It's looking more and more like Switzerland is becoming the place to be. If this actually becomes a thing, I may very well have to change my retirement plans from the sunny beaches of Rotaan to the snowy mountains of Switzerland. Hmm... would they let me keep my guns if I moved there?
Swiss government proposes paying everyone £1,700 a month whether they work or not in a bid to end poverty… but insists most people will still want to get a job
Swiss residents to vote on referendum to guarantee basic monthly income
It would be first country in the world to introduce unconditional income
Radical plan was proposed by group of intellectuals
Swiss residents are to vote on a countrywide referendum about a radical plan to pay every single adult a guaranteed income of £425 a week (or £1,700 a month).
The plan, proposed by a group of intellectuals, could make the country the first in the world to pay all of its citizens a monthly basic income regardless if they work or not.
But the initiative has not gained much traction among politicians from left and right despite the fact that a referendum on it was approved by the federal government for the ballot box on June 5.
Under the proposed initiative, each child would also receive 145 francs (£100) a week.
The federal government estimates the cost of the proposal at 208 billion francs (£143 billion) a year.
Around 153 billion francs (£105 bn) would have to be levied from taxes, while 55 billion francs (£38 bn) would be transferred from social insurance and social assistance spending.
The group proposing the initiative, which includes artists, writers and intellectuals, cited a survey which shows that the majority of Swiss residents would continue working if the guaranteed income proposal was approved.
'The argument of opponents that a guaranteed income would reduce the incentive of people to work is therefore largely contradicted,' it said in a statement quoted by The Local.
However, a third of the 1,076 people interviewed for the survey by the Demoscope Institute believed that 'others would stop working'.
And more than half of those surveyed (56 percent) believe the guaranteed income proposal will never see the light of day.
I think it's an interesting idea as well. I'm cautiously in favor of it. My feeling is it will work out pretty well, but we'll see. I also agree with the premise that most people want to work and be productive because, well, almost anyone can technically not work in the US if they really didn't want to. You could go be homeless and go to a soup kitchen and get food stamps and so on. Few people chose to do so on an extended basis.
Breotan wrote: Hmm... would they let me keep my guns if I moved there?
Don't think so. Anyway, I'll go there first. And I already have the citizenship!
I thought Switzerland gun laws were pretty good as far as ownership goes.
Yeah, Switzerland has very liberal gun laws. If you moved there you would be able to keep your guns, provided you pass all the neccessary checks and requirements.
If more than half is coming direct from Tax it sounds like it could fail. The idea of people getting a fixed and guaranteed monthly income is a great idea from a social point of view. It also opens up the job market to allow for a wider range of jobs that can be done but which wouldn't pay enough to support a person without the additional income. So you can quickly see companies employing more people to do minor work and free up others to do their work. A much needed thing in a work market where we are often seeing jobs hard to get and those which are got being overworked.
Thing is where will the money come from. This scheme in a sense needs nearly all its money to come from tax; so in a sense people get a monthly income, but they then have to turn around and put nearly just as much back into government in order to get that money back.
I suspect this money will generate a healthier retail market so there is some area there for taxation on produce sold to generate more money being recycled back into taxes. Plus the assumption that people will keep working - which isn't unreasonable. People generally advance their standard of living to suit their income; boost the income and people will still work to maintain a higher standard of living and to raise it.
It's a very neat idea, but the numbers behind it will be complex and very key to if it works or fails. It will also be interesting to know if it runs only because of external import/export income or purely from internally generated revenue - the former would have a high risk that changes in the global market could have even more dire effects on the home market.
SilverMK2 wrote: I'm pretty sure that if that came into being in the UK, rent would immediately jump £1700 a month and house prices would treble
That is the other consideration.
Rather like how increasing the minimum wage often sees a rise in living costs. If the min-wage rises by that amount in Switzerland what will happen to the living costs. Will rents rise, goods and produce rise etc... It could even result in the population actually being worse off than before if the rises happen.
It's one of those issues with a free market in that if you give people more money the market will quickly react by not only providing more to buy but also raising the prices of what you do buy to start with. It's one thing in defence of regulated prices by government in that the government can put a stop to such activities. Of course a controlled market has its own problems as well.
Very interested to see how this goes if passed- especially seeing what portion of the population would continue working, and if living costs rise substantially.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: Very interesting idea, I'm interested to see how it works in practice.
Essentially. I imagine even if it works it won't necessarily work in other places as part of the elements that make it work are the culture of that country. That probably won't stop some from endlessly droning about it though, either way.
I hope this fails. All people having guaranteed access to things such as comfortable housing and modern social-essentials such as internet and phones without having to work 60 hours a week or be the off-spring of rich parents is immoral.
As others, I would be interested to see what happens if this actually was voted in.
It doesn't seem like the politicians on either side or a good part of the people over there are for it.
Something I am curious about is if they plan on everyone, working or not getting this bounty, or just non workers?
It would suck that people finally have some money and suddenly your rent goes up. I hope it works. We have the resources to end poverty around the world but there will always be those who wish to maintain the status quo.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: Very interesting idea, I'm interested to see how it works in practice.
Essentially. I imagine even if it works it won't necessarily work in other places as part of the elements that make it work are the culture of that country. That probably won't stop some from endlessly droning about it though, either way.
Yeah, that's the kicker. I don't think this could really work well in the US (At least that amount) just due to population size.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: Very interesting idea, I'm interested to see how it works in practice.
Essentially. I imagine even if it works it won't necessarily work in other places as part of the elements that make it work are the culture of that country. That probably won't stop some from endlessly droning about it though, either way.
Yeah, that's the kicker. I don't think this could really work well in the US (At least that amount) just due to population size.
A larger population generally goes hand in hand with a higher GDP in developed nations. A guaranteed income in the USA would also probably drive up the demand for goods and services, pumping even more money back into the system.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: Very interesting idea, I'm interested to see how it works in practice.
Essentially. I imagine even if it works it won't necessarily work in other places as part of the elements that make it work are the culture of that country. That probably won't stop some from endlessly droning about it though, either way.
Yeah, that's the kicker. I don't think this could really work well in the US (At least that amount) just due to population size.
A larger population generally goes hand in hand with a higher GDP in developed nations. A guaranteed income in the USA would also probably drive up the demand for goods and services, pumping even more money back into the system.
I'm sure there is a certain point where it becomes too expensive, depending on population size. For example, take the 240,000,000 million adult population in the US. At 300$ a month.. that's 72 billion a month. That just doesn't seem feasible to me.
Sasori wrote: I'm sure there is a certain point where it becomes too expensive, depending on population size. For example, take the 240,000,000 million adult population in the US. At 300$ a month.. that's 72 billion a month. That just doesn't seem feasible to me.
However, if each person spends $200 of that $300, that $200 is then passed through a number of companies as they buy new stock, invest in new machines, new staff, etc, as well as paying taxes.
It is the flow of money that drives things, not vaults full of gold.
Relapse wrote: As others, I would be interested to see what happens if this actually was voted in.
It doesn't seem like the politicians on either side or a good part of the people over there are for it.
Something I am curious about is if they plan on everyone, working or not getting this bounty, or just non workers?
A similar system was apparently trialled in some little town in Canada back in the '70s. Everyone was entitled to the base wage, but extra money earned dropped it by $1 for every $2 earned.
So there's still an incentive to work, and they found that most people did.
Would be very interesting to see how it works on a national scale.
Sasori wrote: I'm sure there is a certain point where it becomes too expensive, depending on population size. For example, take the 240,000,000 million adult population in the US. At 300$ a month.. that's 72 billion a month. That just doesn't seem feasible to me.
However, if each person spends $200 of that $300, that $200 is then passed through a number of companies as they buy new stock, invest in new machines, new staff, etc, as well as paying taxes.
It is the flow of money that drives things, not vaults full of gold.
I just don't personally see that working out in practice.
Sasori wrote: I just don't personally see that working out in practice.
Every dollar spent is spent multiple times before it comes to rest. If those dolars are already at rest they are not working to generate value.
Unlike giving money to the very rich and companies in the form of trickle down policy where they tend to horde wealth, giving money to the poorer and middle classes typically results in higher spending as they can now afford to buy more necessities, spend more on recreation, etc; this generates further wealth and also benefits wider society at the same time.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: Very interesting idea, I'm interested to see how it works in practice.
Essentially. I imagine even if it works it won't necessarily work in other places as part of the elements that make it work are the culture of that country. That probably won't stop some from endlessly droning about it though, either way.
Yeah, that's the kicker. I don't think this could really work well in the US (At least that amount) just due to population size.
A larger population generally goes hand in hand with a higher GDP in developed nations. A guaranteed income in the USA would also probably drive up the demand for goods and services, pumping even more money back into the system.
I'm sure there is a certain point where it becomes too expensive, depending on population size. For example, take the 240,000,000 million adult population in the US. At 300$ a month.. that's 72 billion a month. That just doesn't seem feasible to me.
Considering we spend a lot more than that on the military...
Plus get rid of social security, welfare, and the standard deduction/exemptions...
Sasori wrote: I'm sure there is a certain point where it becomes too expensive, depending on population size. For example, take the 240,000,000 million adult population in the US. At 300$ a month.. that's 72 billion a month. That just doesn't seem feasible to me.
However, if each person spends $200 of that $300, that $200 is then passed through a number of companies as they buy new stock, invest in new machines, new staff, etc, as well as paying taxes.
It is the flow of money that drives things, not vaults full of gold.
Given that so much manufacturing of the goods consumed by the United States are made in other countries how will their buying "new stock, invest in new machines, new staff" assist the American economy?
The future of what? Where exactly does the money come from?
Where does all money come from? Is it a representative of some designated "worth",or does it gain value by virtue of the country which controls it? Or is it, in fact, simply and idea, a lie? An abstract "value" created out of our own need to define, to control. An inherently worthless idea, given value because we need it to. Debt, traded and transformed, the original owners long dead and forgotten. A hope, a desperate belief, that someone, somehow, somewhere will repay it. A fragile balance of pure belief, because to believe anything else makes it meaningless, and abstract concept devoid of value. A destruction of everything that has been built up, a removal of everything that is, simply because of a change in perception.
Sasori wrote: I'm sure there is a certain point where it becomes too expensive, depending on population size. For example, take the 240,000,000 million adult population in the US. At 300$ a month.. that's 72 billion a month. That just doesn't seem feasible to me.
However, if each person spends $200 of that $300, that $200 is then passed through a number of companies as they buy new stock, invest in new machines, new staff, etc, as well as paying taxes.
It is the flow of money that drives things, not vaults full of gold.
Given that so much manufacturing of the goods consumed by the United States are made in other countries how will their buying "new stock, invest in new machines, new staff" assist the American economy?
Staff at a local level are US...same with transport and distribution networks.
Sasori wrote: I'm sure there is a certain point where it becomes too expensive, depending on population size. For example, take the 240,000,000 million adult population in the US. At 300$ a month.. that's 72 billion a month. That just doesn't seem feasible to me.
However, if each person spends $200 of that $300, that $200 is then passed through a number of companies as they buy new stock, invest in new machines, new staff, etc, as well as paying taxes.
It is the flow of money that drives things, not vaults full of gold.
Given that so much manufacturing of the goods consumed by the United States are made in other countries how will their buying "new stock, invest in new machines, new staff" assist the American economy?
As per a post above. A stronger, more affluent market along with suitable incentives can also encourage investment in local manufacturing. Alongside this, small businesses from manufacture, retail, construction and service sectors would potentially thrive.
SilverMK2 wrote: As per a post above. A stronger, more affluent market along with suitable incentives can also encourage investment in local manufacturing. Alongside this, small businesses from manufacture, retail, construction and service sectors would potentially thrive.
Which ignores the historic and economic reasons why manufacturing moved overseas to begin with. Your idea has merit, albeit in a close system with limited international trade and transport links.
SilverMK2 wrote: As per a post above. A stronger, more affluent market along with suitable incentives can also encourage investment in local manufacturing. Alongside this, small businesses from manufacture, retail, construction and service sectors would potentially thrive.
Which ignores the historic and economic reasons why manufacturing moved overseas to begin with. Your idea has merit, albeit in a close system with limited international trade and transport links.
It is not my idea. It is my thoughts on the general idea behind infusing capital into the lower and middle classes.
Many large conglomerates moved manufacturing offshore to cut costs, certainly. One of the ideas with a "wage" granted to all is that the cash drives sales which drives demand. This can in turn be used to kickstart more smaller businesses which generally employ and manufacture locally.
Again; my general thoughts on an ecconomic plan which has been created by others who presumably know a lot more and can factor society and historic trends into their models.
skyth wrote: A guaranteed income can also mean that we can get rid of the minimum wage which will encourage more manufacturing here.
Perhaps not. A minimum wage would still help prevent exploitation of workers and help with social mobility. The whole point of employment is to better your position in life by being able to afford more and better things. A guaranteed income simply means more of your wage can go towards this rather than paying for basics like rent, food and transport, etc...
skyth wrote: A guaranteed income can also mean that we can get rid of the minimum wage which will encourage more manufacturing here.
Perhaps not. A minimum wage would still help prevent exploitation of workers and help with social mobility. The whole point of employment is to better your position in life by being able to afford more and better things. A guaranteed income simply means more of your wage can go towards this rather than paying for basics like rent, food and transport, etc...
And with a guaranteed income, it still does that. The point of the minimum wage is that everyone that works full time should be able to support themselves. Guaranteed income takes care of that part. (assuming it is enough).
Nostromodamus wrote: What are the costs of living there? Is this sum considered a large amount, or is it barely enough to squeak by?
I'm not familiar with Switzerland to know how much impact this would have.
Switzerland is one of the, if not the most expensive places in the world. This money would not be enough to get by, but it comes on top of already existing social insurance and so would be a very welcome bonus for low-income families. Essentially, it would allow the poor to save a bit of money for things besides food and housing, and participate in social activities, pursue hobbies or sports or even to go on a trip once in a while. Basically do all the stuff every now and then that the middle class often takes for granted.
It would be very nice, but the big question of course is who is going to pay for it? If this money has to be collected by raising taxes and cutting social insurances, then in the end there might not be a benefit. Or there might just be a benefit for the poor, while the middle class has to pay for it.
Kilkrazy wrote: $72 billion sounds like a lot of money but actually it's about 0.4% of the US GDP, under 5% for the whole year.
Unless I'm missing something here though, this would have to come out of the Federal budget, right? Of which this would be the single largest expenditure at 864 billion.
The question is how much of that 864 billion would end up no longer needed because of such a program. I'm guessing in the short term it would cost more, but in the long term save a ton of money as a variety of costs would go down over time.
Kilkrazy wrote: $72 billion sounds like a lot of money but actually it's about 0.4% of the US GDP, under 5% for the whole year.
Unless I'm missing something here though, this would have to come out of the Federal budget, right? Of which this would be the single largest expenditure at 864 billion.
GDP (gross domestic product) is everything produced by a country, not federal budget.
To be sure, there would be questions about how to raise the money and how to distribute it. I just wanted to show that it is not an inconceivably huge amount of money.
Iron_Captain wrote: At least the Swiss get to vote on stuff like this... Why can't we live in a democracy?
You fething wot mate?
A democracy. You know what that is? It is a Greek word that means "rule by the common people" and indicates a form of government where the people (that meaning every person allowed to vote) make decisions regarding laws and policies. Here in the Netherlands, (and all other European countries) those decisions are made by government officials rather than the people. The only input the people have in the government is to once every 4 years pick a candidate from a small selection on a government-approved list. If enough people pick this specific person he/she then gets a seat in one of the two decision-making organisations of the state. In effect, the inbring of the people in the state is non-existent, and that is the case for all so-called "representative democracies". It is not an actual democratic form of government, as the rulers are only a small group of influential people ruling over the rest, rather than the rulers being the people as a whole. Ideally, in a democracy, a government should never be able or willing to go against the will of the majority of the people or do anything without the agreement of the majority of the people. In the Netherlands and every other European country unfortenately, this is often the case. Switzerland on the other hand has a system where not only get the people to propose laws if they want to, they also get to vote on any government decisions they want to. This eliminates the need for the people to have to vote on every single little thing (which would be a very ineffective form of government for a modern state), but unlike in the Netherlands, it does allow the people to have a direct say in ruling the country if a sufficient amount of people finds an issue important enough.
Nostromodamus wrote: What are the costs of living there? Is this sum considered a large amount, or is it barely enough to squeak by?
I'm not familiar with Switzerland to know how much impact this would have.
Switzerland is one of the, if not the most expensive places in the world. This money would not be enough to get by, but it comes on top of already existing social insurance and so would be a very welcome bonus for low-income families. Essentially, it would allow the poor to save a bit of money for things besides food and housing, and participate in social activities, pursue hobbies or sports or even to go on a trip once in a while. Basically do all the stuff every now and then that the middle class often takes for granted.
It would be very nice, but the big question of course is who is going to pay for it? If this money has to be collected by raising taxes and cutting social insurances, then in the end there might not be a benefit. Or there might just be a benefit for the poor, while the middle class has to pay for it.
Oh no, someone might have to give up a trip to eurodisney so someone else can get by.
Iron_Captain wrote: At least the Swiss get to vote on stuff like this... Why can't we live in a democracy?
You fething wot mate?
A democracy. You know what that is? It is a Greek word that means "rule by the common people" and indicates a form of government where the people (that meaning every person allowed to vote) make decisions regarding laws and policies. Here in the Netherlands, (and all other European countries) those decisions are made by government officials rather than the people. The only input the people have in the government is to once every 4 years pick a candidate from a small selection on a government-approved list. If enough people pick this specific person he/she then gets a seat in one of the two decision-making organisations of the state. In effect, the inbring of the people in the state is non-existent, and that is the case for all so-called "representative democracies". It is not an actual democratic form of government, as the rulers are only a small group of influential people ruling over the rest, rather than the rulers being the people as a whole. Ideally, in a democracy, a government should never be able or willing to go against the will of the majority of the people or do anything without the agreement of the majority of the people. In the Netherlands and every other European country unfortenately, this is often the case. Switzerland on the other hand has a system where not only get the people to propose laws if they want to, they also get to vote on any government decisions they want to. This eliminates the need for the people to have to vote on every single little thing (which would be a very ineffective form of government for a modern state), but unlike in the Netherlands, it does allow the people to have a direct say in ruling the country if a sufficient amount of people finds an issue important enough.
