everything on Boomers, a totally arbitrary slice of the population, who are in fact as demographically and politically diverse as any other age group. Moreover, it has now become commonplace for younger people to call everyone who is older them a "Boomer", regardless of whether that term is accurate, in a kind of willful ignorance.
No, not all Boomers are the same, and no, they don't control the world.
I dispute that Boomers ever assumed the mantle, as it were. They're a subset of the population. No generation has the mantle. Like I said, Boomers don't control the world.
Bill Clinton was the first Boomer President, so you might argue that they assumed the mantle then, but 1993 does not coincide with the embrace of laissez-faire economic philosophy. This occurred much earlier.
> Many of them bought into Milton Friedman (Chicago school) economics
Milton Friedman was born in 1912, a year after Reagan, and was an advisor to Reagan and to Margaret Thatcher, so I think it's quite a stretch to attribute this to Boomers. Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" was published in 1962, when the youngest Boomers weren't even born yet.
Boomers are the first generation in American History to hand their successive generations a lower standard of living.
And under Bill Clinton the Boomers certainly did assume the mantle. They certainly were in control in all facets of society. Also, Boomers revitalized Ayn Randism. She was dormant, a forgotten relic until they began to embrace her philosophy.
I think it is indifference mixed with selfishness and a collection of many little or perhaps not so little power grabs. One example might be that poor people can't rent a flat somewhere they can have a good life, because everybody else is already there and this is expressed in a rent poor people can't afford.
Another little power grab: Call a taxi when it is raining heavily, and you beckon strongly and the taxi is stopping for you and not for the handicapped woman because the taxi driver saw you first. When you are already sitting you suddenly see the woman outside and you realize that she needs the taxi more than you. It is sort of an effort to get out and tell the taxi driver that she was first. It is easier for you to just drive away.
It is war if people expressly try to hurt poor people. But I just don't think that the majority of well-off people are this evil. They are mostly indifferent, selfish and enjoy the benefits of the power grabs they do.
This said, I agree with you that many people in the USA are strongly indifferent and selfish and they justify this with saying that they live in a meritocracy and that everybody had the same chance to be successful, and if a poor person is not successful it's their own fault. But that's not hatred nor a war.
Somehow, as the US became rich enough and successful enough to end all of that, we switched the narrative. Today, poverty is a personal failure, the result of bad decision making, lax moral standards, lack of sufficient entrepeneurial spirit etc.
We've switched from "fighting poverty" to "fighting poor people who are fucking things up for the rest of us".
I know that a solid safety net will result in some freeloading. But when I trade off the negatives of the limited freeloading that I believe will occur against the massive benefits of a population that is healthy, fed, housed, secure ... there's just no contest. If I have to pay a tiny bit extra because a few people are scamming the system, I frankly don't care, and I certainly don't advocate for the destruction of the entire system because of it.
This belief or philosophy or religion is also known as "Survival of the Fittest". Its a cult.
Should be 'If you are not trying to become rich you are a LOSER.' Not being rich only makes you a small l loser, which as we all know is what happens to a Winner who cannot support all of the deadweight of LOSERS cling to them and definitely not in no part due to the actions of the rich winners.
Which is a very expensive war, so it might be cheaper to give some of that money to the poor people, so they can spend it more effectively.
This is the thing that bothers me about this conversation more than anything. It's like giving pain killers to someone who has pain—in some cases that may be the only real solution but arguably the vast, VAST majority of the time, there is a basic desire to do the same thing repeatedly hoping for a different outcome.
Giving money to people who aren't willing to change only perpetuates the problem. It's enabling them. Many people who were "formerly poor" will repeat the saying ad nauseam: poverty is a mindset. You can't "fix" poverty with money because money won't change their mind or their hearts.
IME, only small embedded organizations are good at helping folks out of this cycle. Because they are small, they know the area, they know the people, they know the cycle and they actually help people get out of that cycle.
I'll give you a hint, look at wealth distribution graphs
Don’t confuse tough love with no love - many people simply don’t think welfare is going to actually help.
I, for one, don’t agree that “we’ve seen time and time again” that cash handouts help.
Political progress can be made only through meeting in the middle and negotiation, not by finger-pointing and accusing the opposition of being wrong. There's a reason millions of reasonable adults disagree with you (and who agree with you) - the truth is not clear-cut and complex and presents many seemingly contrary facts.
The attitude that poor people need "tough love" is extremely condescending, so yes, it's difficult to distinguish tough love from no love.
