Live data from Hacker News

The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

nytimes.com

71–80 of 188 posts

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"lacked access to a proper education". How does that explain Washington DC with the highest levels of funding per child in the country? Every kid has access to a well funded school with well paid teachers. I think it's easier to defend the claim that the kids lacked guidance and support to take advantage of the education provided for them. In the US a single mom who homeschools, with only a high school education, wil…

> lacked access to a proper education". How does that explain Washington DC with the highest levels of funding per child in the country? Every kid has access to a well funded school with well paid teachers. Education funding in the US is wildly uneven. Spend some time visiting inner-city schools. They are not even remotely "well-funded". Property-tax driven school funding formulas ensure that richer areas have much,…

Inner city public schools are some of the most well-funded in the county. Washington DC is almost entirely "inner city" public schools (I.e. Almost all the student population is low income) and has the highest per student spending.

The wealthy suburb of DC where I grew up spends $13,500 per student per year. That's a lot less than DC or Baltimore or Chicago, all of which have 70-85% low-income students, and only moderately more than Philadelphia, which is also almost all "inner city" schools.

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#72
post #62
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there is such a thing, but it only works if the people themselves do it, not the government? For a concrete example, it seems to me that one thing that helps people get out of poverty is having some savings. Being poor is expensive, often because large expenses compound due to financing, late fees, or even just an inability to make bulk purchases. Having a financial cushion can make life a lot cheaper. But th…

The few thousand dollars you might save not buying a TV or cell phone isn't going to do shit to get you out of poverty. You can't save your way out of being poor a nickle and dime at a time.

[deleted]

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#73
post #28

I was born into a single parent family in a trailer park. I worked my way out of that situation including serving in the US Marines in order to pay for college. Even coming from a background that should have led my family to use welfare (mom was too proud and cleaned houses instead) I tend to lean more towards the idea that welfare and the nanny state in general hurt more than they help. The CATO Institute does a lot…

Some may argue that the US military is a big provider of welfare, handing out "fictitious" jobs to almost anybody in a "socialist" way.

I'd like to see the term "warfare queen" become part of the vernacular the way "welfare queen" did.

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#74
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount paid to corporate subsidies is pretty obscene: http://imgur.com/ttNcwHA

Is this accurate? It basically says that middle class people spend six times as much paying for corporate subsidies than they spend paying for things like defense, welfare payments, medicare, etc., combined. The fact that the information is conveyed using a poor-quality jpeg screenshot of an unattributed infographic from two years ago, however, does not inspire confidence. The two sources at the bottom of the graphic…

No it's not accurate. I mean hell, $7 of your $50k goes to welfare? That's 0.014%. In reality, depending on what you want to call welfare (republicans like to call everything welfare and pretend it's bankrupting the country in order to scale it down, for example, so you have wildly different definitions in the political spectrum) it's around 5-8% of GDP. So this is just laughably inaccurate. Defense spending of $250, in reality it's closer to $2k.

Then there's the corporate subsidies, they're more interesting because they're not necessarily wrong. Perhaps this number is but in general they're very high, but not in the way people normally think about subsidies. I see numbers thrown around all the time with murky definitions and it's misleading.

For example, the IMF did a study that showed $5.3 trillion in oil subsidies worldwide. Gigantic number, consider world GDP is $75 trillion, US a little under $18 t.

Now I'm sympathetic to the study, agree with it, and think we should take that number seriously and do something about it. I also think it constitutes a form of subsidy.

But it's a bit misleading to say this means we're all paying thousands of dollars to corporate subsidies on this basis from our actual paycheck. There are different forms of subsidies and there's value in not muddying the semantics too much.