Yep, cause we've never had a referendum here. Nor can we petition for subjects to be discussed. Oh wait.
I guess we don't follow the law of Putin so we can't be doing it right.
This is an idea that I've been following on various economic blogs these past months (Finland are thinking about this idea as well) and IMO it has a lot of merit to it. From a British perspective, this basic income could be a good thing.
Poverty costs the UK a lot of NHS money, as well as a high social cost, as poor people tend to get ill more, and live less, so giving them more cash would go a long way to alleviate povery, especially child poverty, and of course, food banks would be consigned to the dustbin.
By paying cash into people's bank accounts, and scrapping benefits, the basic income could save the UK government a ton of money, as red tape and wasteful departments go out the window, and yes, I do mean you DWP!
The voluntary sector would get a boost overnight as people could volunteer for things they like to do, rather than be stuck in dead end jobs.
Speaking of dead end jobs, Western Societies face a massive change when automation ends up replaicng low paid, low skilled jobs. Where would these workers go? A basic income could solve this.
Seeing as the trickle down theory has been proven to be a load of horse gak, as the rich tend to avoid taxation these days, giving the masses more money could see more money getting spent on stuff, which could boost the economy.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: This is an idea that I've been following on various economic blogs these past months (Finland are thinking about this idea as well) and IMO it has a lot of merit to it. From a British perspective, this basic income could be a good thing.
Poverty costs the UK a lot of NHS money, as well as a high social cost, as poor people tend to get ill more, and live less, so giving them more cash would go a long way to alleviate povery, especially child poverty, and of course, food banks would be consigned to the dustbin.
By paying cash into people's bank accounts, and scrapping benefits, the basic income could save the UK government a ton of money, as red tape and wasteful departments go out the window, and yes, I do mean you DWP!
The voluntary sector would get a boost overnight as people could volunteer for things they like to do, rather than be stuck in dead end jobs.
Speaking of dead end jobs, Western Societies face a massive change when automation ends up replaicng low paid, low skilled jobs. Where would these workers go? A basic income could solve this.
Seeing as the trickle down theory has been proven to be a load of horse gak, as the rich tend to avoid taxation these days, giving the masses more money could see more money getting spent on stuff, which could boost the economy.
I think this is a good idea. Go Switzerland!
The issue boils down to: "Ok, I direct deposit money in your account. Enjoy. We are getting rid of food stamps, school lunch, welfare, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, free health clinics, tax rebates and all sorts of other things since you won't need them now that you have money."
And then people spend that money on garbage, and their kids are starving, they have no where to live and can't afford their medications.
In my experience, the social programs will still be needed because some portions of the population simply can't run their own lives.
Even giving people cash to live on, you will still need the social programs to make sure people's kids are getting fed and you will still have people unable to live in homes and medicines getting taken.
I am not saying it is a terrible idea... I think it might be superior to minimum wage issues, but it is one of those 'smarter people than me need to figure out how to do it'. From what I have seen both in my local volunteering community and some experience with FEMA/Katrina work, giving people cash doesn't work and things like free lunch for kids do work. I don't mind spending money on social programs but they need to work.
Iron_Captain wrote: It is a Greek word that means "rule by the common people" and indicates a form of government where the people (that meaning every person allowed to vote) make decisions regarding laws and policies.
If you're going to take that line, then there haven't been all that many democracies in the history of the world, and most of the one's that did exist didn't stick around very long.
It is not an actual democratic form of government, as the rulers are only a small group of influential people ruling over the rest, rather than the rulers being the people as a whole.
That's unavoidable. Even in a direct democracy you'll end up with elites who effectively rule the democracy, in fact direct democracy has historically offered far fewer protections to the people than representative democracy. And, really, after countries reach a certain size direct democracy becomes logistically impractical.
Ideally, in a democracy, a government should never be able or willing to go against the will of the majority of the people or do anything without the agreement of the majority of the people.
No, that isn't ideal at all. The vast majority of people know absolutely nothing about public policy and lack the time, or inclination, to learn about it. What representative democracy does is provide a definite mechanism for such people to at least communicate their preferences to the people that do know such things.
SilverMK2 wrote: It is not my idea. It is my thoughts on the general idea behind infusing capital into the lower and middle classes.
Many large conglomerates moved manufacturing offshore to cut costs, certainly. One of the ideas with a "wage" granted to all is that the cash drives sales which drives demand. This can in turn be used to kickstart more smaller businesses which generally employ and manufacture locally.
Again; my general thoughts on an ecconomic plan which has been created by others who presumably know a lot more and can factor society and historic trends into their models.
But you are advocating for it.
Interestingly "the nation's standard of living — by almost any standard — is better than ever, or close to it." http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/americawants/2011-02-02-standard-of-living-main_N.htm. By your standards this would mean that we have more cash to drive sales, which drives demand which can then kickstart more smaller businesses (which will somehow compete with nations with much lower wage costs, reduced bureaucracy, lack of unions, lack of environmental concerns, etc.).
Ouze wrote: I think it's an interesting idea as well. I'm cautiously in favor of it. My feeling is it will work out pretty well, but we'll see. I also agree with the premise that most people want to work and be productive because, well, almost anyone can technically not work in the US if they really didn't want to. You could go be homeless and go to a soup kitchen and get food stamps and so on. Few people chose to do so on an extended basis.
All the previous trials of the concept seemed to work pretty well and typically showed a pretty predictable pattern emerging; people who worked lots of hours worked less to spend more time with families/friends/hobbies, and people who had been on social security, caring for family, or working very few hours tended to pick up a few extra.
Overread wrote: If more than half is coming direct from Tax it sounds like it could fail. The idea of people getting a fixed and guaranteed monthly income is a great idea from a social point of view. It also opens up the job market to allow for a wider range of jobs that can be done but which wouldn't pay enough to support a person without the additional income. So you can quickly see companies employing more people to do minor work and free up others to do their work. A much needed thing in a work market where we are often seeing jobs hard to get and those which are got being overworked.
Thing is where will the money come from. This scheme in a sense needs nearly all its money to come from tax; so in a sense people get a monthly income, but they then have to turn around and put nearly just as much back into government in order to get that money back.
I suspect this money will generate a healthier retail market so there is some area there for taxation on produce sold to generate more money being recycled back into taxes. Plus the assumption that people will keep working - which isn't unreasonable. People generally advance their standard of living to suit their income; boost the income and people will still work to maintain a higher standard of living and to raise it.
It's a very neat idea, but the numbers behind it will be complex and very key to if it works or fails. It will also be interesting to know if it runs only because of external import/export income or purely from internally generated revenue - the former would have a high risk that changes in the global market could have even more dire effects on the home market.
One thing to remember is that the basic income also partially pays for itself; the cost of administering means-tested social security systems, ie what most developed nations have right now, is astronomical - simply removing that whole bureaucracy covers a large percentage of the cost of the BI policy. Covering the remainder can be done in many ways; the bluntest object is obviously a rise in income tax, but there are other options - a Financial Transaction Tax is workable, and though technically regressive as it's "flat", in practice most normal citizens wouldn't even notice the difference; closing the gap between Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax is another option, there's an argument to be made that CGT should exist at some level of discount to encourage investment, but the gap has been increased via lobbying to the point of foolishness; and of course some countries could easily fund a BI policy with a modest reallocation of funding from their bloated Defence budgets.
The other thing to consider are the plausible secondary effects of such a policy. Entrepreneurial endeavour among SMEs, for example, would surely increase with a BI system in place since not only would people starting a new business be putting themselves personally under much less financial pressure during the initial setup and growth 5-year-ish period of the business, but the fear, should you fail, of destitution or the humiliation of being forced to use a welfare system that treats you like a liar and a fraud by default would be gone.
SilverMK2 wrote: I'm pretty sure that if that came into being in the UK, rent would immediately jump £1700 a month and house prices would treble
That is the other consideration.
Rather like how increasing the minimum wage often sees a rise in living costs. If the min-wage rises by that amount in Switzerland what will happen to the living costs. Will rents rise, goods and produce rise etc... It could even result in the population actually being worse off than before if the rises happen.
It's one of those issues with a free market in that if you give people more money the market will quickly react by not only providing more to buy but also raising the prices of what you do buy to start with. It's one thing in defence of regulated prices by government in that the government can put a stop to such activities. Of course a controlled market has its own problems as well.
This is certainly an issue, but it's largely one of our own making, at least in the UK. The two main drivers of cost of living increases right now are rent and energy bills, and that's our own fault - we sold off our social housing stock and introduced incentives and aid for home ownership, which combined resulted in a huge number of wealthy buy-to-let landlords gorging themselves on the Housing Benefit that we now have to pay out to huge numbers of people who previously would have been given Council houses. Our energy problems are manifold, but chiefly the issue is privatisation. The key though is that we caused these problems, and that means we can fix them as well if the political will exists to do so(sadly that's presently not the case).
I would posit that increasing the BI annually in line with some measure of consumer price inflation would be manageable enough given the boost to growth we would reasonably expect the policy to generate.
The obstacles to Basic Income policy are chiefly ideological, not economic.
Iron_Captain wrote: At least the Swiss get to vote on stuff like this... Why can't we live in a democracy?
You fething wot mate?
A democracy. You know what that is? It is a Greek word that means "rule by the common people" and indicates a form of government where the people (that meaning every person allowed to vote) make decisions regarding laws and policies. Here in the Netherlands, (and all other European countries) those decisions are made by government officials rather than the people. The only input the people have in the government is to once every 4 years pick a candidate from a small selection on a government-approved list. If enough people pick this specific person he/she then gets a seat in one of the two decision-making organisations of the state. In effect, the inbring of the people in the state is non-existent, and that is the case for all so-called "representative democracies". It is not an actual democratic form of government, as the rulers are only a small group of influential people ruling over the rest, rather than the rulers being the people as a whole. Ideally, in a democracy, a government should never be able or willing to go against the will of the majority of the people or do anything without the agreement of the majority of the people. In the Netherlands and every other European country unfortenately, this is often the case. Switzerland on the other hand has a system where not only get the people to propose laws if they want to, they also get to vote on any government decisions they want to. This eliminates the need for the people to have to vote on every single little thing (which would be a very ineffective form of government for a modern state), but unlike in the Netherlands, it does allow the people to have a direct say in ruling the country if a sufficient amount of people finds an issue important enough.
Yep, cause we've never had a referendum here. Nor can we petition for subjects to be discussed. Oh wait.
Referanda in the Netherlands are only possible since last summer, and even then, many important subjects are still off limits, requirements for a referendum are extremely hard to meet, virtually impossible for most normal citizens, and even if people manage to get a referendum it has no legal binding value whatsoever. The government is free to ignore it, as I predict will happen with the upcoming referendum on the association treaty with Ukraine. In a democracy, the government never should be able to go against the will of the people, and thus ignoring a referendum should not even be possible. The same is true for petitions for subjects to be discussed. Even if the outrageously severe standards for such a petition are met, the government can just choose to ignore the issue and use the "discussion" as an opportunity for an extra tea break. These things are not democratic, they are a farce.
Soladrin wrote: I guess we don't follow the law of Putin so we can't be doing it right.
Iron_Captain wrote: It is a Greek word that means "rule by the common people" and indicates a form of government where the people (that meaning every person allowed to vote) make decisions regarding laws and policies.
If you're going to take that line, then there haven't been all that many democracies in the history of the world, and most of the one's that did exist didn't stick around very long.
No. There haven't been. Ancient Athens and modern Switzerland are the only examples where democracy really took off. In the rest of the Western world, ruling elites under pressure from the ideas of the Enlightenment and French Revolution did see the need for democratic reform, but they were afraid to lose their power if they implemented too much reform. That is why most of the West got stuck with some kind of farcical semi-democracy and pretends it is the real deal.
It is not an actual democratic form of government, as the rulers are only a small group of influential people ruling over the rest, rather than the rulers being the people as a whole.
That's unavoidable. Even in a direct democracy you'll end up with elites who effectively rule the democracy,
That may be so, but the big difference is that the elites in a direct democracy can never make a decision that does not have the consent of a majority of the people, whereas in a representative democracy, this is possiblem and in fact extremely common.
dogma wrote: in fact direct democracy has historically offered far fewer protections to the people than representative democracy.
That is a very unclear and hard to measure statement, I would think. Could you elaborate on it?
dogma wrote: And, really, after countries reach a certain size direct democracy becomes logistically impractical.
That is not true. Switzerland manages just fine, and with the internet, any such argument becomes completely moot. And surely if even huge countries like the US or Russia manage to hold elections, they could manage to organise referenda in the same fashion.
Ideally, in a democracy, a government should never be able or willing to go against the will of the majority of the people or do anything without the agreement of the majority of the people.
No, that isn't ideal at all. The vast majority of people know absolutely nothing about public policy and lack the time, or inclination, to learn about it. What representative democracy does is provide a definite mechanism for such people to at least communicate their preferences to the people that do know such things.
Which is not democracy. A democratic government receives its mandate from the agreement of a majority of the people. If a democratic government goes against the will of the people, it loses its mandate as a democratic government, making it democratic no longer. Also, people that have no knowledge or interest in politics tend not to vote at all, both in representative and direct democracies.
Kilkrazy wrote: $72 billion sounds like a lot of money but actually it's about 0.4% of the US GDP, under 5% for the whole year.
Unless I'm missing something here though, this would have to come out of the Federal budget, right? Of which this would be the single largest expenditure at 864 billion.
GDP (gross domestic product) is everything produced by a country, not federal budget.
I am aware what GDP is.... However, if we are going to be giving our citizens something like this, it would come out of the Federal budget.
That may be so, but the big difference is that the elites in a direct democracy can never make a decision that does not have the consent of a majority of the people, whereas in a representative democracy, this is possiblem and in fact extremely common.
Sure they can, it has happened plenty of times in states that attempted to function as direct democracies. Ancient Athens is actually a pretty good example of this, I'm sure it has happened in Switzerland too.
That is not true. Switzerland manages just fine, and with the internet, any such argument becomes completely moot. And surely if even huge countries like the US or Russia manage to hold elections, they could manage to organise referenda in the same fashion.
Switzerland is a tiny country, and even it doesn't operate as a purely direct democracy. Swiss citizens don't have a say on every matter of state, having to poll ~6 million people whenever a decision needed to be made would be madness. I can't even begin to imagine doing the same with with ~220 million people.
Which is not democracy. A democratic government receives its mandate from the agreement of a majority of the people. If a democratic government goes against the will of the people, it loses its mandate as a democratic government, making it democratic no longer.
That doesn't fit any definition of democracy which has practical relevance.
Also, people that have no knowledge or interest in politics tend not to vote at all, both in representative and direct democracies.
Sure, but politics is not the same thing as policy. The number of people who understand politics, and vote, is much larger than the number of people who understand policy.
skyth wrote: Pure democracy runs into the problem of the tyranny of the majority.
As opposed to the representative democracy that runs into the problem of the tyranny of a minority? Damn!
Notice I mentioned a constitutional republic, which solves that issue. A pure represenrative democracy still has the problem of the tyranny of the majority.
There's nothing wrong with a balance of powers that also includes a body that is a true representative democracy. There's no reason you can't have a judicial branch, an executive branch and a legislative branch where only the legislative branch has direct voting by the people.
So just like if the US congress passes a law, a law passed by "the tyranny of the majority" can still be overturned by the judicial branch as unconstitutional.
Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote: This is an idea that I've been following on various economic blogs these past months (Finland are thinking about this idea as well) and IMO it has a lot of merit to it. From a British perspective, this basic income could be a good thing.
Poverty costs the UK a lot of NHS money, as well as a high social cost, as poor people tend to get ill more, and live less, so giving them more cash would go a long way to alleviate povery, especially child poverty, and of course, food banks would be consigned to the dustbin.
By paying cash into people's bank accounts, and scrapping benefits, the basic income could save the UK government a ton of money, as red tape and wasteful departments go out the window, and yes, I do mean you DWP!
The voluntary sector would get a boost overnight as people could volunteer for things they like to do, rather than be stuck in dead end jobs.
Speaking of dead end jobs, Western Societies face a massive change when automation ends up replaicng low paid, low skilled jobs. Where would these workers go? A basic income could solve this.
Seeing as the trickle down theory has been proven to be a load of horse gak, as the rich tend to avoid taxation these days, giving the masses more money could see more money getting spent on stuff, which could boost the economy.
I think this is a good idea. Go Switzerland!
The issue boils down to: "Ok, I direct deposit money in your account. Enjoy. We are getting rid of food stamps, school lunch, welfare, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, free health clinics, tax rebates and all sorts of other things since you won't need them now that you have money."
And then people spend that money on garbage, and their kids are starving, they have no where to live and can't afford their medications.
In my experience, the social programs will still be needed because some portions of the population simply can't run their own lives.
Even giving people cash to live on, you will still need the social programs to make sure people's kids are getting fed and you will still have people unable to live in homes and medicines getting taken.
I am not saying it is a terrible idea... I think it might be superior to minimum wage issues, but it is one of those 'smarter people than me need to figure out how to do it'. From what I have seen both in my local volunteering community and some experience with FEMA/Katrina work, giving people cash doesn't work and things like free lunch for kids do work. I don't mind spending money on social programs but they need to work.
WHo knows? figure it out Swiss!
There will always be a tiny minority that does dumb things, but that's true for most things in life, and shouldn't be allowed to torpedo, what IMO, is an excellent idea.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: By your standards this would mean that we have more cash to drive sales, which drives demand which can then kickstart more smaller businesses (which will somehow compete with nations with much lower wage costs, reduced bureaucracy, lack of unions, lack of environmental concerns, etc.).