> many people simply don’t think welfare is going to actually help.
The article argues that this belief is not based on the empirical evidence.
I suspect that this belief is actually the result of a condescending attitude toward poor people rather than the cause of so-called "tough love" policies.
If you make money you’re doing well. That idea can be extended to imply that being poor means you’ve done something wrong.
To me it echoes feudalist ideas like divine rule. The king deserved to be king, otherwise God would not have allowed him to be king. Therefore the king must be good.
In my opinion this way of thinking is formed by looking at existing hierarchies and retroactively defining morality based on those hierarchies. Which then leads to the idea that poor people must be poor because of something they did, how could the hierarchy exist otherwise?
This line of thinking also leads to the opinion that rich people do better, which does not consider that poor people might be doing the best they can under their circumstances, even if it is not the optimal strategy.
What you are alluding to is a "no love" stance (the standard conservative viewpoint). The idea that everyone should be able to "bootstrap" themselves out of poverty.
You make it seem like we shouldn't give painkillers to people in pain because some people do stupid things that cause them pain. But the fact of the matter is that giving the money currently spent on poverty (because we do in fact spend a _lot_ of money on poverty) to the poor people directly is more efficient. They, again and again, make more out of a dollar than that dollar would have made if it were spent on, say, food banks. If the case for empathy doesn't work for you (and clearly it doesn't) then surely the case for efficiency of government spending should?
I say that somewhat jokingly, but I think it's basically true. AFAIK welfare/basic income studies have shown that giving people money directly tends to work really well for increasing their life quality long-term, even long after the payments end. I don't know on what basis you think the vast majority of poor people are poor because of a poverty mindset/being financially irresponsible.
Likewise, for people who have chronic pain, if we have the capacity to help ease their pain, we should do that.
The question of what to do with the people who are enabled to avoid the work required to eliminate the source of their pain is a hard one, but I don't think that threatening people with starvation and homelessness is something we should aspire towards.
Having a little help like the child tax credits allows them to get their head of the water and make better decisions for the medium and long term. (like improve their education, take better care of their kids, etc.)
Sounds like survivorship bias. How many chronically poor think that?
Clearly the function of means checking is not to restrict access to only those in need as it often creates hoops to jump through that can be impenetrable for those who need it the most.
So maybe the function of means checking is to do what it succeeds at doing, which is creating an "us" vs "them" distinction, to give even those scarcely outside the eligibility someone to look down on and accuse of fraud and being "welfare queens" and to maintain a negative attitude toward those in need while strengthening association with those on "your" side even if their financial situation is a thousand lifetimes removed from yours and poverty is only a bad month or health issue away.
For me this is where the entire argument lies. A basic income (that does not depend on children) asserts the right to subsist without a job. Employment can offer you a better life, but it should not be able to offer you life itself. An employer that wields that carrot also wields that stick, and can exploit the difference to incredible social harm.
There are a lot of people with money (high net-worth) that work (have some position in a company that they could get fired from), e.g. Jeff Bezos, many if not all CEOs, etc.
So your father's take is either A) false, or B) what people with money are doing is not work, and is therefore bad.
The exception doesn't prove the rule. Just because some really driven people are willing to be a CEO when they have far more money than they could ever need, doesn't mean that the average burger flipper is going to continue working at mcdonalds if his living expenses were fully paid by the government.
There is a kind of brain rot that can set in on wealthy people that makes them see their net worth as their score. It's not about need or comfort. All that matters is hitting a higher score.
so basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#...?
I would say it is more like a twisted perversion of the hierarchy of needs where all levels are broken down to a single abstraction: Net worth = Score
But I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others.
This is a good example of a "thought-terminating cliché"[0]. In this case, the statement assumes its own veracity, which makes it difficult to respond to in a discussion.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
I kinda think you missed the point. This is actually just another one of those clichés. Surely you can see how this sort of communication doesn't promote a healthy discussion. Is there an argument that you want to make or are you just going to demand that someone argue against your cliché?
And sticking to calling out fallacies while failing to discuss the object level question is?
>Is there an argument that you want to make or are you just going to demand that someone argue against your cliché?
1. if you look carefully I'm not the person that you originally accused of using "thought-terminating cliché"
2. You really haven't really presented any arguments for the original argument was a "thought-terminating cliché". All you did was assert that was the case and posted a wikipedia link.
Let me try again: Why should citizen A have to involuntarily transfer their private property gained through voluntary economic transactions to citizen B?
Welfare ia decidely not a public good. Apples to oranges.