What the study measures are externalities that aren't priced in. A person dies in motorised traffic? You can combat it by pricing that into the price of oil. A climate change related natural disaster happens, or we have to pay for CO2 cleanup, or healthcare costs rise due to oil-industry fumes causing lung cancer somewhere, you can price all of that in. Not pricing that in is a form of subsidy, but it's not like we take thousands of dollars from our pay check and send it to the companies to support them, very little money goes to these companies, the issue is we don't extract enough from them that we should once we look at the damage they cause, and this is technically a subsidy. The IMF measures the missed revenue from taxing fossil fuels at a lower range than it should if it prices in all externalities.

Yet I've seen renowned green energy pundits in my country (the Netherlands) talk about these $5.3 trillion subsidies as if we're sending that money to corporations every year. I'm completely on their side, yet I don't think this is helpful, there's too much misleading information thrown around.

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#75

I was born into a single parent family in a trailer park. I worked my way out of that situation including serving in the US Marines in order to pay for college. Even coming from a background that should have led my family to use welfare (mom was too proud and cleaned houses instead) I tend to lean more towards the idea that welfare and the nanny state in general hurt more than they help. The CATO Institute does a lot…

You're pretty lucky you had a massive govt welfare program to fall back on.

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#76

I was born into a single parent family in a trailer park. I worked my way out of that situation including serving in the US Marines in order to pay for college. Even coming from a background that should have led my family to use welfare (mom was too proud and cleaned houses instead) I tend to lean more towards the idea that welfare and the nanny state in general hurt more than they help. The CATO Institute does a lot…

You should read/listen to this: http://www.npr.org/2015/10/20/450175865/do-we-have-less-symp...

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#77

I was born into a single parent family in a trailer park. I worked my way out of that situation including serving in the US Marines in order to pay for college. Even coming from a background that should have led my family to use welfare (mom was too proud and cleaned houses instead) I tend to lean more towards the idea that welfare and the nanny state in general hurt more than they help. The CATO Institute does a lot…

My understanding is that the CATO Institute is paid for largely by the right-winger Charles Koch (a former member of the John Birch Society) and is an organization that shills right-wing thought. The CATO institute isn't an "independent think tank" - it's been set up to promote a right-wing agenda.

Paul Krugman histories the development of an entire network of such entities by wealthy arch-conservatives and small-business organizations (who supported right-wing ideas because they reduce taxes and empower employers vis-a-vis employees and especially unions) in his book

"The Conscience of a Liberal":

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393333132?keywords=conscie...

This network of organizations, which took decades to build, does indeed compose a "vast right-wing conspiracy" in the sense that they coordinate with and cross-reference each other to deliver right-wing political views and to promote the hiring of lobbyists and aides in Washington, D.C. who share their political views. Luckily, according to Krugman, their persuasive power is diminishing with time.

My take-away: don't equate one of these right-wing "think tanks" with a real think-tank, e.g., RAND corporation.

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#78
post #28

I was born into a single parent family in a trailer park. I worked my way out of that situation including serving in the US Marines in order to pay for college. Even coming from a background that should have led my family to use welfare (mom was too proud and cleaned houses instead) I tend to lean more towards the idea that welfare and the nanny state in general hurt more than they help. The CATO Institute does a lot…

Some may argue that the US military is a big provider of welfare, handing out "fictitious" jobs to almost anybody in a "socialist" way.

The army's healthcare system is positively European too.

Re: The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

#80

I was born into a single parent family in a trailer park. I worked my way out of that situation including serving in the US Marines in order to pay for college. Even coming from a background that should have led my family to use welfare (mom was too proud and cleaned houses instead) I tend to lean more towards the idea that welfare and the nanny state in general hurt more than they help. The CATO Institute does a lot…

My understanding is that the CATO Institute is paid for largely by the right-winger Charles Koch (a former member of the John Birch Society) and is an organization that shills right-wing thought. The CATO institute isn't an "independent think tank" - it's been set up to promote a right-wing agenda. Paul Krugman histories the development of an entire network of such entities by wealthy arch-conservatives and small-bus…

They provide some pretty straightforward calculations to back up their point. Are the calculations wrong? If so, where is the first mistake?
Post reply on HN