And yet manufacturing is not the be-all and end-all. Many western nations now have massive service sector industries replacing the old manufacturing sector. The point regards local manufacturing works well for affluent areas where local, boutique producers can sell a more premium product; look at areas with a healthy middle class and see how many 1-5 workshop/store businesses there are around per head of population. And as before; manufacturing is not everything; greater affluence leads to greater industry in many sectors.
Nor is wealth that well evenly distributed; while standards of living are generally much better than they were, "spare cash" is still sparse in large sectors of the population, hence a dearth of companies operating there.
I'd be more inclined to back this idea if it was for fulltime work/pensioners/those unable to work that have earned their stamp.
Not to unemployed benefits claimants otherwise it would be a charter for the bone idle.
Support all hard workers and volunteers, no matter the grade.
Obviously see if it works for the Swiss. It's horrendously expensive there though. I know two fulltime private teachers over there and they can afford a postage stamp sized apartment.
Just waiting for the Scots to vote for this in next!
As I understand the idea it does include full time workers and pensioners, etc. The idea is to provide a universal dole that gives everyone a basic minimum standard of living.
skyth wrote: Notice I mentioned a constitutional republic, which solves that issue.
So… a tyranny of the past, where long-dead people can impose their wills on currently living people that will be forced to obey a constitution that was written before they were even born .
That seems AWESOME! Almost like “ruled by an evil necromancer”-awesome, but not quite.
notprop wrote: I'd be more inclined to back this idea if it was for fulltime work/pensioners/those unable to work that have earned their stamp.
Not to unemployed benefits claimants otherwise it would be a charter for the bone idle.
Support all hard workers and volunteers, no matter the grade.
Obviously see if it works for the Swiss. It's horrendously expensive there though. I know two fulltime private teachers over there and they can afford a postage stamp sized apartment.
Just waiting for the Scots to vote for this in next!
The entire point of the policy is to replace all the clunking, onerous, often unfair means-tested welfare bureaucracy with a single, universal, no-conditions payment to everyone regardless of circumstances. Deciding to withhold it from the unemployed defeats the point on multiple levels - you're not getting rid of the existing benefits system, just bolting another(expensive) entitlement on to it so you make no savings from the existing system; you're not eliminating all the issues with means-tested welfare that mean low-income folk often end up losing money by working more(as just a few extra hours can see you lose more than your additional earnings from your benefits AND you end up with extra taxation to deal with), nor are you putting as much money as you could have in the hands of the social group most likely to spend it immediately, ie the poorest, and so the economic benefits of the policy for society as a whole would be diminished because less money would be circulating and less people would be enabled to move from unemployment to self-employment without fear of future destitution; and finally, without universalism you undermine both the ethical basis for the policy(ie, the idea that everyone is entitled to a basic standard of living that lets them survive with some dignity) AND you create an opening for the policy to be undermined and dismantled over time as we've seen with existing welfare programmes(afterall, if we're not giving it to the unemployed it's hardly fair to give it to the wealthy, so we have to figure out what band of income is "hard working" enough to be entitled to the payment but not already so well rewarded that giving them extra while denying it to the poor is grotesque, so it'll have to be means tested and oh look you just invented Tax Credits and we're back where we started).
Further, your objection is based in a faulty premise; benefit fraud in this country is less than 1%(and remember, that number is the upper estimate, the actual number of proven cases is far, far lower), indeed it costs the taxpayer less than clerical errors and mistaken overpayments, and further still the idea that we have a problem with substantial numbers of long-term unemployed is a complete myth, most claimants find a job within 3-6 months and the percentage who claim for more than 3 years is minuscule. Now, there are almost certainly some small number nationwide who genuinely just want to be, as you put it, "bone idle", but they're hardly significant, and neutering a policy that would help hundreds of thousands of people on the lowest incomes and provide a general economic boost for everybody in order to spite some tiny, tiny minority of skivers is completely mental IMO.
As I say help the lowest incomes of workers - good, all for it.
Benefits - bad, sod 'em.
If someone can travel half way around the world and get a job cleaning the streets/flipping burgers/driving vans/anything then everyone here can. Decent wage for all, no incentive not to work for it.
Except, Y'know a better life and more spending money. This "They wont want to work" is bull considering that most people stay on welfars less than a year.
hotsauceman1 wrote: Except, Y'know a better life and more spending money. This "They wont want to work" is bull considering that most people stay on welfars less than a year.
What kind of welfare? The majority seems to be on AFDC for more than a year, with ~27% on it for 2-5 years.
notprop wrote: As I say help the lowest incomes of workers - good, all for it.
Benefits - bad, sod 'em.
If someone can travel half way around the world and get a job cleaning the streets/flipping burgers/driving vans/anything then everyone here can. Decent wage for all, no incentive not to work for it.
I'm going to have to bow out of this conversation now, because I'm afraid I don't have the necessary temperament to respond to this post politely beyond this.
notprop wrote: Yeah that's US Welfare not the Cot to grave, house included welfare that is available in some parts of Europe.
It was just a response to hotsauceman1- they're from the states as well, and I was curious which type of welfare they were talking about. I know lots of folks on different types of government assistance, and poverty is a hard rut to climb out of once you're in it as far as I'm aware.
notprop wrote: Yeah that's US Welfare not the Cot to grave, house included welfare that is available in some parts of Europe.
It was just a response to hotsauceman1- they're from the states as well, and I was curious which type of welfare they were talking about. I know lots of folks on different types of government assistance, and poverty is a hard rut to climb out of once you're in it as far as I'm aware.
There is literally no point. Anyone who can look at the evidence and claim benefits are an incentive not to work has either fallen victim to #'s 2, 3 & 4 and requires persuasion of a type and length that can only come from someone they know personally IRL, or else...well, Rule 1 and all that. Either way a forum post isn't going to change their mind because they don't want to hear it.
notprop wrote: Yeah that's US Welfare not the Cot to grave, house included welfare that is available in some parts of Europe.
It was just a response to hotsauceman1- they're from the states as well, and I was curious which type of welfare they were talking about. I know lots of folks on different types of government assistance, and poverty is a hard rut to climb out of once you're in it as far as I'm aware.
There is literally no point. Anyone who can look at the evidence and claim benefits are an incentive not to work has either fallen victim to #'s 2, 3 & 4 and requires persuasion of a type and length that can only come from someone they know personally IRL, or else...well, Rule 1 and all that. Either way a forum post isn't going to change their mind because they don't want to hear it.
I don't think I took a position on whether or not they're an incentive not to work did I? And I believe hotsauce is firmly in the, "They're not" camp. So I'm unsure of what you're talking about, as I was just trying to get some more data into the thread.
Automatically Appended Next Post: If you want me to Share my opinion I've seen people who really need it just to survive or get by, and I've seen people abuse it as well. I'd assume the abuse is in the minority.
I've seen comments that since someone has a refrigerator, they are abusing welfare...
***Edit***: Unemployment is not a form of welfare. My mistake.
Spoiler:
To be more specific, drawing unemployment for the full 99 weeks when a previous employer agreed to hire them back(at a wage that is more than unemployment), and then after the 99 weeks going to work for that employer anyway. He was quoted as saying, "I've worked hard all my life, it's about time I had a break."
The unemployment office said there was nothing to be done about it as long as they keep providing proof they "tried" to find a job.
To counter that, a few of my family members receive help from other types of assistance, and they really do need it so their kids can eat, go to the doctor, and have clothes to wear.
Sinful Hero wrote: To be more specific, drawing unemployment for the full 99 weeks when a previous employer agreed to hire them back(at a wage that is more than unemployment), and then after the 99 weeks going to work for that employer anyway. He was quoted as saying, "I've worked hard all my life, it's about time I had a break."
I'm sure that makes up a huge percent of those on welfare.
Sinful Hero wrote: To be more specific, drawing unemployment for the full 99 weeks when a previous employer agreed to hire them back(at a wage that is more than unemployment), and then after the 99 weeks going to work for that employer anyway. He was quoted as saying, "I've worked hard all my life, it's about time I had a break."
I'm sure that makes up a huge percent of those on welfare.
Whoops, My mistake. Unemployment is not welfare. That's what I get for typing before thinking.
notprop wrote: Yeah that's US Welfare not the Cot to grave, house included welfare that is available in some parts of Europe.
It was just a response to hotsauceman1- they're from the states as well, and I was curious which type of welfare they were talking about. I know lots of folks on different types of government assistance, and poverty is a hard rut to climb out of once you're in it as far as I'm aware.
There is literally no point. Anyone who can look at the evidence and claim benefits are an incentive not to work has either fallen victim to #'s 2, 3 & 4 and requires persuasion of a type and length that can only come from someone they know personally IRL, or else...well, Rule 1 and all that. Either way a forum post isn't going to change their mind because they don't want to hear it.
Oh dear "powerful people" and "underdogs". Even the title is cringingly unconvincing.
Most people in the UK are happy with a welfare state. A helping hand when needed is only right. What is not right is a system that allows whole life indolence (or otiosity if you prefer, it's all the rage)
at the expense of the tax payer. There have been up to 3M people unemployed in the UK for a few decades. Over that period we have had an estimated influx of 5M migrants, most of whom have found work. There really wouldn't be so many people out of work unless they had been enabled to do so.
I've seen comments that since someone has a refrigerator, they are abusing welfare...
There are definitely people out there who think that unless someone on welfare has the most miserable and austere existence then they're somehow cheating or gaming the system. The reality is that when someone is in a miserable and austere existence, it doesn't drive them to make things better, it puts them in survival mode. Into a state where things can never get better.
I was in a coffee shop recently and a guy got angry at his daughter because she was on some form of assistance and had a smart phone. He started yelling at her for wasting tax payers money and how dare she spend her welfare money on that and she should be reported for abusing the system and on and on for a couple of minutes. She burst into tears and yelled that a charity that was running a job search center gave it to her so she could have a phone number for her resume before storming out of the place.
I've seen comments that since someone has a refrigerator, they are abusing welfare...
There are definitely people out there who think that unless someone on welfare has the most miserable and austere existence then they're somehow cheating or gaming the system. The reality is that when someone is in a miserable and austere existence, it doesn't drive them to make things better, it puts them in survival mode. Into a state where things can never get better.
I was in a coffee shop recently and a guy got angry at his daughter because she was on some form of assistance and had a smart phone. He started yelling at her for wasting tax payers money and how dare she spend her welfare money on that and she should be reported for abusing the system and on and on for a couple of minutes. She burst into tears and yelled that a charity that was running a job search center gave it to her so she could have a phone number for her resume before storming out of the place.
It is this type of ignorance that paints welfare with such a broad brush.
notprop wrote: Yeah that's US Welfare not the Cot to grave, house included welfare that is available in some parts of Europe.
It was just a response to hotsauceman1- they're from the states as well, and I was curious which type of welfare they were talking about. I know lots of folks on different types of government assistance, and poverty is a hard rut to climb out of once you're in it as far as I'm aware.
There is literally no point. Anyone who can look at the evidence and claim benefits are an incentive not to work has either fallen victim to #'s 2, 3 & 4 and requires persuasion of a type and length that can only come from someone they know personally IRL, or else...well, Rule 1 and all that. Either way a forum post isn't going to change their mind because they don't want to hear it.
I don't think I took a position on whether or not they're an incentive not to work did I? And I believe hotsauce is firmly in the, "They're not" camp. So I'm unsure of what you're talking about, as I was just trying to get some more data into the thread.
Automatically Appended Next Post: If you want me to Share my opinion I've seen people who really need it just to survive or get by, and I've seen people abuse it as well. I'd assume the abuse is in the minority.
notprop wrote: Yeah that's US Welfare not the Cot to grave, house included welfare that is available in some parts of Europe.
It was just a response to hotsauceman1- they're from the states as well, and I was curious which type of welfare they were talking about. I know lots of folks on different types of government assistance, and poverty is a hard rut to climb out of once you're in it as far as I'm aware.
There is literally no point. Anyone who can look at the evidence and claim benefits are an incentive not to work has either fallen victim to #'s 2, 3 & 4 and requires persuasion of a type and length that can only come from someone they know personally IRL, or else...well, Rule 1 and all that. Either way a forum post isn't going to change their mind because they don't want to hear it.
I don't think I took a position on whether or not they're an incentive not to work did I? And I believe hotsauce is firmly in the, "They're not" camp. So I'm unsure of what you're talking about, as I was just trying to get some more data into the thread.
Automatically Appended Next Post: If you want me to Share my opinion I've seen people who really need it just to survive or get by, and I've seen people abuse it as well. I'd assume the abuse is in the minority.
hotsauceman1 wrote: Except, Y'know a better life and more spending money. This "They wont want to work" is bull considering that most people stay on welfars less than a year.
What kind of welfare? The majority seems to be on AFDC for more than a year, with ~27% on it for 2-5 years.
feeder wrote: What are the hard numbers for these "cot to grave" indolents? Do they include the disabled?
I mean I watched the first season of Shameless on Netflix, but I understand it is an entertainment series, not a documentary.
Cameron has talked about something like 200,000 families in such a situation, which might indicate up to a million including their children who it should be remembered have not yet nearly reached the grave and might get an education and jobs. But I don't think there are any firm statistics. It's a kind of bogeyman that appeals to people's sense of drama.
notprop wrote: Yeah that's US Welfare not the Cot to grave, house included welfare that is available in some parts of Europe.
It was just a response to hotsauceman1- they're from the states as well, and I was curious which type of welfare they were talking about. I know lots of folks on different types of government assistance, and poverty is a hard rut to climb out of once you're in it as far as I'm aware.
There is literally no point. Anyone who can look at the evidence and claim benefits are an incentive not to work has either fallen victim to #'s 2, 3 & 4 and requires persuasion of a type and length that can only come from someone they know personally IRL, or else...well, Rule 1 and all that. Either way a forum post isn't going to change their mind because they don't want to hear it.
I don't think I took a position on whether or not they're an incentive not to work did I? And I believe hotsauce is firmly in the, "They're not" camp. So I'm unsure of what you're talking about, as I was just trying to get some more data into the thread.
Automatically Appended Next Post: If you want me to Share my opinion I've seen people who really need it just to survive or get by, and I've seen people abuse it as well. I'd assume the abuse is in the minority.
hotsauceman1 wrote: Except, Y'know a better life and more spending money. This "They wont want to work" is bull considering that most people stay on welfars less than a year.
What kind of welfare? The majority seems to be on AFDC for more than a year, with ~27% on it for 2-5 years.
notprop wrote: Yeah that's US Welfare not the Cot to grave, house included welfare that is available in some parts of Europe.
It was just a response to hotsauceman1- they're from the states as well, and I was curious which type of welfare they were talking about. I know lots of folks on different types of government assistance, and poverty is a hard rut to climb out of once you're in it as far as I'm aware.
There is literally no point. Anyone who can look at the evidence and claim benefits are an incentive not to work has either fallen victim to #'s 2, 3 & 4 and requires persuasion of a type and length that can only come from someone they know personally IRL, or else...well, Rule 1 and all that. Either way a forum post isn't going to change their mind because they don't want to hear it.
I don't think I took a position on whether or not they're an incentive not to work did I? And I believe hotsauce is firmly in the, "They're not" camp. So I'm unsure of what you're talking about, as I was just trying to get some more data into the thread.
Automatically Appended Next Post: If you want me to Share my opinion I've seen people who really need it just to survive or get by, and I've seen people abuse it as well. I'd assume the abuse is in the minority.
hotsauceman1 wrote: Except, Y'know a better life and more spending money. This "They wont want to work" is bull considering that most people stay on welfars less than a year.
What kind of welfare? The majority seems to be on AFDC for more than a year, with ~27% on it for 2-5 years.
19%+15%= 34% on it for under a year. so yeah, most people are on it less than a year
No... The total of folks on AFDC for a year or more is 19.3%(1-2 years)+26.9%2-5 years)+19.6%(5+ years)=65.8%. Although at this point this is probably off topic.
Automatically Appended Next Post: We can take it to PM of you want.
LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposal that would have guaranteed everyone in the Alpine nation an unconditional basic income, according to projections published Sunday by public broadcaster SRF1.
The plan could have seen people in this wealthy nation of 8 million people receive about 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,560) per month — enough to cover their basic needs.
Proponents argued that a basic income would free people from meaningless toil and allow them to pursue more productive or creative goals in life. Critics said the plan would explode the state budget and encourage idleness, arguments that appear to have convinced voters.
Based on a partial count of results from 19 Swiss cantons (states), the gfs.bern polling group calculated that 78 percent of voters opposed the measure against 22 percent in favor.
The Swiss government itself advised voters to reject the proposal put forward by left-wing campaigners who collected the necessary 100,000 signatures to force a vote on the issue.
But the idea has won over some economists, who say it could replace traditional welfare payments and give everybody the same chances in life.
Salaried workers who earned more than basic income would have received no extra money, while children would have received one-quarter of the total for adults.
The Dutch city of Utrecht is planning a two-year experiment with a similar plan, handing money to residents who already receive welfare benefits.
The unconditional basic income proposal was one of five measures up for decision nationwide Sunday. Proposals to reform publicly owned companies and financing of transport routes was rejected, while voters backed plans to simplify the application procedures for asylum-seekers and another that will allow screening of embryos before they are implanted in the womb.
I think it's an idea whose time is nearly here, though. It depends how fast expert systems and robots start to plough into traditional middle class jobs.
We've already seen old-fashioned bank management succumb to computer moderated credit rating systems, for example.
I think it's an idea whose time is nearly here, though. It depends how fast expert systems and robots start to plough into traditional middle class jobs.
We've already seen old-fashioned bank management succumb to computer moderated credit rating systems, for example.
It's actually closer to 4:1 if I'm doing my math right. 78% voted against it.
I think it's an idea whose time is nearly here, though. It depends how fast expert systems and robots start to plough into traditional middle class jobs.
We've already seen old-fashioned bank management succumb to computer moderated credit rating systems, for example.
It's actually closer to 4:1 if I'm doing my math right. 78% voted against it.