Welfare protects the public againt poverty.
Both benefit the public.
National defense protects everyone equally.
Welfare only protects those that receive it. Welfare is not a public good by definition. It is both rivalous and excludable.
Governments should not take from some to give to others. They should only ever take from all to give to all.
> And sticking to calling out fallacies while failing to discuss the object level question is?
In this case, an honest attempt at raising general discussion quality, even if it happens to lower it in the immediacy.
> 1. if you look carefully I'm not the person that you originally accused of using "thought-terminating cliché"
Yes, but you did use such a cliché in your response which seemed to have demanded that I argue against said cliché ("... but rather than trying to argue for why we should, you drop a link to some fallacy on wikipedia and call it a day.")
> 2. You really haven't really presented any arguments for the original argument was a "thought-terminating cliché".
Indeed, and I am still not even sure specifically what point they intended to argue. I don't know what a coherent response would look like other than to point out why I can't seem to form a more coherent response.
--------------
Anyway, back to the initial statement.
> I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others.
It seems to be commonly decried that "people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should [not] be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others" and rarely asserted that "people with less fortunate life circumstances should be allowed the opportunity to take risks with their productive time rather than being forced into employment as soon as they reach adulthood".
Your point is that I could start with this explanation or otherwise include it in my initial comment -- which is fair enough! I suppose I might subscribe a bit too much to a "Socratic" method of teasing out another person's thoughts rather than supplying my own.
I don't deny this assertion. I deny the method of achieving this outcome whereby private property is stolen/taxed involuntarily from others to achieve it.
People with worse initital conditions are absolutely free the opportunity to take risks with their productive time. I believe that the risk should be funded voluntarily by either charity or lrivate capital. Involuntary funding necessarily leads to less efficient economic outcomes.
> I don't deny this assertion.
For what it’s worth, I don’t mean to say that your comment specifically denies this idea. More lamenting the assumptions that are made.
> People with worse initital conditions are absolutely free the opportunity to take risks with their productive time.
I agree but the risk is much less for a person who can get by on an allowance from their parents or are afforded a place to stay rent-free; failure can be effectively punitive with life-long consequences without such a safety net.
> Involuntary funding necessarily leads to less efficient economic outcomes.
Why do you believe this? Not that I mean to deny it outright but I often see this claim and I cannot recall seeing strong evidence of it. From an epistemology perspective, I don’t see how people “know” this such that they feel comfortable stating it so brazenly.
I don't disagree, but I also don't think the solution to this is to steal from those that started with better initial conditions.
> Why do you believe this? Not that I mean to deny it outright but I often see this claim and I cannot recall seeing strong evidence of it.
Basic economics. Money taxed from you and then allocated elsewhere means that you're worse off. This is acceptable to some degree: public goods. It is unacceptable when the gov does it to provide non public goods. In this case, UBI is a non public good. You would rather spend the money that is redistributed from you on anything else. In the event that your best use of the money was to give to people that needed UBI, you would do that voluntarily. So in all cases, those being taxed are no better than they were before, and in the worst case they are all worse off.
Example: Let's say you have $100 and can live off $50. You really want to provide clean water to a community by charitably giving, and that would cost $40. The gov imposes a tax rate of 50%. Of the 50%, 10% goes to public goods, and 40% goes to teaching lions how to drive cars.
With the tax rate, you cannot afford to provide clean water and instead must fund lion drivers. Without the lion drivers included in the tax, you could easily afford to provide clean water.
First, this is an extremely toxic attitude.
Second, do you really think that people living paycheck-to-paycheck in jobs that are just barely tolerable enough to keep them from quitting are "maximizing their utility curve when compared to the opportunity costs"? Much more likely is they are stuck at a low local maxima because they can't afford to spend 2 weeks looking for a job that would better fit their skillset and preferred job functions.
Yes, that is quite possible, and I believe my comment covered that possibility by constraining their poaition against the opportunity cost. In this case, the opportunity cost of working is not searching for another job. But if you can't afford food while searching for another job, obviously you should work.
Hence! why I am a proponent of private charity. Under those same conditions, said person could go to their church, local org, etc. and see if anyone would be willing to assist them in a job search or while they did search. This solution is much preferable to me than involuntary theft of money from everyone to support a maybe chance of finding something else.
Plus it's not the reorganization of the same systems. I propose a completely voluntary system. It is more economically efficient than thr state run system.