The 2:1 calculation must have been the work of that computer moderated math that is replacing the middle class
I think they shot too high with the minimum. I know $2500 doesn't go very far in Switzerland, but their current welfare rates are $960 a month. I think this guaranteed minimum income should provide people with enough to survive like welfare. I think a lot more people would have voted for it if it was like $1000-$1100 and replaced means tested welfare.
We will see this idea continue to surface more and more as long as the world economy sort of maintains its size and doesn't grow much as in that situation you want an increased velocity to money and one of the best ways to get it is to put the money in the hands of the poorest in your country.
The minimum was definitely too high, it needs to be at a rate where it will cover basic needs (food, shelter, heating, phone, internet, public transport, some leisure spending) without funding anything particularly luxurious (privately owned car/ house/ holidays abroad etc.).
They've also been reporting that Corbyn's shadow chancellor is considering the idea for the UK Labour party as one of the core pieces of its manifesto.
In theory, it could actually cost less than the current benefits system, due to scrapping the billions of pounds of red tape involved with twice-weekly jobsekeer's interviews, jobcentres, Atos assessments etc.
Currently we pay more on the systems designed to make life difficult for the unemployed than we do actually giving them the money they need to not live lives of misery and poverty (which in turn lead to higher crime rates and lots of knock-on effects to society).
scarletsquig wrote: The minimum was definitely too high, it needs to be at a rate where it will cover basic needs (food, shelter, heating, phone, internet, public transport, some leisure spending) without funding anything particularly luxurious (privately owned car/ house/ holidays abroad etc.).
They've also been reporting that Corbyn's shadow chancellor is considering the idea for the UK Labour party as one of the core pieces of its manifesto.
In theory, it could actually cost less than the current benefits system, due to scrapping the billions of pounds of red tape involved with twice-weekly jobsekeer's interviews, jobcentres, Atos assessments etc.
Currently we pay on the systems designed to make life difficult for the unemployed than we do actually giving them the money they need to not live lives of misery and poverty (which in turn lead to higher crime rates and lots of knock-on effects to society).
For a lot of people a privately owned car isn't a luxury. If you live in a rural area like I do, where public transport is fairly dismal and expensive, a car is a necessity for a lot of ordinary activities. I commute by train at the moment, but if I had a job in a less accessible place, I would need a car to get to the new job. Not having one would limit my ability to change jobs or seek a new job if necessary. On top of this, the time and travel costs of family outings by public transport are excessive, as well as routine things like getting to the supermarket and taking children to activities. This illustrates the difficulty of working out a suitable rate of income.
I don't know what the base level universal income should be. Clearly it would have to be a balance between a country's ability to pay it and basic living costs. Perhaps it might vary by area, but there is something to be said for making it a completely flat benefit. In the UK that might encourage people to go and live in places like Liverpool. They would spend their spare money to the benefit of the local economy.
As you mentioned, there would be a huge saving in bureaucracy, though this would also throw a lot of officials out of work.
The first step would at least be making in as much as welfare rates. I'm not sure it should pay for costs like a car even if someone lives in a rural area. Maybe eventually it can be extended to that, but where it needs to start is in providing people the bare minimums to allow for human flourishing without treating them like criminals and demanding they spend time continually proving they need the assistance.
My take on this is 100% pragmatic. The costs of alleviating poverty through this method are simply lower than means tested programs on a case by case basis. It's like places where housing a homeless person (in supportive housing with all the programs they need) will cost the government $11000-25000 a year but the costs of having a homeless person on the street (emergency medical costs, policing costs, incarceration) can be $50,000 to $100,000 or more a year.
If I had to guess why most of the Swiss voted against this it would be the combination of the high rate and an immigration issue.
How is giving people money from the govt substantially different from lowering taxes so people keep more of their money in the first place? Doesn't seem to make sense to give the government money just so they can give it back.
If you the govt supports everyone with enough money to live off of with some degree of comfort than the program will discourage work. If the govt pays people a small amount of money to supplement incomes then it would be cheaper and more efficient to just give everyone a tax credit.
Prestor Jon wrote: How is giving people money from the govt substantially different from lowering taxes so people keep more of their money in the first place? Doesn't seem to make sense to give the government money just so they can give it back.
Because there is a cut-off where you essentially dont pay taxes.
Like me, I got every single penny I paid to the Govt. I basically paid 0$ in taxes.
And lowering taxes will not give youthe amount needed. for people making 25000, 2500 is 10% of what they make, their not paying that much. While riche people would barely feel having that money taken out.
Still, im for welfare. But I dislike generational welfare and welfare as a job, you are not meant to be on it for your whole life.
But I also think there should be free daycares that are for those on welfare who wish to go to school and improve their life. Welfare should give people incentives is what I mean.
Prestor Jon wrote: How is giving people money from the govt substantially different from lowering taxes so people keep more of their money in the first place? Doesn't seem to make sense to give the government money just so they can give it back.
Because there is a cut-off where you essentially dont pay taxes.
Like me, I got every single penny I paid to the Govt. I basically paid 0$ in taxes.
And lowering taxes will not give youthe amount needed. for people making 25000, 2500 is 10% of what they make, their not paying that much. While riche people would barely feel having that money taken out.
Still, im for welfare. But I dislike generational welfare and welfare as a job, you are not meant to be on it for your whole life.
But I also think there should be free daycares that are for those on welfare who wish to go to school and improve their life. Welfare should give people incentives is what I mean.
That's why we have the EIC, Earned Income Tax Credit. You work you get paid you don't get paid enough to owe taxes so the govt gives you a refund plus extra money to help you. Tax credits or cuts to the tax rate both have the same basic function of reducing the tax revenue collected and increasing the money refunded to tax payers with "payers" just being everybody who files.
I'm disappointed this didn't pass. It should be obvious to anyone that simply cutting a cheque for everyone in the country is more cost effective than administering a means-tested welfare system.
feeder wrote: I'm disappointed this didn't pass. It should be obvious to anyone that simply cutting a cheque for everyone in the country is more cost effective than administering a means-tested welfare system.
Nope, Infact it is likely going to be LESS cost effective. Because as you said EVERYONE gets one. The tme, effort and so forth would be tremendous, it would start an entire industry and part in the government. How do you get it to everyone, how is it distributed? is it digital? everyone gets a card? How would this work.
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skyth wrote: EITC is just a government subsidy of corporations so that the corporations don't have to pay people decently.
Still, im for welfare. But I dislike generational welfare and welfare as a job, you are not meant to be on it for your whole life.
The thing is...Most people on welfare actually have a job. The job just doesn't pay enough to live on and feed their children.
Yes, but welfare doesnt offer a chance or incentive to improve, just stay the same.
I say welfare needs a time limit, and you haveto appeal at the end of that time limit.
feeder wrote: I'm disappointed this didn't pass. It should be obvious to anyone that simply cutting a cheque for everyone in the country is more cost effective than administering a means-tested welfare system.
Nope, Infact it is likely going to be LESS cost effective. Because as you said EVERYONE gets one. The tme, effort and so forth would be tremendous, it would start an entire industry and part in the government. How do you get it to everyone, how is it distributed? is it digital? everyone gets a card? How would this work.
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skyth wrote: EITC is just a government subsidy of corporations so that the corporations don't have to pay people decently.
Still, im for welfare. But I dislike generational welfare and welfare as a job, you are not meant to be on it for your whole life.
The thing is...Most people on welfare actually have a job. The job just doesn't pay enough to live on and feed their children.
Yes, but welfare doesnt offer a chance or incentive to improve, just stay the same.
I say welfare needs a time limit, and you haveto appeal at the end of that time limit.
There is realistically no chance to improve. If you already have a job or two and are still on government assistance suddenly cutting off government assistance means that you are likely to not have food or shelter or medical care. Plus your children are not going to have those things either. The lazy generational welfare myth keeps on getting perpetuating though.
There is a structural problem and government assistance is an attempt at a band aid while trying to make it so that the people receiving government assistance are displayed as some how being lazy and at fault for their situation.
Prestor Jon wrote: How is giving people money from the govt substantially different from lowering taxes so people keep more of their money in the first place? ...
...
People whose income is too low to pay taxes gain nothing from remission of taxes.
Prestor Jon wrote: How is giving people money from the govt substantially different from lowering taxes so people keep more of their money in the first place? ...
...
People whose income is too low to pay taxes gain nothing from remission of taxes.
That's already covered by the EITC. People who don't earn enough to pay taxes can still get additional money refunded to them after they file their taxes.
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skyth wrote: EITC is just a government subsidy of corporations so that the corporations don't have to pay people decently.
The Other Milton Friedman: A Conservative With a Social Welfare Program
By ROBERT H. FRANK
Published: November 23, 2006
Milton Friedman, who died last week at 94, was the patron saint of small-government conservatism. Conservatives who invoke his name in defense of Social Security privatization and other cutbacks in the social safety net might thus be surprised to learn that he was also the architect of the most successful social welfare program of all time.
Market forces can accomplish wonderful things, he realized, but they cannot ensure a distribution of income that enables all citizens to meet basic economic needs. His proposal, which he called the negative income tax, was to replace the multiplicity of existing welfare programs with a single cash transfer — say, $6,000 — to every citizen. A family of four with no market income would thus receive an annual payment from the I.R.S. of $24,000. For each dollar the family then earned, this payment would be reduced by some fraction — perhaps 50 percent. A family of four earning $12,000 a year, for example, would receive a net supplement of $18,000 (the initial $24,000 less the $6,000 tax on its earnings).
Mr. Friedman’s proposal was undoubtedly motivated in part by his concern for the welfare of the least fortunate. But he was above all a pragmatist, and he emphasized the superiority of the negative income tax over conventional welfare programs on purely practical grounds. If the main problem of the poor is that they have too little money, he reasoned, the simplest and cheapest solution is to give them some more. He saw no advantage in hiring armies of bureaucrats to dispense food stamps, energy stamps, day care stamps and rent subsidies.
As always, Mr. Friedman’s policy prescriptions were shaped by his desire to minimize adverse economic incentives, a feature that architects of earlier welfare programs had largely ignored. Those programs, each administered by a separate bureaucracy, typically reduced a family’s benefits by some fraction of each increment in earned income. Rates of 50 percent were common, so a family participating in four separate programs might see its total benefits fall by $2 for each extra dollar it earned. Under the circumstances, no formal training in economics was necessary to see that working didn’t pay. In contrast, someone who worked additional hours under Mr. Friedman’s plan would always take home additional after-tax income.
The negative income tax was never adopted in the end, because of concern that a payment large enough to support an urban family of four might induce many to go on the dole. With a payment of $6,000 per person, for example, rural communes of 30 would have a pooled annual payment of $180,000, which they could supplement by growing vegetables and raising animals. Because these groups could live quite comfortably at taxpayer expense, there would be an eager audience for accounts of their doings on the nightly news. Political support for such a program would be difficult to sustain.
Instead, Congress adopted the earned-income tax credit, essentially the same program except that only people who were employed received benefits. One of the few American welfare programs widely adopted in other countries, the earned-income tax credit has proved far more efficient than conventional programs, just as Mr. Friedman predicted. Yet because it covers only those who work, it cannot be the sole weapon in society’s antipoverty arsenal.
skyth wrote: I suppose 'feed your children' could be an opinion. After all, if you give them half a slice of bread, you are technically 'feeding' them...
The thing is, why punish children for being born to poor parents?
People are free to have as many children as they want. If they want to have more children then they can support that's a probem of their own creation.
If your problem is that you want corporations to pay higher wages then the solution isn't for the federal and/or state governments to pay out welfare to increase incomes. That will have no impact on wages and actively works to keep them low. If corporations know that the govt will provide low paid employees with assistance then corporations will pay low wages and direct employees to file for govt assistance. Why would corporations pay more if they know the govt is there to pick up the slack?
Low wages are much more of a supply/demand issue than a corporate greed issue. Sure corporations don't want to pay more than what is necessary to fill the job and get the work done but low paying jobs are easily filled by an abundant pool of applicants willing to take the job so there is no force pushing for higher wages. Government assistance dampens any push for higher wages even more. If a person doesn't have the skills required to do work that is valuable enough to the employer to be worth a high wage that's a worker problem not an employer problem. If an employee isn't contributed more value than there's no reason for an employer to raise the wage. If a person doesn't have valuable skills and therefore can only work low wage jobs then that person needs to either make peace with the fact that he/she has to live within his/her meager means or develop a more valuable skill set. Artificially inflating the cost of low wage labor only reduces jobs and makes it harder for people without skills to get work.
Absolutely is - soon machines/robots will have 50-60% of all current jobs. What people fail to understand is this is not a political issue - this is a there is no other way issue.
Nah, then the rich people will live on their own island or maybe even an orbital in space. They can set up a radar screen and shoot down anyone of the .999999%ers who try to fly up.
The future of what? Where exactly does the money come from?
You are asking the wrong question. The correct question is what is money?
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Frazzled wrote: Nah, then the rich people will live on their own island or maybe even an orbital in space. They can set up a radar screen and shoot down anyone of the .999999%ers who try to fly up.
The future of what? Where exactly does the money come from?
You are asking the wrong question. The correct question is what is money?
Money is tool to facilitate commerce, it is a unit of measurement for value. If there is no money then there is either no commerce or we've reverted to barter.
skyth wrote: I suppose 'feed your children' could be an opinion. After all, if you give them half a slice of bread, you are technically 'feeding' them...
The thing is, why punish children for being born to poor parents?
People are free to have as many children as they want. If they want to have more children then they can support that's a probem of their own creation.
So again, punishing children for being born to poor parents is a good thing?
If your problem is that you want corporations to pay higher wages then the solution isn't for the federal and/or state governments to pay out welfare to increase incomes. That will have no impact on wages and actively works to keep them low. If corporations know that the govt will provide low paid employees with assistance then corporations will pay low wages and direct employees to file for govt assistance. Why would corporations pay more if they know the govt is there to pick up the slack?
Low wages are much more of a supply/demand issue than a corporate greed issue. Sure corporations don't want to pay more than what is necessary to fill the job and get the work done but low paying jobs are easily filled by an abundant pool of applicants willing to take the job so there is no force pushing for higher wages. Government assistance dampens any push for higher wages even more. If a person doesn't have the skills required to do work that is valuable enough to the employer to be worth a high wage that's a worker problem not an employer problem. If an employee isn't contributed more value than there's no reason for an employer to raise the wage. If a person doesn't have valuable skills and therefore can only work low wage jobs then that person needs to either make peace with the fact that he/she has to live within his/her meager means or develop a more valuable skill set. Artificially inflating the cost of low wage labor only reduces jobs and makes it harder for people without skills to get work.
The problem is that increased productivity does not lead to an increase in wages. Plus there is the very important human element...That there are humans involved and they deserve compassion. Really, I'm in support of a mandated multiplier of wages between lowest and highest paid in the company...Say 50 times. The CEO can't earn more than 50 times what the janitor earns (including stock options, health care, etc).
I'm also in support of a guaranteed income and public heath care along with getting rid of government assistance, minimum wage, etc. People deserve to have enough money to survive just by being people and this country has the resources to do that. The problem is that the poor are shoehorned as lazy and not deserving when really the only way to make sure that you really prosper is to be lucky. There is the myth that working hard will get you ahead and let you prosper. Really, working hard has a hygiene effect on success...That is it's harder for it to happen if you don't do it, but it doesn't make it happen.
Then there is the myth that people can magically develop better and new skills. Problem is that that ability depends on luck...Genetics and Nutrition while growing up determine intelligence/ability to learn. Combine with having time and a job that allows you time to take classes/learn other things and having the constitution to do that after working backbreaking labor for minimum wage...Plus not having a weird name that instantly gets your resume round filed.
Prestor Jon wrote: How is giving people money from the govt substantially different from lowering taxes so people keep more of their money in the first place? ...
...
People whose income is too low to pay taxes gain nothing from remission of taxes.
That's already covered by the EITC. People who don't earn enough to pay taxes can still get additional money refunded to them after they file their taxes.
skyth wrote: I suppose 'feed your children' could be an opinion. After all, if you give them half a slice of bread, you are technically 'feeding' them...
The thing is, why punish children for being born to poor parents?
People are free to have as many children as they want. If they want to have more children then they can support that's a probem of their own creation.
So again, punishing children for being born to poor parents is a good thing?
This has nothing to do with "punishing children for being born to poor parents" and has everything to do with fricking responsibility.
The job of the state isn't to ensure that every kid is born into wealth.
Absolutely is - soon machines/robots will have 50-60% of all current jobs. What people fail to understand is this is not a political issue - this is a there is no other way issue.
You mean how like automation of farming was going to 40% of the population out of work in the early 20th century.
There will be no big job loss. Jobs will just shift around.
The future of what? Where exactly does the money come from?
You are asking the wrong question. The correct question is what is money?
Money is tool to facilitate commerce, it is a unit of measurement for value. If there is no money then there is either no commerce or we've reverted to barter.
While nothing you said is wrong it's just not answering the whole question. In a system with a basic monthly income for everyone - there is still commerce and there is still work being done. I like to think of money as being a value of work - if the same amount of work is being done then the same amount of money should be flowing through an economy. It really just becomes a distribution issue. I'm no expert about this stuff but I know that we live in a world right now that can sustain our system but that is soon about to change. We are currently able to give most people a sustainable income for doing work - a very small percentage fall through the cracks and become homeless or criminals or deadbeats. Within the next 20-30 years robotics is going to change the world and our economic systems will not be able to sustain mankind. The only answer is something like a basic monthly baseline income for all citizens. Otherwise you have a significant half or more of the current workforce of the world that can no longer provide for themselves. No - new jobs do not emerge to replace the old ones. Just ask the horses who used to pull carriages in cities. Ask the men who used to work in car factories. Ask the robot who's taking your order at panera. The Switz being smart and well governed see the future and know there is no other way. Rather then wait for it to become a problem they are preparing their economy for the inevitable change now.
Absolutely is - soon machines/robots will have 50-60% of all current jobs. What people fail to understand is this is not a political issue - this is a there is no other way issue.
You mean how like automation of farming was going to 40% of the population out of work in the early 20th century.
There will be no big job loss. Jobs will just shift around.
I really don't follow - It used to take hundreds of men to work a field and collect the harvest. Now it takes a few men in giant tractors (soon will require 0 men as a robot is driving the giant tractor). Agricultural employment took a huge hit. There were other jobs available for those people to find in time though. What we are talking about here is a situation where a machine does literally everything better than a human can - for less cost - and more reliably. We are actually already at this point - the technology just hasn't entered the workforce yet. Once it does we will all eventually have a system like this.
It's already cheaper, right now, to buy a robot than to hire a human to work at McDonalds, they just haven't permeated the market yet.
Agriculatural jobs largely shifted to manufacturing.
We're not just talking about manufacturing jobs being replaced here though; service, transport are all going to be eroded.
Where do you envision those jobs going?
There's going to be a huge societal shift in the not so far future that very few governments are even remotely prepared for.
skyth wrote: I suppose 'feed your children' could be an opinion. After all, if you give them half a slice of bread, you are technically 'feeding' them...
The thing is, why punish children for being born to poor parents?
People are free to have as many children as they want. If they want to have more children then they can support that's a probem of their own creation.
So again, punishing children for being born to poor parents is a good thing?
If your problem is that you want corporations to pay higher wages then the solution isn't for the federal and/or state governments to pay out welfare to increase incomes. That will have no impact on wages and actively works to keep them low. If corporations know that the govt will provide low paid employees with assistance then corporations will pay low wages and direct employees to file for govt assistance. Why would corporations pay more if they know the govt is there to pick up the slack?
Low wages are much more of a supply/demand issue than a corporate greed issue. Sure corporations don't want to pay more than what is necessary to fill the job and get the work done but low paying jobs are easily filled by an abundant pool of applicants willing to take the job so there is no force pushing for higher wages. Government assistance dampens any push for higher wages even more. If a person doesn't have the skills required to do work that is valuable enough to the employer to be worth a high wage that's a worker problem not an employer problem. If an employee isn't contributed more value than there's no reason for an employer to raise the wage. If a person doesn't have valuable skills and therefore can only work low wage jobs then that person needs to either make peace with the fact that he/she has to live within his/her meager means or develop a more valuable skill set. Artificially inflating the cost of low wage labor only reduces jobs and makes it harder for people without skills to get work.
The problem is that increased productivity does not lead to an increase in wages. Plus there is the very important human element...That there are humans involved and they deserve compassion. Really, I'm in support of a mandated multiplier of wages between lowest and highest paid in the company...Say 50 times. The CEO can't earn more than 50 times what the janitor earns (including stock options, health care, etc).
I'm also in support of a guaranteed income and public heath care along with getting rid of government assistance, minimum wage, etc. People deserve to have enough money to survive just by being people and this country has the resources to do that. The problem is that the poor are shoehorned as lazy and not deserving when really the only way to make sure that you really prosper is to be lucky. There is the myth that working hard will get you ahead and let you prosper. Really, working hard has a hygiene effect on success...That is it's harder for it to happen if you don't do it, but it doesn't make it happen.
Then there is the myth that people can magically develop better and new skills. Problem is that that ability depends on luck...Genetics and Nutrition while growing up determine intelligence/ability to learn. Combine with having time and a job that allows you time to take classes/learn other things and having the constitution to do that after working backbreaking labor for minimum wage...Plus not having a weird name that instantly gets your resume round filed.
If you don't want children to grow up in poor families then don't have the govt subsidize poor people having kids or don't let people who can't afford to provide for kids have kids. If the govt is willing to subsidize poor people to have kids what prevents poor people from having more kids that grow up in poor families? Subsidizing the action that you want to discourage/prevent doesn't work.
It's not my fault somebody else had kids they can't provide for and I have no responsibility moral or otherwise to force my family to make do with less just so somebody else can have more.
Very few jobs exist that pay people to get more education or certifications on company time. That's why there are night time courses and home study courses. I had to make time after work and on weekends to get my certain because my employer expected me to work on company time. That's not unusual or a new development. There are plenty of programs that people can use to get loans to go to school. Most people use loans to pay for schooling and do it on their own time.
We are setting records with low labor pool participation rates and there aren't that many backbreaking manual labor jobs that pay minimum wage out there that aren't temporary seasonal jobs. A lot of manual labor jobs can be opportunities to become skilled labor in trades, many of which have unions. My employer gets involved with a lot of commercial construction and in all the years I've been there everybody even unskilled helpers made more than minimum wage and the majority of people that work on the jobs were considered skilled labor. There aren't many jobs you can have unskilled people do in construction that won't come back to bite you and cost you if they do it wrong.
The govt doesn't have the power to control outcomes for people, never has and never will. They can't make people be good parents they can't make people make smart financial decisions they can't make people study useful things can't make people have healthy relationships. The govt can forcibly redistribute money and pass laws that limit and take away individual liberty in a vain attempt to do all that but in the end they can't save people from themselves.
Your arguments about children fall flat with the idea that the children already exist. So society needs to step in and make sure we are punishing children for being born to the wrong parents.
As for your night school idea...the reason that I said they couldn't is that a lot of the minimum wage service jobs have you not working a fixed schedule so you can't commit to classes. If you do, you lose out on hours and pay. So you can't feed your children.
Plus you didn't address my point that the ability to learn extra skills is dependant on being lucky and having a higher ability to learn.
And news flash...minimum wage jobs like fast food are rough on you. Having to work that then come home and take care of children leaves no time nor energy for classes unless you are lucky enough to have a better than average constitution.
skyth wrote: Your arguments about children fall flat with the idea that the children already exist. So society needs to step in and make sure we are punishing children for being born to the wrong parents.
As for your night school idea...the reason that I said they couldn't is that a lot of the minimum wage service jobs have you not working a fixed schedule so you can't commit to classes. If you do, you lose out on hours and pay. So you can't feed your children.
Plus you didn't address my point that the ability to learn extra skills is dependant on being lucky and having a higher ability to learn.
And news flash...minimum wage jobs like fast food are rough on you. Having to work that then come home and take care of children leaves no time nor energy for classes unless you are lucky enough to have a better than average constitution.
I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've worked fast food and retail jobs. They are not fun but they are also a great motivator for spending the time your not at work lookin for better jobs and learnin new skills. If somebody is working in the fast food industry and does t like it but can't bring himself/herself to actually do anything about then he/she simply don't care enough. It takes a lot of conscious decisions to go through life and amass zero worthwhile skills and to then take a low paying job with no future and decide to have a bunch of kids while you're at it.
If growing up poor is such a devastating hardship for kids and if the govt has a moral imperative to ameliorate the situation then the logical solution would be for the govt to either sterilize poor people or take their children away and raise them in govt facilities. Seriously simply giving poor families more money doesn't guarantee that their kids live better lives. No outcome can be guaranteed and the most effective corrective measures the govt could take are too draconian and totalitarian to be allowed in a free society.
Again...you were lucky that you were born with a high enough learning capacity and ability to do that.
I worked fast food as an employee and a manager. I know how hard the people there have to work to do a good job. Most physically and mentally demanding job that I have ever held. Did you work and go to school while trying to support a family on a minimum wage job?
Also considering the number of people with college degrees that work minimum wage jobs the idea that if only they had more skills or applied themselves they would do better is, quite frankly, a myth. Being able to advance and do well for yourself is more a matter of luck than anything else.
Personally I agree that the world would be a better place if having children was something that you had to earn the right to. However, that is not the world we live in and taking draconian measures against the parents just boils down to punishing children for being born to the wrong parents.
skyth wrote: Your arguments about children fall flat with the idea that the children already exist. So society needs to step in and make sure we are punishing children for being born to the wrong parents.
As for your night school idea...the reason that I said they couldn't is that a lot of the minimum wage service jobs have you not working a fixed schedule so you can't commit to classes. If you do, you lose out on hours and pay. So you can't feed your children.
Plus you didn't address my point that the ability to learn extra skills is dependant on being lucky and having a higher ability to learn.
And news flash...minimum wage jobs like fast food are rough on you. Having to work that then come home and take care of children leaves no time nor energy for classes unless you are lucky enough to have a better than average constitution.
I work a minimum wage job and will again coming this summer while looking for something more, reasonable. I know they suck, and I know that after each day I want to go home and cry.
That for me was a motivator for going to college and working hard. And im graduating 6 days from now with a degree from a nice university because I knew what was needed for a successful life.
Yes, it can be difficult, and success isnt overnight. But there are alot of things in life that require work. And a good life is one of those.
Also, Iron Working. Here in CA, the join the union you need just a high school diploma. work your way up, you can end up making 150,000$ a year.
People are free to have as many children as they want. If they want to have more children then they can support that's a probem of their own creation.
It is of critical importance to the state that birth rates are upheld and that its citizenship does not grow up essentially outside of society. If most people can't afford to have more than one or even just one child then you're not going to have much fun in a century or so. And strictly affording isn't the only issue, either.
Absolutely is - soon machines/robots will have 50-60% of all current jobs. What people fail to understand is this is not a political issue - this is a there is no other way issue.
You mean how like automation of farming was going to 40% of the population out of work in the early 20th century.
There will be no big job loss. Jobs will just shift around.
I really don't follow - It used to take hundreds of men to work a field and collect the harvest. Now it takes a few men in giant tractors (soon will require 0 men as a robot is driving the giant tractor). Agricultural employment took a huge hit. There were other jobs available for those people to find in time though. What we are talking about here is a situation where a machine does literally everything better than a human can - for less cost - and more reliably. We are actually already at this point - the technology just hasn't entered the workforce yet. Once it does we will all eventually have a system like this.
Who made those giant tractors? Who made the parts to make them? Who designed them? How did they get to the field in the first place? There is a massive industry supporting those few remaining farmers who now drive those tractors. The displaced farmers got other jobs. As you said.
Automation moves the work around. If we manage to automate every job people do now, there will still be work for people to make it all happen. Automation will never replace people entirely.
Skinnereal wrote: There is a massive industry supporting those few remaining farmers who now drive those tractors. The displaced farmers got other jobs. As you said.
Automation moves the work around. If we manage to automate every job people do now, there will still be work for people to make it all happen. Automation will never replace people entirely.
Well, but at some point we can fully automate building tractors.
In the time before agriculture pretty much everyone's job was getting food and there was no surplus of human effort for anything else, on account we'd all starve to death. Along comes agriculture and everyone can be fed off a smaller portion of people's labor and so human effort can be spent on other things like having dedicated potters, masons, and metalworkers and so forth. Today the averaged output of a single person's farming labor in an industrialized country can feed a staggering number of people and relatively few of us are now involved in food production.
Similarly we've looked for ways to make the production of things that fill our other needs or desires more efficient and require less human effort. As the production of these things becomes more efficient (through automation or other methods), the number of people that can have a given need or desire fulfilled by the labor of one person increases. Viewed on a long time scale and assuming we don't meet with some kind of hard barrier to increasing efficiency further, this can be done for all humans needs and desires. This means that the proportion of the population needed to produce everything we need or want will shrink. Perhaps not vanish entirely but it's not hard to envision a future where the majority of people don't have to be or can't employed. If we've got 32 billion people, and all their needs & desires can be fulfilled by 10 billion that's 22 billion people with no job prospects.
Some things have already reached this level of efficiency. For example we only need one Beyonce to have a sufficient number of Beyonces for the entire worlds Beyonce recording & listening needs.
skyth wrote: Again...you were lucky that you were born with a high enough learning capacity and ability to do that.
I worked fast food as an employee and a manager. I know how hard the people there have to work to do a good job. Most physically and mentally demanding job that I have ever held. Did you work and go to school while trying to support a family on a minimum wage job?
Also considering the number of people with college degrees that work minimum wage jobs the idea that if only they had more skills or applied themselves they would do better is, quite frankly, a myth. Being able to advance and do well for yourself is more a matter of luck than anything else.
Personally I agree that the world would be a better place if having children was something that you had to earn the right to. However, that is not the world we live in and taking draconian measures against the parents just boils down to punishing children for being born to the wrong parents.
I worked minimum wage jobs during high school and college and after college. I didn't have kids until after I got a better job and got married. Having kids you can't provide for while stuck in a dead end job and having not developed useful skills is a poor decision. Nobody is forced to have kids and avoiding having kids isn't terribly difficult. No amount of govt assistance will prevent people from making poor decisions.
Going to college doesn't guarantee anything. That's why I didn't say you need a college degree I said you need useful skills. There are a whole host of college majors that don't get you prepared for finding good paying jobs. I wold have chosen a different course of study or postponed going to college for another year or two if I could go back and do it over again. The eduation that you get, the schools that you go to, the amount of family support you get for going to school and working hard at learning, what you learn, if you graduate that all helps you learn useful skills that can get you entry level jobs that have the possibility of leading to better paying jobs or a decent career path. Luck is just the occurrence of preparation intersecting with opportunity. Nobody is out there handing out great high paying jobs to random people who pass by.
skyth wrote: Again...you were lucky that you were born with a high enough learning capacity and ability to do that.
I worked fast food as an employee and a manager. I know how hard the people there have to work to do a good job. Most physically and mentally demanding job that I have ever held. Did you work and go to school while trying to support a family on a minimum wage job?
Also considering the number of people with college degrees that work minimum wage jobs the idea that if only they had more skills or applied themselves they would do better is, quite frankly, a myth. Being able to advance and do well for yourself is more a matter of luck than anything else.
Personally I agree that the world would be a better place if having children was something that you had to earn the right to. However, that is not the world we live in and taking draconian measures against the parents just boils down to punishing children for being born to the wrong parents.
I worked minimum wage jobs during high school and college and after college. I didn't have kids until after I got a better job and got married. Having kids you can't provide for while stuck in a dead end job and having not developed useful skills is a poor decision. Nobody is forced to have kids and avoiding having kids isn't terribly difficult. No amount of govt assistance will prevent people from making poor decisions.
However, it will make it so that the children won't be as likely to suffer because of other people's decisions. And again, you are punishing children for not being born to the correct parents. Regardless, people deserve to eat. Without nutrition and shelter and medical care they will not be able to be productive members of society.
. Luck is just the occurrence of preparation intersecting with opportunity.
No, luck is being born with a higher capability of learning. Luck is having good nutrition growing up so your development wasn't hurt. Luck is having a good constitution so you have the endurance to keep trying. Luck is being in an area that has good schools. Luck is being attractive (Quite frankly, if you're ugly, you will have a lot harder time getting a good paying job). Luck is being born here rather being born a woman in Sudan. Luck is not having a weird sounding name that immediately gets an application round-filed. Luck is not having to compete with someone luckier in these regards. Luck is not being forced to move around a lot growing up so you don't have the chance to develop contacts that can help you. Luck is not growing up poor so that the contacts that you have at an early age are more likely to be able to help you land a good job. Saying you make your own luck and your own success is complete BS.
Hard work and preparation has a hygiene effect on opportunity. As in it is harder to get opportunity without it. However, it does not make opportunity happen. Hard work and preparation in no ways guarantee success. The only guarantees are things that are outside of your control.
skyth wrote: Again...you were lucky that you were born with a high enough learning capacity and ability to do that.
I worked fast food as an employee and a manager. I know how hard the people there have to work to do a good job. Most physically and mentally demanding job that I have ever held. Did you work and go to school while trying to support a family on a minimum wage job?
Also considering the number of people with college degrees that work minimum wage jobs the idea that if only they had more skills or applied themselves they would do better is, quite frankly, a myth. Being able to advance and do well for yourself is more a matter of luck than anything else.
Personally I agree that the world would be a better place if having children was something that you had to earn the right to. However, that is not the world we live in and taking draconian measures against the parents just boils down to punishing children for being born to the wrong parents.
I worked minimum wage jobs during high school and college and after college. I didn't have kids until after I got a better job and got married. Having kids you can't provide for while stuck in a dead end job and having not developed useful skills is a poor decision. Nobody is forced to have kids and avoiding having kids isn't terribly difficult. No amount of govt assistance will prevent people from making poor decisions.
However, it will make it so that the children won't be as likely to suffer because of other people's decisions. And again, you are punishing children for not being born to the correct parents. Regardless, people deserve to eat. Without nutrition and shelter and medical care they will not be able to be productive members of society.
. Luck is just the occurrence of preparation intersecting with opportunity.
No, luck is being born with a higher capability of learning. Luck is having good nutrition growing up so your development wasn't hurt. Luck is having a good constitution so you have the endurance to keep trying. Luck is being in an area that has good schools. Luck is being attractive (Quite frankly, if you're ugly, you will have a lot harder time getting a good paying job). Luck is being born here rather being born a woman in Sudan. Luck is not having a weird sounding name that immediately gets an application round-filed. Luck is not having to compete with someone luckier in these regards. Luck is not being forced to move around a lot growing up so you don't have the chance to develop contacts that can help you. Luck is not growing up poor so that the contacts that you have at an early age are more likely to be able to help you land a good job. Saying you make your own luck and your own success is complete BS.
Hard work and preparation has a hygiene effect on opportunity. As in it is harder to get opportunity without it. However, it does not make opportunity happen. Hard work and preparation in no ways guarantee success. The only guarantees are things that are outside of your control.
The argument that you're making, at least the one that I'm gleaning from your posts, is that if the govt simply gave poor parents more money that they would become better parents and their children wouldn't suffer. I think that's more than a bit naive because children can suffer under bad parents regardless of what the income is for the parents and there are many factors/decisions to put people in bad situations beyond simply not having an abundance of money.
One of the reasons why I was able to better my career options was because I met my wife, who is a pediatric nurse. She worked hard in high school, paid for college with loans and paid off her loans by getting a good nursng job right out of college. Her inome enabled us to get better. Working as a pediatric nurse she sees some pretty awful heartbreaking things in regards to kids stuck in families with bad parents. Some parents have money, some don't, some get a lot of govt assistance, some don't get any, some already are involved with law enforcement and social services, some aren't. The common thread with all of them is that they're not good parents, they don't seem to have the capacity or desire to properly care for their kids and no amount of money can change that personality and behavior. That's anecdotal, I know, but I think it exemplifies a basic truth that people's character and personality will dictate behavior more so than income.