Obviously people are busy so we can't expect every single person to work directly on every single decision so probably the first thing we would need is a way to, lets say, "elect" specific individuals who can be entrusted to make decisions on everyone's behalf. Then those people can decide how much money we all contribute and how to spend that money in the most economically efficient way.
You are right, this is such a good idea! Why aren't we already doing it that way ... ?
Here is a real-life example:
I live in the Portland metro. A couple of years ago, voters decided to vote to tax my income above a threshold to pay for preschool for people who have incomes below the threshold of taxation.
This does not lead to increased economic efficiency. Every year I now have to pay $x dollars directly to other people's children under the threat of state violence. I would much rather put that money in my child's 529. Or use it to pay for my child's daycare!
This isn't increased economic efficiency. It is literal theft.
This is simply not how it works. "The Government" is just what it's called when The People work together to solve shared problems.
Taxation is not theft just because you voted against it and lost.
I wouldn't pretend to have enough information to determine exactly how efficient Portland's redistribution of wealth through taxes and schools is, but basic logic tells us that several moderately well educated people should likely be more efficient overall than several uneducated people plus one exceptionally well educated person.
I'm not arguing that having a greater number of educated people wouldn't be more productive. I'm arguing that redistributing wealth involuntarily is less efficient.
"""
Economic efficiency implies an economic state in which every resource is optimally allocated to serve each individual or entity in the best way while minimizing waste and inefficiency.
""" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economic_efficiency.asp
Robbing Peter to pay Paul necessarily leaves Peter worse off. The solution is not pareto optimal, and therefore cannot be a solution in a maximal efficiency.
Furthermore, in the daycare example, the solution necessarily creates deadweight loss. Robbing me to pay for someone else's daycare now increases daycare demand, which given a fixed supply, makes daycare more expensive for everyond, myself included. So not only am I paying for someone else's kids to go to daycare, but now I have to pay more for my kids to go to daycare to outcompete the demand they now present with their free money.
> Taxation is not theft just because you voted against it and lost.
If your city's population got together and voted to tax people who post on HN at 99% to fund banquets for children, would you similarly not consider that theft?
> If your city's population got together and voted to tax people who post on HN at 99% to fund banquets for children, would you similarly not consider that theft?
This is why courts and judges exist. Obviously that would be an unreasonable tax under normal circumstances that no rational judge would uphold.
Therefore inheritance should be illegal, because it potentially allows for the capability of spending stored productive capacity on a full life of leisure.
Even if it isn't viable to increase the pay, the work could be made more pleasant if people took more persuading to take it.
My job is difficult and takes a lot of work to get the skills necessary to do it. Who's going to take over my job? Probably nobody, but that's just my (extremely uneducated) guess.
You can already do that.
Are you claiming that the only reason you have your current job is to avoid the remote possibility of being out on the streets?
Being "out on the streets" because you don't have a job is hardly a "remote possibility". It's a virtual certainly unless you have a massive cash hoard built up.
It's not a virtual certainty. Not even close. The rate of homelessness in the US in 2022 was 0.18%. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
Few people have a "massive cash hoard" built up, yet lots of people lose their jobs. And if you're willing to work "BS jobs for random spending money", as the OP said, then you probably won't remain unemployed for long.
I don't get it. Is your argument that because the homeless rate is 0.18% in the US, that if you had no income and drained your savings, that the probability of you ending up on the streets is minuscule? How do you think you'll acquire housing if you don't have any money?
>And if you're willing to work "BS jobs for random spending money", as the OP said
Are we reading the same comment? Here's his previous comment:
>there's no chance I'm working anything but BS jobs for random spending money
My argument is simple:
1) Few people in the US have a massive cash hoard built up. "57% of Americans can’t afford a $1,000 emergency expense" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/57-americans-t-afford-1-19584...
2) Lots of people lose their jobs every year, via firings, layoffs, quitting, companies going out of business, etc.
3) Nonetheless, the rate of homelessness is only 0.18%
4) Thus, homelessness is not a virtual certainty if you lose your job.
People almost always find a way to avoid homelessness, typically by finding a new job.
> Are we reading the same comment?
Yes, your quotation is accurate.
>People almost always find a way to avoid homelessness, typically by finding a new job.
So you're basically agreeing with the original commenter? I read his comment as basically saying the only reason he works at his job is to keep a roof over his head, and that if you don't work you'll eventually be homeless. He's not claiming that getting fired means you're going to be homeless.
No.
> I read his comment as basically saying the only reason he works at his job is to keep a roof over his head
Yes, that's also my reading of the comment.
> if you don't work you'll eventually be homeless.