I don't have much confidence that the govt taking money out of my paycheck and giving it to poor parents will suddenly make those parents make better decisions than they previously made that led them to be in bad situation in the first place and prevent their kids from suffering. The govt does not have the ability or the resources to ensure that every child grows up in a good environment with a caring family that provides for their needs. There are people out there that can't be saved, not under the current rules our society lives by and when the govt tries to force the system to work in such a way as to try to make that possible anyway it does more harm than good.
Nobody is born lucky. You can be born into a good family that nurtures and provides for you and gives you a good education and still become a destitute drug addict or a lazy do nothing or criminal or any other kind of bad outcome. The vast majority of people don't just have things handed to them for nothing. There is always a certain amount of work and preparation involved. No type of connection or network is going to let you keep a job that you do poorly or aren't remotely qualified to do or can't do at all. Lots of people move around a lot growing up and still end up with decent jobs. People grow up all over the world on military bases or with parents that change job locations etc. Moving around can just as easily build a bigger network than prevent one from forming. If you don't work hard and apply yourself no amount of opportunity will put you in a good situation. You can't control what you're born into but you can control the decisions you make and what you do to help yourself.
There's an assumption being made that poor parents automatically = bad parents, because they weren't "sensible enough" to get a well-paid job.
This isn't true at all.
I grew up in an absolutely poor family, and had excellent loving parents.
My partner had a wealthy upbringing, but terrible parents (one of which left when she was 4).
Earning money and the stress that comes with it often gets in the way of good parenting, so I'd say that wealthier households can also be at risk of bad parenting because both parents are overworked and overstressed and unable to give heir children much attention as a result of having to work so hard to earn the money they "need" to be "good parents".
Of course, our society views success as wealth, so it will never occur to most people that it's even possible for poor parents to be good parents or wealthy parents to be bad parents, it's an assumed stereotype that anyone poor has failed at life and does not deserve to reproduce.
scarletsquig wrote: There's an assumption being made that poor parents automatically = bad parents, because they weren't "sensible enough" to get a well-paid job.
This isn't true at all.
I grew up in an absolutely poor family, and had excellent loving parents.
My partner had a wealthy upbringing, but terrible parents (one of which left when she was 4).
Earning money and the stress that comes with it often gets in the way of good parenting, so I'd say that wealthier households can also be at risk of bad parenting because both parents are overworked and overstressed and unable to give heir children much attention as a result of having to work so hard to earn the money they "need" to be "good parents".
Of course, our society views success as wealth, so it will never occur to most people that it's even possible for poor parents to be good parents or wealthy parents to be bad parents, it's an assumed stereotype that anyone poor has failed at life and does not deserve to reproduce.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Prestor Jon wrote: You can't control what you're born into but you can control the decisions you make and what you do to help yourself.
You can't control which options are available to you nor can you make sure that they are meaningful choices. Your successes and failures in life are as arbitrary as they are a product of your efforts.
Prestor Jon wrote: You can't control what you're born into but you can control the decisions you make and what you do to help yourself.
You can't control which options are available to you nor can you make sure that they are meaningful choices. Your successes and failures in life are as arbitrary as they are a product of your efforts.
You can't control your options but you control which options you pick and what decisions you make and action you take goes a long way in determining what new options become available. You can't have one without the other and all the great options in the world won't matter if you aren't willing to take advantage of them and work hard to succeed with them.
It still is the myth of the self-made man when all it is is the lucky man.
Guess what, the one person taking a chanve and suceeding is trying to claim that it was due to his skill. However, he will claim the three that took a chance and failed are lazy and failed completely through their own fault. Nice view from the ivory tower from someone who just got lucky.
skyth wrote: It still is the myth of the self-made man when all it is is the lucky man.
Guess what, the one person taking a chanve and suceeding is trying to claim that it was due to his skill. However, he will claim the three that took a chance and failed are lazy and failed completely through their own fault. Nice view from the ivory tower from someone who just got lucky.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I'm not against a social safety net but our current programs are dependency traps that actively make it harder for people to better themselves so that they don't need the assistance. Dependency isn't freedom or self agency. Assistance should be used to move up beyond the need for assistance instead of being a generational dependency that just serves to create an underclass.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I'm not against a social safety net but our current programs are dependency traps that actively make it harder for people to better themselves so that they don't need the assistance. Dependency isn't freedom or self agency. Assistance should be used to move up beyond the need for assistance instead of being a generational dependency that just serves to create an underclass.
Are you saying that you think government-sponsored programs like Breakfast Club (free breakfast at school) and swimming lessons create inter-generational dependency?
skyth wrote: It still is the myth of the self-made man when all it is is the lucky man.
Guess what, the one person taking a chanve and suceeding is trying to claim that it was due to his skill. However, he will claim the three that took a chance and failed are lazy and failed completely through their own fault. Nice view from the ivory tower from someone who just got lucky.
Fortune tends to favor the bold that get up and put in the effort. I wouldn't have gotten "lucky" if I didn't put in the work in the first place. We'll never legislate our way into a fair world. Something will always be unequal. More money. Better looks. Fortunate contacts. Bad circumstances. Some things you can't help, but others you can. My internships, references from those internships, GPA, publications, and military service landed me my current job (boss told me when he had a few drinks in him). Other members of my graduating class that decided to party like rock stars never did find a job in the field. And some of them had rich parents.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I'm not against a social safety net but our current programs are dependency traps that actively make it harder for people to better themselves so that they don't need the assistance. Dependency isn't freedom or self agency. Assistance should be used to move up beyond the need for assistance instead of being a generational dependency that just serves to create an underclass.
Are you saying that you think government-sponsored programs like Breakfast Club (free breakfast at school) and swimming lessons create inter-generational dependency?
No, what he is saying is the parents that just stay on welfare and do nothing with their life are setting a poor example for kids, that you can just do nothing and someone ill provide for you
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I'm not against a social safety net but our current programs are dependency traps that actively make it harder for people to better themselves so that they don't need the assistance. Dependency isn't freedom or self agency. Assistance should be used to move up beyond the need for assistance instead of being a generational dependency that just serves to create an underclass.
Are you saying that you think government-sponsored programs like Breakfast Club (free breakfast at school) and swimming lessons create inter-generational dependency?
No, what he is saying is the parents that just stay on welfare and do nothing with their life are setting a poor example for kids, that you can just do nothing and someone ill provide for you
Well, that's what you think he is saying I know some of these kids. They're reaching the age where they see the difference in quality of life at home vs some of their friends. They aren't thinking "Sweet! Free ride!" They're asking how I can afford to take my kids away for the long weekend. Asking about the value of education. And I believe it is the fact that they get access to decent breakfast five days a week and dance programs to give them the self worth to think they can earn that too.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I'm not against a social safety net but our current programs are dependency traps that actively make it harder for people to better themselves so that they don't need the assistance. Dependency isn't freedom or self agency. Assistance should be used to move up beyond the need for assistance instead of being a generational dependency that just serves to create an underclass.
Are you saying that you think government-sponsored programs like Breakfast Club (free breakfast at school) and swimming lessons create inter-generational dependency?
No, what he is saying is the parents that just stay on welfare and do nothing with their life are setting a poor example for kids, that you can just do nothing and someone ill provide for you
And that is based on the myth that people on government assistance don't work. The vast majority of people on government assistance do indeed work and they work harder than the people complaining about them being lazy are.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I'm not against a social safety net but our current programs are dependency traps that actively make it harder for people to better themselves so that they don't need the assistance. Dependency isn't freedom or self agency. Assistance should be used to move up beyond the need for assistance instead of being a generational dependency that just serves to create an underclass.
I understand what you're saying. The idea of a guaranteed basic income is not to be a safety net but to allow everyone to maintain a basic standard of living with no questions asked. If you want more than that you have to find an additional source of income. This might be a job, a part-time job or casual work, or self-employment of some form that might range from plumbing to live music to coaching ice skating.
This is how a lot of retired people live. They have a pension but they also do odd jobs such as exam invigilation or selling artwork to eke out their pensions.
If it truly becomes the fact that life-time unemployment is a rule rather than an exception, thanks to robotisation, I think it would be more positive to look at it as a great liberation of humans from drudgery and wage slavery. But this cannot happen if the only way to get the money needed to live is to get a non-existent job.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I'm not against a social safety net but our current programs are dependency traps that actively make it harder for people to better themselves so that they don't need the assistance. Dependency isn't freedom or self agency. Assistance should be used to move up beyond the need for assistance instead of being a generational dependency that just serves to create an underclass.
Are you saying that you think government-sponsored programs like Breakfast Club (free breakfast at school) and swimming lessons create inter-generational dependency?
No, what he is saying is the parents that just stay on welfare and do nothing with their life are setting a poor example for kids, that you can just do nothing and someone ill provide for you
And that is based on the myth that people on government assistance don't work. The vast majority of people on government assistance do indeed work and they work harder than the people complaining about them being lazy are.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the way our governments, state and federal, structure our assistance programs is bad and counter productive because it doesn't help people get off assistance it traps people into staying dependent on assistance.
I have experience with Section 8 housing assistance, that's a program where the state sets rates for what housing should cost and subsidizes it for people who can't afford it. So you can have people living in a 2 bedroom apartment and the Housing Authority says they're qualified for Section 8 assistance so the state says a 2 bedroom should coust $600 a month and the given the amount of income the person has, whether its fixed income like social security/disability or a minimum wage job or whatever, the state pays $550 a month and the person pays $50 a month. If that person's income increases then that person risks no longer qualifying for Section 8 housing assistance and will have to pay all of their rent without assistance. So residents in the complex who were on Section 8 assistance had to be careful not to earn more money and lose their assistance. It's very difficult to make an earnings jump from minimum wage + assistance (housing, food stamps, welfare, WIC, medicare/medicaid, etc) to a higher wage that is greater than the combined sum of the minimum wage and assistance so it discouages people from taking small steps upward and incentivizes them to stay on assistance. The longer they stay on assistance in a low skill dead end job the harder it is to get a better job and the more dependent they become on assistance. Then if they have children those children grow up in an environment where it is normal to avoid making more money so you can keep collecting assistance they think that's normal and it becomes generational.
The same thing happens with unemployment. You lose your job, you file for unemployment and you get paid $ per month in unemployment so you aren't going to go take a job that pays less than $ per month because that wouldn't make financial sense. So you stay on unemployment until you can get a better job but he longer you stay on unemployment the harder it is to get a new and better job. Then eventually unemployment runs out and you're stuck with a big gap in your resume, no new skills, and no unemployment $ so you're worse off than when you first started collecting unemployment.
Those programs are counter productive because they penalize you for improving yoursef unless you can improve by a miraculous margin which in turn disincentivizes the very thing you're trying to get people to do. The government shouldn't make it extra difficult to work your way off of assistance. Of course having people dependent on government assistance makes it easier for politicians to win their votes by manipulating those assistance programs.
I agree. People can be wonderful parents or horrible parents regardless of income or wealth. Sometimes the state can help children who are stuck with bad parents, too often it can't. It's heart breaking to see kids suffer through no fault of their own but it's also a very dangerous slippery slope when we start empowering the state to get involved with who can have children, what constitutes good parenting and when children should be removed from families. There aren't a lot of societal ills that can be easily cured by having the govt cut some checks and through money at them.
Not throwing money a parents, but throwing money at programs. I live in the city I grew up in, and the school my kids go to now was the "bad" school when I was their age. Due to increased funding, it has changed from the worst public school in the city to one of the best. My kids have access to programs like music, dance and swimming that I would be very hard-pressed to provide. The problem kids (formerly called lazy or stupid) have extra support from teaching assistants and actually have a future better than their mentally ill or addicted parents (formerly called losers or deadbeats).
Seriously, a well-regulated socialist democracy is a paradise for it's populace.
I'm not against a social safety net but our current programs are dependency traps that actively make it harder for people to better themselves so that they don't need the assistance. Dependency isn't freedom or self agency. Assistance should be used to move up beyond the need for assistance instead of being a generational dependency that just serves to create an underclass.
I understand what you're saying. The idea of a guaranteed basic income is not to be a safety net but to allow everyone to maintain a basic standard of living with no questions asked. If you want more than that you have to find an additional source of income. This might be a job, a part-time job or casual work, or self-employment of some form that might range from plumbing to live music to coaching ice skating.
This is how a lot of retired people live. They have a pension but they also do odd jobs such as exam invigilation or selling artwork to eke out their pensions.
If it truly becomes the fact that life-time unemployment is a rule rather than an exception, thanks to robotisation, I think it would be more positive to look at it as a great liberation of humans from drudgery and wage slavery. But this cannot happen if the only way to get the money needed to live is to get a non-existent job.
Where does the money come from? The government either has to either create it, borrow it or collect it from somebody. We already spend trillions a year and borrow billions per month and we have record setting lows in labor participation rates and underemployment. What part of the federal budget are we cutting to make room for guaranteed income payments to 320,000,000 people or where are we getting new money from to fund it?
If the amount is great enough to give low income or jobless people a comfortable standard of living then it's going to drive up the cost of entry level labor and make it that much harder for low skill people to get jobs. If it's only a small amount of money it won't pull anyone out of poverty. If the idea is to allow people to do more volunteer work or take more low paying jobs then it's just more corporate welfare, employers can keep wages low because the govt provided monthly income picks up the slack. It also increases the labor cost of full time work, why work full time if you can work part time and get by fine with the additional govt income? If full time work has to pay more to convince people to work 40+ hours a week then that reduces the number of jobs available which hurts employment. If fewer people are working full time and most people are dependent on monthly govt payments to subsidize their standard of living then the entire economy is now wholly dependent on govt money.
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skyth wrote: It still is the myth of the self-made man when all it is is the lucky man.
Guess what, the one person taking a chanve and suceeding is trying to claim that it was due to his skill. However, he will claim the three that took a chance and failed are lazy and failed completely through their own fault. Nice view from the ivory tower from someone who just got lucky.
You have to take chances and work hard if you want to be successful. Outside of straight up nepotism or corruption you can't get promotions and job offers without hard work. You've gotten promotions, did you earn them from drawing straws or were you recognized for working hard and getting things done? Even lucky people have to work hard. I could work hard on my jumpshot and never make it into the NBA but Lebron James wins the genetic lottery with his body type and athleticism and his hard work makes him a superstar in the NBA. Steph Curry wasn't born with the ability to make a jumpshot he had to work at it even though he has natural ability and talent. Even idiot savants have to learn their job and do it well.
Nothing guarantees a postive outcome, not hard work, education, luck, nothing. But if you don't take a chance and try hard then it's unlikely that a better situation is going to just fall into your lap through random chance. Working hard and taking calculated risks is commendable behavior, you don't have to be Teddy Roosevelt to find that to be admirable. It's only normal to recognize that your hard work and risk taking paid off when that happens. It's also normal and honest to recognize that taking risks and working hard doesn't guarantee success either. Someting like 50% of new restaurants fail and it's not because the people who own them and work in them don't try their best but it's still impossible to create a successful restaurant if you don't try to open one in the first place.
So it boils down to chance whether a person succeeds or not.
Guaranteed income would remove the bad part of risk taking. If trying to improve your position will leave you and your family homeless if you fail there is too much risk to try. Guaranteed income means that they will still have the ability to support themselves if something goes wrong. It also gets rid of the section 8 housing problem you mentioned.
skyth wrote: It still is the myth of the self-made man when all it is is the lucky man.
Guess what, the one person taking a chanve and suceeding is trying to claim that it was due to his skill. However, he will claim the three that took a chance and failed are lazy and failed completely through their own fault. Nice view from the ivory tower from someone who just got lucky.
You *make* your own luck in life.
So, get boot-strapp'n boyo.
See exactly. I mean right now there's some loser in Africa dying of polio. If only he'd tried a little higher before he was born he could managed to pop out the womb in america and gotten vaccine. What a joke. Hell, sometimes I see those 16yr old kids with sports cars and just think "If I'd tried a little harder maybe my daddy would have bought me a fancy car when I was teenager too. *sigh* but I was lazy and didn't make an effort so I never even met the man. Oh well, maybe I'll do better next time I'm gestating"
skyth wrote: It still is the myth of the self-made man when all it is is the lucky man.
Guess what, the one person taking a chanve and suceeding is trying to claim that it was due to his skill. However, he will claim the three that took a chance and failed are lazy and failed completely through their own fault. Nice view from the ivory tower from someone who just got lucky.
You *make* your own luck in life.
So, get boot-strapp'n boyo.
See exactly. I mean right now there's some loser in Africa dying of polio. If only he'd tried a little higher before he was born he could managed to pop out the womb in america and gotten vaccine. What a joke. Hell, sometimes I see those 16yr old kids with sports cars and just think "If I'd tried a little harder maybe my daddy would have bought me a fancy car when I was teenager too. *sigh* but I was lazy and didn't make an effort so I never even met the man. Oh well, maybe I'll do better next time I'm gestating"
skyth wrote: So it boils down to chance whether a person succeeds or not.
Guaranteed income would remove the bad part of risk taking. If trying to improve your position will leave you and your family homeless if you fail there is too much risk to try. Guaranteed income means that they will still have the ability to support themselves if something goes wrong. It also gets rid of the section 8 housing problem you mentioned.
Or we could just change our assistance programs to gradual phaseouts to allow people to make normal incremental improvements in their lives and income without having to take on drastic negative consequences. We already have programs that are supposed to be helping people improve themselves, if they're not currently working as well as we want them to lets change them before we scrap them entirely and go with a new untried sweeping reform that could have horrible unintended consequences. It's not a binary solution set of guaranteed monthly income (that has no track record of success anywhere in the world because nobody thinks its a good enough idea to try it) and the same broken programs that haven't succeeded over 50+ years of trying.
skyth wrote: It still is the myth of the self-made man when all it is is the lucky man.
Guess what, the one person taking a chanve and suceeding is trying to claim that it was due to his skill. However, he will claim the three that took a chance and failed are lazy and failed completely through their own fault. Nice view from the ivory tower from someone who just got lucky.
You *make* your own luck in life.
So, get boot-strapp'n boyo.
See exactly. I mean right now there's some loser in Africa dying of polio. If only he'd tried a little higher before he was born he could managed to pop out the womb in america and gotten vaccine. What a joke. Hell, sometimes I see those 16yr old kids with sports cars and just think "If I'd tried a little harder maybe my daddy would have bought me a fancy car when I was teenager too. *sigh* but I was lazy and didn't make an effort so I never even met the man. Oh well, maybe I'll do better next time I'm gestating"
Being born in America is no guarantee of not being born with serious birth defects, conditions or contracting life threatening diseases.
Plus every program was untried at first. Doesn't meam it won't work.
You still haven't addressed that the ability to develop new skills is determined by luck.
And I forgot to address something I wanted to. You brought up the red herring of labor particopation rates being low. I don't neccasarily see this as a bad thing. Especially when this is caused by a couple factors...baby boomers retiring and older workers being laid off because they are too skilled and then no one wanting to hire them.
skyth wrote: Plus every program was untried at first. Doesn't meam it won't work.
You still haven't addressed that the ability to develop new skills is determined by luck.
And I forgot to address something I wanted to. You brought up the red herring of labor particopation rates being low. I don't neccasarily see this as a bad thing. Especially when this is caused by a couple factors...baby boomers retiring and older workers being laid off because they are too skilled and then no one wanting to hire them.
It's not. If you want to learn new skills you just need the desire to learn them. Whether that's making time to learn skills via the internet for free at your local library, taking night classes at community colleges, doing web based home study certification clases, etc. and if need be you can apply for loans and grants. What does luck have to do with it? If you don't have the motivation to use your spare time to better yourself then you won't. Nobody is going to randomly drop off new job skills at your home for you just throught the luck of the draw. The only way you obtain new skills is to learn them and that requires work and effort on yoru part.
Low labor participation rates mean that there are already a large number of people not working. Programs that can incentive not working will only exacerbate that problem. Fewer people working reduces the ability for the govt to collect tax revenue beacause less people working hurts the economy. Less tax revenue inhibits the ability for the govt to fund programs to help people.
Yes, every program has to get starterd sometime but why are you dead set on starting this one when we already have existing programs that are desperately in need of fixing. Why scrap programs that have the potential right now to be beneficial and instead replace with with a social experiment that could fail horribly?
Being born in America is no guarantee of not being born with serious birth defects, conditions or contracting life threatening diseases.
I'm fairly sure rates of Polio are much lower in the america than rural Africa. If you've got got some source that indicate otherwise, I'd love to see them.
Being born in America is no guarantee of not being born with serious birth defects, conditions or contracting life threatening diseases.
I'm fairly sure rates of Polio are much lower in the america than rural Africa. If you've got got some source that indicate otherwise, I'd love to see them.
That's not because of a lack of government programs. In Africa's case, it's because of their governments that they are in the shape they are in now. And it certainly wasn't because of government mandates and regulations that the vaccine was developed in the first place.
And there is more that can go wrong with a child at birth than just polio, which has largely been stamped out in the United States (it happens, but very rarely).
And there is more that can go wrong with a child at birth than just polio, which has largely been stamped out in the United States (it happens, but very rarely).
See. If those kids didn't want polio they should have made a big effort to be born in the united states. One's life is the result of one's own effort and all. If they didn't want polio they should have just tried harder to be born where it wasn't a problem. As for all those kids born with birth defects in america, they just didn't put in enough effort to be born in the future after we've cured them.
skyth wrote: Plus every program was untried at first. Doesn't meam it won't work.
You still haven't addressed that the ability to develop new skills is determined by luck.
And I forgot to address something I wanted to. You brought up the red herring of labor particopation rates being low. I don't neccasarily see this as a bad thing. Especially when this is caused by a couple factors...baby boomers retiring and older workers being laid off because they are too skilled and then no one wanting to hire them.
It's not. If you want to learn new skills you just need the desire to learn them. Whether that's making time to learn skills via the internet for free at your local library, taking night classes at community colleges, doing web based home study certification clases, etc. and if need be you can apply for loans and grants. What does luck have to do with it? If you don't have the motivation to use your spare time to better yourself then you won't. Nobody is going to randomly drop off new job skills at your home for you just throught the luck of the draw. The only way you obtain new skills is to learn them and that requires work and effort on yoru part.
It takes more than that. Intelligence (IE the ability to learn) is not something under your control. It is solely determined by luck. Being born with above average IQ and not having your brain development made worse through poor nutrition is not something that you can work harder at. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people don't learn new skills that pay well easily or even at all. It's not a matter of working hard or having motivation at all, but raw innate ability. To be able to study while working and taking care of children requires you to be healthier than average and to have better endurance than average. It also requires you to be lucky enough to have a job with a fixed schedule where you can dedicate time to studying. Plus what do you do about the people that borrow money to go to school but can't find a better job and now can't pay back the loans and still have enough money to feed and shelter themselves and their families?
Low labor participation rates mean that there are already a large number of people not working. Programs that can incentive not working will only exacerbate that problem. Fewer people working reduces the ability for the govt to collect tax revenue beacause less people working hurts the economy. Less tax revenue inhibits the ability for the govt to fund programs to help people.
So in other words seniors should have to work to survive until the day they drop dead. You ignored absolutely everything I said in this regard. Labor participation rates are at a record low because we have a record number of senior citizens. Your 'incentives' won't do anything to 'fix' that and a fix is not needed. Like I said, it's a red herring. Retired people still spend money, and in fact, spend a higher portion of their income than middle class or wealthy individuals.
Yes, every program has to get starterd sometime but why are you dead set on starting this one when we already have existing programs that are desperately in need of fixing. Why scrap programs that have the potential right now to be beneficial and instead replace with with a social experiment that could fail horribly?
I don't see it failing horribly. It's basically a more efficient social safety net. Means testing creates issues plus has a larger administrative overhead. The issues with current social safety nets is that people play political football with them because people on them are 'lazy' and 'unmotivated'.
And there is more that can go wrong with a child at birth than just polio, which has largely been stamped out in the United States (it happens, but very rarely).
See. If those kids didn't want polio they should have made a big effort to be born in the united states. One's life is the result of one's own effort and all. If they didn't want polio they should have just tried harder to be born where it wasn't a problem. As for all those kids born with birth defects in america, they just didn't put in enough effort to be born in the future after we've cured them.
You know, not one of Prestor Jon's ideas are meant for an undeveloped nation so comparing them to one ends up being silly. He has been addressing 1st world nations and in particular the US. Every kid born in the US has opportunities most kids born on the continent of Africa will never have. That is life.
Mental capacity is hardly the only reason that people are unable to increase their income potential.
This thread reads like a transcript from a Victorian gentlemen's club.
"They simply need to take advantage of the opportunities provided to them. Hard work is all they need!"
"William, you know very well that hard work is no subsitute for the limited cranial capacity of the lower classes!"
"My gardner has the sharp look of a gypsy, and yet I now pay him a shilling a month more since he apprenticed to the wainwright!"
Being born in America is no guarantee of not being born with serious birth defects, conditions or contracting life threatening diseases.
I'm fairly sure rates of Polio are much lower in the america than rural Africa. If you've got got some source that indicate otherwise, I'd love to see them.
Polio is the only disease that counts? Our neighbor's son was born with cerebral palsy and one our daughters friends has an older brother with severe autism. Again, being born in America doesn't guarantee you anything other than US citizenship. If you choose to have children you roll the dice and take responsibility for whatever comes. People are born into tough heartbreaking situations all over the world. I'm not seein the point behind your game of finding somebody somewhere who's worse off than somebody else.
skyth wrote: Plus every program was untried at first. Doesn't meam it won't work.
You still haven't addressed that the ability to develop new skills is determined by luck.
And I forgot to address something I wanted to. You brought up the red herring of labor particopation rates being low. I don't neccasarily see this as a bad thing. Especially when this is caused by a couple factors...baby boomers retiring and older workers being laid off because they are too skilled and then no one wanting to hire them.
It's not. If you want to learn new skills you just need the desire to learn them. Whether that's making time to learn skills via the internet for free at your local library, taking night classes at community colleges, doing web based home study certification clases, etc. and if need be you can apply for loans and grants. What does luck have to do with it? If you don't have the motivation to use your spare time to better yourself then you won't. Nobody is going to randomly drop off new job skills at your home for you just throught the luck of the draw. The only way you obtain new skills is to learn them and that requires work and effort on yoru part.
It takes more than that. Intelligence (IE the ability to learn) is not something under your control. It is solely determined by luck. Being born with above average IQ and not having your brain development made worse through poor nutrition is not something that you can work harder at. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people don't learn new skills that pay well easily or even at all. It's not a matter of working hard or having motivation at all, but raw innate ability. To be able to study while working and taking care of children requires you to be healthier than average and to have better endurance than average. It also requires you to be lucky enough to have a job with a fixed schedule where you can dedicate time to studying. Plus what do you do about the people that borrow money to go to school but can't find a better job and now can't pay back the loans and still have enough money to feed and shelter themselves and their families?
Low labor participation rates mean that there are already a large number of people not working. Programs that can incentive not working will only exacerbate that problem. Fewer people working reduces the ability for the govt to collect tax revenue beacause less people working hurts the economy. Less tax revenue inhibits the ability for the govt to fund programs to help people.
So in other words seniors should have to work to survive until the day they drop dead. You ignored absolutely everything I said in this regard. Labor participation rates are at a record low because we have a record number of senior citizens. Your 'incentives' won't do anything to 'fix' that and a fix is not needed. Like I said, it's a red herring. Retired people still spend money, and in fact, spend a higher portion of their income than middle class or wealthy individuals.
Yes, every program has to get starterd sometime but why are you dead set on starting this one when we already have existing programs that are desperately in need of fixing. Why scrap programs that have the potential right now to be beneficial and instead replace with with a social experiment that could fail horribly?
I don't see it failing horribly. It's basically a more efficient social safety net. Means testing creates issues plus has a larger administrative overhead. The issues with current social safety nets is that people play political football with them because people on them are 'lazy' and 'unmotivated'.
serious question Is there some kind of study or data or something you can link or direct me to that explains that malnutrition induced learning disabilities or cognitive impairment is a widespread problem in the US? I know it's a legitimate health concern but I've never thought it was a major factor in people getting stuck in dead end low wage jobs. I still don't think guaranteed monthly incomes fix that problem. People can and will still make bad unhealthy neglectful choices about their health and their kids health. Like I mentioned my wife is a pediatric nurse and she's seen all kinds of gak like parents putting Mountain Dew in bottles and sippy cups and young kids that contract type 2 diabetes from being obese. You can give their parents money but it won't stop them from malnourishing their kids.
My concern over labor participation rates isn't seniors it's that guaranteed govt stipends will discourage more people in their prime from working. It would be nice to get free money and pursue hobbies instead of working full time jobs but there is still work that needs to get done. I think we need better programs to help people get jobs not more programs to help people not have to work at all. The economy is barely growing, wages are stagnant and it's hard to find good jobs so I think paying people to stay home would be counter productive, at least until the robot overlords take over.
I have more hope of politicians finally taking steps to fix existing programs that at least have existing constituencies in both the public and private sectors than I do in politicians ever defunding and scrapping those programs in order to start a brand new program that will be just as susceptible to politicking and mismanagement but won't have existent constituencies to push for reform. Congress won't act out of altruism. More pressure and leverage can be applied to fix what exists than can be pushed onto a new program. Plus realistically we can't afford to tack on guaranteed income payments on top of existing programs and it's virtually impossible to get Congress to cut or defund anything.
It's quite amazing that people are arguing that wealth and success is all about luck, or it isn't related to luck at all. There seems to be little consideration that both elements play a part.
I mean, I do pretty well, and yeah I worked to graduate uni, get a professional qualification and work my way through a number of jobs building my resume and skill base. But I also started my career at the beginning of a decade long boom in the state, and that helped me get promoted and helped massively with my early investments. I have younger friends who did everything I did, but they're finding promotions much harder to come by, and are stuck with very high mortgages in a flat property market.
Really, I think the issue is that people tend to see the luck other people had but not their hard work, and tend to credit their own hard work but not their luck. The whole thing becomes a process of self-congratulation, instead of a means of understanding how the world actually works.
Monkey Tamer wrote: We'll never legislate our way into a fair world. Something will always be unequal.
False objective. We don't need to create a completely fair world in order to have been successful, we only need to create a more fair world.
And if anyone wants doubts how much more equal the developed world has become, I'd ask them to go and read about the horrific conditions that the bottom of society lived in 100 years ago, especially children. It was common and accepted that dhildren would die of malnutrition, or having lifelong stunted growth and mental development. Now those things are incredibly rare, and never happen through a simple lack of resources. We have produced a much more equal world by building the safety net.
Free capital movement (absence of capital controls)
An independent monetary policy
Option (a): A stable exchange rate and free capital flows (but not an independent monetary policy because setting a domestic interest rate that is different from the world interest rate would undermine a stable exchange rate due to appreciation or depreciation pressure on the domestic currency).
Option (b): An independent monetary policy and free capital flows (but not a stable exchange rate).
Option (c): A stable exchange rate and independent monetary policy (but no free capital flows, which would require the use of capital controls).
There is an economic theory, that with industrialization, governments will have to forget about deficits and continuously spend or provide massive payments in order to keep the economy going.
Alternatively re-employing barriers to trade will improve employment as well.
sebster wrote: It's quite amazing that people are arguing that wealth and success is all about luck, or it isn't related to luck at all. There seems to be little consideration that both elements play a part.
I mean, I do pretty well, and yeah I worked to graduate uni, get a professional qualification and work my way through a number of jobs building my resume and skill base. But I also started my career at the beginning of a decade long boom in the state, and that helped me get promoted and helped massively with my early investments. I have younger friends who did everything I did, but they're finding promotions much harder to come by, and are stuck with very high mortgages in a flat property market.
Really, I think the issue is that people tend to see the luck other people had but not their hard work, and tend to credit their own hard work but not their luck. The whole thing becomes a process of self-congratulation, instead of a means of understanding how the world actually works.
Monkey Tamer wrote: We'll never legislate our way into a fair world. Something will always be unequal.
False objective. We don't need to create a completely fair world in order to have been successful, we only need to create a more fair world.
And if anyone wants doubts how much more equal the developed world has become, I'd ask them to go and read about the horrific conditions that the bottom of society lived in 100 years ago, especially children. It was common and accepted that dhildren would die of malnutrition, or having lifelong stunted growth and mental development. Now those things are incredibly rare, and never happen through a simple lack of resources. We have produced a much more equal world by building the safety net.
I don't think anyone is arguing that luck has nothing to do with it. I'm certainly not. It's a combined creation of opportunity/chance/luck and hard work. When people have "good luck" it is often due to an opportunity occurs for a person who is prepared to take advantage of it. Opportunity by itself guarantees you nothing, neither does hard work. You can work really hard at your job and it can still be a demoralizing dead end job for you. You can't control the opportunities that come your way but you can control if you're ready to take advantage of them, if you've worked hard and created good references, if you are willing to take a chance, etc. The idea that we should dismiss the idea that hard work will get you ahead as BS is a terrible one. Working hard will help you take advantage of opportunities for promotions and better jobs, not working hard will hurt you chances of getting promotions or better jobs. Whether or not you get offered promotions or jobs and who offers them to you is beyond your control and the opportunities you come across are determined by chance and networking. It's rare to find success stories where luck and hard work weren't both involved.
sebster wrote: It's quite amazing that people are arguing that wealth and success is all about luck, or it isn't related to luck at all. There seems to be little consideration that both elements play a part.
I mean, I do pretty well, and yeah I worked to graduate uni, get a professional qualification and work my way through a number of jobs building my resume and skill base. But I also started my career at the beginning of a decade long boom in the state, and that helped me get promoted and helped massively with my early investments. I have younger friends who did everything I did, but they're finding promotions much harder to come by, and are stuck with very high mortgages in a flat property market.
Really, I think the issue is that people tend to see the luck other people had but not their hard work, and tend to credit their own hard work but not their luck. The whole thing becomes a process of self-congratulation, instead of a means of understanding how the world actually .
I never argued that hard work doesn't matter...I've always said that it has a hygeine effect on success. Success is harder to get without it(it is pretty much required for it) however, you can also work hard and not suceed. Hard work does not guarantee success and I hate the myth that the lower income people are just lazy which is not true.
sebster wrote: It's quite amazing that people are arguing that wealth and success is all about luck, or it isn't related to luck at all. There seems to be little consideration that both elements play a part.
I mean, I do pretty well, and yeah I worked to graduate uni, get a professional qualification and work my way through a number of jobs building my resume and skill base. But I also started my career at the beginning of a decade long boom in the state, and that helped me get promoted and helped massively with my early investments. I have younger friends who did everything I did, but they're finding promotions much harder to come by, and are stuck with very high mortgages in a flat property market.
Really, I think the issue is that people tend to see the luck other people had but not their hard work, and tend to credit their own hard work but not their luck. The whole thing becomes a process of self-congratulation, instead of a means of understanding how the world actually works.
Monkey Tamer wrote: We'll never legislate our way into a fair world. Something will always be unequal.
False objective. We don't need to create a completely fair world in order to have been successful, we only need to create a more fair world.
And if anyone wants doubts how much more equal the developed world has become, I'd ask them to go and read about the horrific conditions that the bottom of society lived in 100 years ago, especially children. It was common and accepted that dhildren would die of malnutrition, or having lifelong stunted growth and mental development. Now those things are incredibly rare, and never happen through a simple lack of resources. We have produced a much more equal world by building the safety net.