Likely, yes. But the question isn't work vs. no work. The question is working at the OP's so-called "difficult" job vs. working at less difficult jobs. That's why the issue of homelessness is mostly irrelevant.
My strong suspicion is that the OP works at a "difficult" job, which presumably pays a lot more than "BS jobs", because the OP actually aspires to a more luxurious standard of living than the bare minimum.
Given the OP's other comments, e.g., the OP's job "takes a lot of work to get the skills necessary to do it", and given the fact that this is Hacker News, I'm assuming that the OP is a relatively well-compensated member of the tech industry. When the OP says, "Who's going to take over my job? Probably nobody", as if a well-paying job in the tech industry is somehow the "price" of avoiding homelessness, I dispute that.
It's kind of like when engineers defend working on unethical projects "because I have to feed my family", despite the fact that the vast majority of people feed their families without 6-figure incomes and stock options.
But yes, I pick my jobs almost exclusively to support my not-working hours.
How is that obvious when you literally said, "there's no chance I'm working anything but BS jobs for random spending money"?
> I wouldn't be able to quickly save for retirement that way.
This is precisely my point. You didn't choose your job simply to avoid homelessness; it has nothing to do with homelessness, as you now admit. You chose your job to maximize your income.
I wouldn't do my job without pay but I would do it even if my food & shelter expenses were covered by the state.
Obviously I'd still code, it'd just be random fun stuff, whenever I feel like contributing, until some other hobby demands my attention. Within the structure of employment, even fun work tasks can become tiresome.
My job doesn't really involve those annoyances. Obviously I have some meetings and things that aren't really super engaging. But I enjoy what I do, I like everyone I work with, and I have a good work-life balance.
Hyperinflation is a real possibility, and UBI needs to be tuned pretty tightly to prevent it.
An employer that wields that carrot also wields that stick, and can exploit the difference to incredible social harm.
It is especially cruel that in the US, so many benefits are tied to employment. It means employers have this huge power over workers and also makes sure that it is almost impossible for some workers to invest the time and money in themselves required to gain the skills needed for better employment opportunities.
And so many taxes tied to employment. Not just US, but pretty much everywhere.
Why discourage the most the thing you want people to do?
Not entering the part-time, entrepreneurial workforce due to self-employment taxes is absolutely a thing because the bite taken out is quite large.
Wage taxes absolutely need to go, but they are tied to Social Security / Medicare, so the elite in both parties are unwilling to touch them, albeit for different reasons.
Sometimes it’s ludicrous, why the hell am I, a desk jockey, doing a brake job?
Why is it more cost effective to build a retaining wall myself, with basic tools, rather than working extra hours and paying someone that does it as a career? (Btw, that retaining wall is going to last 100years).
Income tax is a form of overhead. Not just changing the economics of “saving a dollar is like making 2 dollars”, but ups the price of things.
A corporation, mainly paying taxes on its profits, not all revenue, would never have this magnitude of dilemma between outsourcing vs in-house.
This is why I prefer shifts towards taxing destruction (like carbon taxes, stranded capital) instead of taxing production.
Better in material terms, but worse in other metrics. Full time employment means you barely have any time or energy for your life outside of work. I really doubt a lot of people would chose to be subjected to that, just to have a bigger house or to be able to go for expensive vacation. I'm guessing much more people would be willing to go part-time, but that is a not very efficient in many industries.
Even if I were to concede his first point (which I'm about 50% willing to do - I accept that there are actually "lazy" people in the world who will lack any intrinsic motivation to do stuff), that doesn't mean that his implication - it will be bad - follows.
When considering social policy, it is almost always going to have some good effects and some bad effects. So what we need to ask is not "is it good or bad that some people will not work if we give people money?" but rather "does the good from giving out the money outweigh the bad?"
I think that the answer is unequivocally yes. Your dad might disagree, but he'd have to explain why the bad is bigger/worse than the good.
Children should not be poor, but how can you ensure accountability on the part of the parents?
Why do you feel that poverty-relief is different to these other types of government spending? Why should it be held to a higher standard? What are your values?
Right there is where you suggest that accountability MUST be 'ensured'. This is a very high accounting standard to set, much higher than normal for any federal programs that I'm aware of. I don't understand why you feel that a program that relieves a core ill of society (poverty) should waste no money. Anything that reduces poverty makes the rest of government services cheaper, as it so closely relates to crime. Is it that you don't trust the decision making of the individuals just because they're poor? If not, then what is it you expect?
What the TFA shows is that when you give parents money unconditionally they do overwhelmingly spend it on their children. Once that is understood, you must evaluate any system for measuring accountability against the cost of that very low rate of abuse.
If the means testing costs more than it saves and/or wrongly rejects too many people then whats the point of having it?
Nobody should be poor. It always baffles me why care and sympathy for other humans tends to disappear when they happen to reach an arbitrary age.
But perhaps you'll start caring again when they get even older? Should 80 year olds be poor? What is the appropriate age range to be poor?
You should give them enough money every month to fully cover basic food, basic shelter, and basic expenses.
I can try to make it simpler for you.
"Every Month" means monthly. So, twelve times per year.
"Basic Food" means things like rice, bread, carrot, celery, onion, potato or raw meat. Obviously this can vary slightly per person but in general enough for a month will mean five to ten pounds of each of those, so called, "staple" foods.
"Basic Shelter" means walls and roof that contain a bed, bathroom, kitchen, and heating. In practice, this is just called "rent". Like with the food, what this specifically looks like in any given place will vary.
Finally, "Basic Expenses". This means things like clothes, phone & electric bills (though, it's not too unreasonable to consider electric as part of your 'shelter' as well), travel expenses (gas, train tickets, bus fare), simple repairs, batteries, light bulbs, etc.
I'm sorry this has been so confusing for you but it does get just a little bit more complicated. You see, the actual cost of these things may vary depending on what they are and where they are from. For example, in New Mexico we may consider cornmeal and green chili peppers to be necessary inclusions as staple foods. Air conditioning may also be considered a housing necessity. Compare this to, for example, Maine, where air conditioning may not be considered a necessity and cornmeal and green chili peppers would likely not be considered a staple food and other foods would be considered instead.
Even if it doesn't solve the problem for all, it solves the problem for many. Which makes the rest of us better of.
Solving a problem is a very stupid idea if:
- your wealth depends on not solving it
- people keep voting for you to solve it
Not to get too political, but this equally applies to politicans who have chosen "foreigners" as their issue. A former friend of mine who turned neo nazi once asked me in a discussion to give him one reason not to vote for $horrible_xenophobic_party. My reason was that they won't solve his problem with foreigners. The last time they had been in government the migration was higher than during the social democratic government before and after. If they would have solved it, they would have taken away the number one topic for which people keep voting them. They are interested in power, corruption and neoliberal economics, the foreigner schtick is just a vehicle to get there.
With poverty it is very similar. Many political parties take poverty as a decoy to explain why the policy they wanted to do anyways will solve it. E.g. cutting social security or ramping up police funding. Actual policies that help have to do with taxing the rich more, giving poor people the access to education and solving basic needs so they can actually make use of that access etc.
But yeah. Trickle down. Any minute now.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
Say we didn't understand flight as well as we do, and we have this problem where planes keep crashing, maybe 2-3 a year (like it was in the 1980s-1990s) and instead of getting to the bottom of it and fixing the underlying problem, aerospace engineers and expert pilots just shrugged their shoulders, "whelp, that sucks.." and kept up the status quo?
What if in the late '70s this new virus started spreading among gay men, and doctors just shrugged and said "well we can treat the symptoms and make our best guess how to avoid it, but damned if I know what's going on..."? How long would we keep awarding academic medals, increasing professors' salaries (and of course tuition), and lauding these doctors as heroes if they never advanced the state of their art?
Why are economists shielded from a similar failure in their chosen profession?
What these all have in common is they are merely descriptive sciences, not engineered solutions to specific problems. Understanding how something works currently, is not the same as having the tools to make it work better.
To use a similar example to the one you gave - the common cold is one of the most common and well-studied illnesses known to man, but there is no vaccine for it. Lazy scientists? No, it's just that not every problem has an easy solution.
I mean, we still can't cure aids, nor can we cure cancer, and we still haven't figured out how to stop aging. If you cherry pick the right examples you can make any field seem like bunk.
>I guess they just like winning medals and appearing elite, without actually contributing anything?
Are they? some of the contributions listed here seem pretty important and non-trivial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...
I see our social safety net abused on a daily basis on my role, and I also am keenly aware that both parties use it as a campaigning tool, because single moms in the city working two jobs either receive too much, or too little government support, depending on who is campaigning for what.
We really need to start making goal-focused policy decisions in the US, especially when it comes to social support and education. When I read about the justification for the strong social safety net in many parts of Europe, it doesn't sound like a socialist hellscape to me, it sounds like common sense.