I can agree with this. I'd rather us move toward a more fair world. There have been several instances where I wasn't rewarded for working hard, or worse, someone else was rewarded. There will always be factors beyond control, and I've learned to let go and not worry about it at night. Good people get the short end of the stick all the time, and it sucks.
sebster wrote: It's quite amazing that people are arguing that wealth and success is all about luck, or it isn't related to luck at all. There seems to be little consideration that both elements play a part.
I mean, I do pretty well, and yeah I worked to graduate uni, get a professional qualification and work my way through a number of jobs building my resume and skill base. But I also started my career at the beginning of a decade long boom in the state, and that helped me get promoted and helped massively with my early investments. I have younger friends who did everything I did, but they're finding promotions much harder to come by, and are stuck with very high mortgages in a flat property market.
Really, I think the issue is that people tend to see the luck other people had but not their hard work, and tend to credit their own hard work but not their luck. The whole thing becomes a process of self-congratulation, instead of a means of understanding how the world actually .
I never argued that hard work doesn't matter...I've always said that it has a hygeine effect on success. Success is harder to get without it(it is pretty much required for it) however, you can also work hard and not suceed. Hard work does not guarantee success and I hate the myth that the lower income people are just lazy which is not true.
For what it's worth I do agree with you on the myth that only lazy people end up on welfare. That's just bad zero sum politics that we get from having a two party system that pushes politicians to always oppose whatever the other side favors and act as if there are only two polar opposite sides to every issue. There will always be people that are happy to just work the system and there will always be people that desperately want to achieve better but are stuck in their current situation. Helping people that want to succeed is always worthwhile but unfortunately we typically have govt that tries a one size fits all approach so we help the people that don't care as much as the people that do care so there is always ample fodder for either side to spin to support whatever narrative they want to create. It's extremely difficult to get the people in charge to have pragmatic honest conversations about how effective our social safety net is, how it could be better and what changes we should make to improve it.
Helping people that want to succeed is always worthwhile but unfortunately we typically have govt that tries a one size fits all approach so we help the people that don't care as much as the people that do care so there is always ample fodder for either side to spin to support whatever narrative they want to create.
The problem isn't a one size fits all solution at all, the problem is a network of individual means tested programs that take away any incentive to increase one's income. It's this patchwork of programs that people have to navigate to where earning any money on your own can have disastrous effects rather than be rewarded and encouraged.
I say tear it all down and replace it with a guaranteed minimum income for everyone slightly higher than current welfare rates. This idea of paying out $3500 in Switzerland when their welfare rate is around $950 is totally stupid. The first goal should be the alleviation of poverty with a program that doesn't get clawed back when people earn more on their own.
When you say "help the people that don't care as much as the people that do care" I hear more means-tested nonsense that keeps people in poverty. As if we can evaluate how much someone cares and have that be a factor and dump anyone who we don't feel "cares enough."
Prestor Jon wrote: I don't think anyone is arguing that luck has nothing to do with it. I'm certainly not.
My apologies then. I might have misread as the conversation continued - people were making points and counterpoints and I read them as absolute positions.
It's rare to find success stories where luck and hard work weren't both involved.
Yep, this.
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skyth wrote: I never argued that hard work doesn't matter...I've always said that it has a hygeine effect on success. Success is harder to get without it(it is pretty much required for it) however, you can also work hard and not suceed. Hard work does not guarantee success and I hate the myth that the lower income people are just lazy which is not true.
Cool. I think we agree completely.
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Monkey Tamer wrote: I can agree with this. I'd rather us move toward a more fair world. There have been several instances where I wasn't rewarded for working hard, or worse, someone else was rewarded. There will always be factors beyond control, and I've learned to let go and not worry about it at night. Good people get the short end of the stick all the time, and it sucks.
Yeah, I got really worked up over a few instances when I was younger. To be fair one was an absolute doozy. I worked about 60 hours in three days to get a project up and fully running to meet someone else's arbitrary timeline... and then at the whole company meeting the CEO asked my co-worker to stand up and get a round of applause... because the CEO forgot who was the Management Accountant and who was the Budget Accountant.
Mind you, there's also plenty of times that I've looked great because of someone else's hardwork, I tend no to think about those anywhere near as often As you say, better to just let go.
Helping people that want to succeed is always worthwhile but unfortunately we typically have govt that tries a one size fits all approach so we help the people that don't care as much as the people that do care so there is always ample fodder for either side to spin to support whatever narrative they want to create.
The problem isn't a one size fits all solution at all, the problem is a network of individual means tested programs that take away any incentive to increase one's income. It's this patchwork of programs that people have to navigate to where earning any money on your own can have disastrous effects rather than be rewarded and encouraged.
I say tear it all down and replace it with a guaranteed minimum income for everyone slightly higher than current welfare rates. This idea of paying out $3500 in Switzerland when their welfare rate is around $950 is totally stupid. The first goal should be the alleviation of poverty with a program that doesn't get clawed back when people earn more on their own.
When you say "help the people that don't care as much as the people that do care" I hear more means-tested nonsense that keeps people in poverty. As if we can evaluate how much someone cares and have that be a factor and dump anyone who we don't feel "cares enough."
The point I was trying to make was that there are plenty of people out there that are trying to overcome the difficult circumstances they find themselves in and that our assistance programs should try to find those people and help them succeed in bettering themselves. Some people in bad situations are very difficult to help get out of those situations due to attitudes, behaviors and other factors. What works for some people isn't going to work for everyone.
The example that comes to my mind is the relocation of people out of urban housing projects years ago. Housing projects that are urban ghettos aren't good for anyone, nobody should want them to exist and nobody should want to live in them because they create a detrimental environment for their residents. However, simply moving everyone out to new locations/the suburbs isn't a solution to everyone stuck in a housing project. A change in scenery via a move to a nicer neighborhood can be the springboard some people need to get away from the bad influences and problems of a ghetto environment but if you just relocate every resident of the projects indescriminately then you'll also be relocating people who aren't ready or interested in changing for the better and sticking them in new neighborhoods where they are outside of their comfort zone and don't have the social support network they knew back in the projects. I'm all for govt assistance to help people I just want the govt to take the time and effort to get it right and do it effectively.
Starting in 1977, in what became known as the Gautreaux program, hundreds of families relocated to suburban neighborhoods—most of them about 25miles from the ghetto, with very low poverty rates and good public schools. The authorities had screened the families carefully, inspecting their apartments and checking for good credit histories. They didn’t offer the vouchers to families with more than five children, or to those that were indifferent to leaving the projects. They were looking for families “seeking a healthy environment, good schools and an opportunity to live in a safe and decent home.”
A well-known Gautreaux study, released in 1991, showed spectacular results. The sociologist James Rosenbaum at Northwestern University had followed 114 families who had moved to the suburbs, although only 68 were still cooperating by the time he released the study. Compared to former public-housing residents who’d stayed within the city, the suburban dwellers were four times as likely to finish high school, twice as likely to attend college, and more likely to be employed. Newsweek called the program “stunning” and said the project renewed “one’s faith in the struggle.” In a glowing segment, a 60 Minutes reporter asked one Gautreaux boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I haven’t really made up my mind,” the boy said. “Construction worker, architect, anesthesiologist.” Another child’s mother declared it “the end of poverty” for her family.
In 1992, 7-year-old Dantrell Davis from the Cabrini-Green project was walking to school, holding his mother’s hand, when a stray bullet killed him. The hand-holding detail seemed to stir the city in a way that none of the other murder stories coming out of the high-rises ever had. “Tear down the high rises,” demanded an editorial in the Chicago Tribune, while that boy’s image “burns in our civic memory.”
HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros was receptive to the idea. He spent a few nights in Chicago’s infamous Robert Taylor Homes and subsequently spoke about “these enclaves of poverty,” where “drug dealers control the stairwells, where children can’t go outside to play, where mothers put their infants to bed in bathtubs.” If people could see beyond the graffitied hallways of these projects, they could get above that way of life, argued the researchers, and learn to live like their middle-class brothers and sisters. Cisneros floated the idea of knocking down the projects and moving the residents out into the metro area.
The federal government encouraged the demolitions with a $6.3billion program to redevelop the old project sites, called HOPE VI, or “Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere.” The program was launched in the same spirit as Bill Clinton’s national service initiative—communities working together to “rebuild lives.” One Chicago housing official mused about “architects and lawyers and bus drivers and people on welfare living together.” Wrecking balls began hitting the Chicago high-rises in the mid-1990s. Within a few years, tens of thousands of public-housing residents all over the country were leaving their apartments. In place of the projects, new developments arose, with fanciful names like “Jazz on the Boulevard” or “Centennial Place.” In Memphis, the Hurt Village project was razed to make way for “Uptown Square,” which the local developer Henry Turley declared would be proof that you could turn the inner city into a “nice place for poor people” to live. Robert Lipscomb, the dynamic director of the Memphis Housing Authority, announced, “Memphis is on the move.”
When the Dixie Homes housing project was demolished, in 2006, a group of residents moved to a place called Springdale Creek Apartments in North Memphis, on Doug Barnes’s beat. They were not handpicked, nor part of any study, and nobody told them to move to a low-poverty neighborhood. Like tens of thousands of others, they moved because they had to, into a place they could afford. Springdale Creek is not fancy, but the complex tries to enforce its own quiet order. A sliding black gate separates the row of brick buildings from busy Jackson Avenue, where kids hang out by the KFC. Leslie Shaw was sold when she heard the phrase gated community mentioned by the building manager.
When Shaw saw the newly painted white walls, “so fresh and clean,” with no old smudges from somebody else’s kids, she decided to give away all her furniture. “I didn’t want to move in here with any garbage from Dixie,” she said. “I said to myself, ‘Might as well start over.’” She bought a new brown velour couch and a matching loveseat. She bought a washer and dryer, and a dresser for her 8-year-old grandson, Gerrell, who lives with her. The only thing she kept was a bookshelf, to hold the paperbacks coming monthly from the book club she’d decided to join.
Shaw is 11 years crack-free and, at 47, eager to take advantage of every free program that comes her way—a leadership class, Windows Vista training, a citizen police course, a writing workshop. What drove her—“I got to be honest with you”—was proving her middle-class sisters and brother, “who didn’t think I’d get above it,” wrong. Just after she moved in, one sister came over and said, “This is nice. I thought they would put you back in the projects or something.”
more of the article that I've spoilered to avoid a wall of text
Spoiler:
I visited Shaw in February, about a year and a half after she’d moved in. The view outside her first-floor window was still pretty nice—no junk littered the front lawn and few apartments stood vacant. But slowly, she told me, Springdale Creek has started to feel less like a suburban paradise and more like Dixie Homes. Neighborhood boys often kick open the gate or break the keypad. Many nights they just randomly press phone numbers until someone lets them in. The gate’s main use seems to be as a sort of low-thrills ride for younger kids whose parents aren’t paying attention. They hang from the gate as it slides open; a few have gotten their fingers caught and had to be taken to the emergency room.
When Shaw recounts all the bad things that have happened at Springdale Creek, she does it matter-of-factly (even as a grandma, she says, “I can jump those boys if I have to”). Car thefts were common at first—Shaw’s neighbor Laura Evans is one of about 10 victims in the past two years. Thieves have relieved the apartment management company of some of its computers, extra refrigerators, and spare stoves. A few Dixie boys—sons of one of Shaw’s friends—were suspected of breaking the windows in vacant apartments. Last year, somebody hit a pregnant woman in the head with a brick. In the summer, a neighborhood kid chased his girlfriend’s car, shooting at her as she drove toward the gate; the cops, who are called in regularly for one reason or another, collected the spent shells on the grass. “You know, you move from one place to another and you bring the element with you,” said Evans, who stopped by Shaw’s apartment while I was there. “You got some trying to make it just like the projects.”
In the afternoon, I visited an older resident from Dixie Homes who lives across the way from Shaw. Her apartment was dark, blinds drawn, and everyone was watching Maury Povich. A few minutes after I arrived, we heard a pounding at the door, and a neighbor rushed in, shouting.
“They just jumped my grandson! That’s my grandson!”
This was 64-year-old Nadine Clark, who’d left Dixie before it got knocked down. Clark was wearing her navy peacoat, but she had forgotten to put in her teeth. From her pocket she pulled a .38-caliber pistol, which was the only thing that glinted in the room besides the TV.
“There’s 10 of them! And I’m gonna go feth them up! That’s my grandson! They took him away in an ambulance!”
Nobody in the house got excited. They kept their eyes on Maury Povich, where the audience was booing a kid who looked just like the thug who’d shot up his girlfriend’s car. “She’ll calm down,” someone said, and after a few minutes, Clark left. I drove down to Northside High, a few blocks away, where the grandson had gotten beaten up. TV crews and local reporters were already gathered outside the school, and a news chopper hovered overhead. There had been two school shootings in the neighborhood that month, and any fresh incidents made big news.
Clark’s grandson is named Unique, although everyone calls him Neek. Outside school that day, Neek had been a victim of one of the many strange dynamics of the new urban suburbia. Neek is tall and quiet and doesn’t rush to change out of his white polo shirt and blue khakis after school. He spends most of his afternoons in the house, watching TV or doing his homework.
Neek’s middle-class habits have made him, unwittingly, a perfect target for homegrown gangs. Gang leaders, cut loose from the housing projects, have adapted their recruiting efforts and operations to their new setting. Lately, they’ve been going after “smart, intelligent, go-to-college-looking kid[s], without gold teeth and medallions,” said Sergeant Lambert Ross, an investigator with the Memphis Police. Clean-cut kids serve the same function as American recruits for al-Qaeda: they become the respectable front men. If a gang member gets pulled over with guns or drugs, he can hand them to the college boy, who has no prior record. The college boy, raised outside the projects, might be dreaming of being the next 50 Cent, or might be too intimidated not to join. Ross told me that his latest batch of arrests involved several kids from two-car-garage families.
Neek generally stayed away from gang types, so some older kids beat him with bats. No one is sure whether a gun was fired. As these things go, he got off easy. He was treated at the emergency room and went back to school after a few days.
In the most literal sense, the national effort to diffuse poverty has succeeded. Since 1990, the number of Americans living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty—meaning that at least 40 percent of households are below the federal poverty level—has declined by 24percent. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Recently, the housing expert George Galster, of Wayne State University, analyzed the shifts in urban poverty and published his results in a paper called “A Cautionary Tale.” While fewer Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, increasing numbers now live in places with “moderate” poverty rates, meaning rates of 20 to 40 percent. This pattern is not necessarily better, either for poor people trying to break away from bad neighborhoods or for cities, Galster explains. His paper compares two scenarios: a city split into high-poverty and low-poverty areas, and a city dominated by median-poverty ones. The latter arrangement is likely to produce more bad neighborhoods and more total crime, he concludes, based on a computer model of how social dysfunction spreads.
Studies show that recipients of Section8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods. One recent study publicized by HUD warned that policy makers should lower their expectations, because voucher recipients seemed not to be spreading out, as they had hoped, but clustering together. Galster theorizes that every neighborhood has its tipping point—a threshold well below a 40 percent poverty rate—beyond which crime explodes and other severe social problems set in. Pushing a greater number of neighborhoods past that tipping point is likely to produce more total crime. In 2003, the Brookings Institution published a list of the 15 cities where the number of high-poverty neighborhoods had declined the most. In recent years, most of those cities have also shown up as among the most violent in the U.S., according to FBI data.
The “Gathering Storm” report that worried over an upcoming epidemic of violence was inspired by a call from the police chief of Louisville, Kentucky, who’d seen crime rising regionally and wondered what was going on. Simultaneously, the University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh was tracking local patterns of violent crime. She had begun her work years before, going blind into the research: she had just arrived from India, had never heard of a housing project, had no idea which were the bad parts of town, and was clueless about the finer points of American racial sensitivities. In her research, Suresh noticed a recurring pattern, one that emerged first in the late 1990s, then again around 2002. A particularly violent neighborhood would suddenly go cold, and crime would heat up in several new neighborhoods. In each case, Suresh has now confirmed, the first hot spots were the neighborhoods around huge housing projects, and the later ones were places where people had moved when the projects were torn down. From that, she drew the obvious conclusion: “Crime is going along with them.” Except for being hand-drawn, Suresh’s map matching housing patterns with crime looks exactly like Janikowski and Betts’s.
Nobody would claim vouchers, or any single factor, as the sole cause of rising crime. Crime did not rise in every city where housing projects came down. In cities where it did, many factors contributed: unemployment, gangs, rapid gentrification that dislocated tens of thousands of poor people not living in the projects. Still, researchers around the country are seeing the same basic pattern: projects coming down in inner cities and crime pushing outward, in many cases destabilizing cities or their surrounding areas. Dennis Rosenbaum, a criminologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that after the high-rises came down in Chicago, suburbs to the south and west—including formerly quiet ones—began to see spikes in crime; nearby Maywood’s murder rate has nearly doubled in the past two years. In Atlanta, which almost always makes the top-10 crime list, crime is now scattered widely, just as it is in Memphis and Louisville.
In some places, the phenomenon is hard to detect, but there may be a simple reason: in cities with tight housing markets, Section8 recipients generally can’t afford to live within the city limits, and sometimes they even move to different states. New York, where the rate of violent crime has plummeted, appears to have pushed many of its poor out to New Jersey, where violent crime has increased in nearby cities and suburbs. Washington, D.C., has exported some of its crime to surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Much research has been done on the spread of gangs into the suburbs. Jeff Rojek, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, issued a report in 2006 showing that serious gang activity had spread to eight suburban counties around the state, including Florence County, home to the city of Florence, which was ranked the most violent place in America the year after Memphis was. In his fieldwork, he said, the police complained of “migrant gangs” from the housing projects, and many departments seemed wholly unprepared to respond.
Additional follow up article:
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2012/04/fresh-data-public-housing-relocation-and-crime/1698/ Snynopsis: Relocating people from public housing on a large scale in Atlanta and Chicago hasn't caused crime in increase in neighborhoods with relocated public housing residents but those neighborhoods do show a smaller decrease in crime than other neighborhoods. The areas with the largest increases in crime were areas that already had higher than average crime rates.
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