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America is substantially reducing poverty among children

economist.com

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Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#51

Post by jessaustin »

notJim wrote: post #17

Note that many of the administrative hurdles could be overcome by moving the benefit to the Social Security Administration, who already have the data needed. Also, it's been a while since I looked at this, but Republican Mitt Romney had the best proposal out of all the child benefit proposals that were kicking around earlier this year. That the democrats didn't pick up on it is a sad statement about them. https://www…

Poor children don't vote and they don't contribute campaign funds. As implied by TFA, they were only helped this time by mistake.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#52

Post by jollybean »

munk-a wrote: post #9

I think this (COVID relief) is the closest America is going to get to a legitimate domestic experiment on UBI we're going to get for a while so it's rather heartening to see the drop in family poverty.

That might be true. But the payouts were more limited than a nominal UBI program, and the costs were astronomical.

The US added 20% of GDP in debt in a single year. [1]

The US Fed added 4 Trillion to it's balance sheet in 2 years [2] which is ballpark maybe 25% of GDP.

Obviously there was more than just wealth distribution in there, but what becomes clear in the calculation is the gigantic expense of UBI.

UBI doesn't work in current terms, it's not a program that can be remotely afforded without a 'total re-work of the system'. Surely there are opportunities with taxing the ultra-wealthy and considering loopholes (esp. offshore tax havens) but there's just no calculus where it works out neatly. In other words 'UBI' is not like 'child care benefits' or some kind of regular social program where can argue about the balance sheet. It's a completely different scale of costing problem.

If the US focused really hard on 'some kind of healthcare for all' (not making any statements about what that might look like) and controlling costs there, improved minimum wage, and did 'basic structural tax reform' - things might improve quite a lot. (i.e. doing the hard work of reforming normal programs we have to have would go a very long way). But I don't think there's any actual magic math that would allow for a true, enduring UBI situation. Even really well managed Oil-rich places like Norway don't quite have that, they sort it out using the more accessible, 'normal' social programs etc..

For more context 'the current payout program' which is not not 'U' in the UBI, just for about 10% of the population, is going to cost 0.5% of GDP. Meaning just that limited program, expanded to 'U' i.e. 'Universal' is 5% of GDP, every year.

Edit: finally should not that a lot of the expansion of the Fed's balance sheet amounts for 'welfare for the rich' and it's not a small amount. That's a problem as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#53

Post by iammisc »

srj wrote: post #40
rootusrootus wrote: post #7

Mostly because the pandemic caused panic stimulus spending, not because of permanent, structural changes to fiscal policy.

Not sure if you're aware but the US recently started sending checks to families every month.

You can't honestly believe that this reduced child poverty. While the Child tax credit has been increased, it's been on a steady increase for a while, and the net amount hasn't changed that much. If the claim is that the timing of payments is reducing poverty.. that's quite the claim.

The more obvious answer is that America had quite the recovery from the great recession including a pre-pandemic unemployment rate approaching 0%.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#54

Post by munk-a »

m_ke wrote: post #30
munk-a wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the wording in your original post was particularly poor though - instead of focusing in on those two as individuals you attributed the issue to democrats as a whole - and also omitted that the bill would also pass quite easily if, say, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz decided to vote for it. You mentioned that it passed due to the previous administration (a republican administration) and was now in danger (under a…

Here's my wording for anyone who can't see it due to it being flagged: """ *Temporarily, and partially thanks to the previous administration The infrastructure bill is about to fail due to a few corrupt corporate Democrats. """ It's more than just Sinema and Manchin, that's why I said a few corporate democrats: https://www.businessinsider.com/house-democrats-threaten-hol... I'm pretty left leaning by American standar…

I absolutely understand what you were saying and I don't think you're incorrect - I just wanted to highlight that the wording was poorly chosen and could easily be misread. I personally have problems with clear communications myself all the time so I just wanted to provide a bit of feedback as to why it was called out as being flamebait - your core statement wouldn't start a flame war - but the way you said it wasn't the best.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#55

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

jandrese wrote: post #31
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's not. Monthly lottery winners are. If you know that 'free money' is just a temporary thing, you don't quit your job and move somewhere where that amount of money is enough to survive, and just stop working.... if ubi is permanent, and guaranteed to be "enough" to minimalistically survive, many more people would do that.

Using Lotto Winners as your experiment has the problem of selecting only the people who play the lotto. Your data will be biased towards less fiscal responsibility.

While I'm certain that there are people who spend an irresponsible amount on lottery tickets, I don't know if those are also the lottery winners.

I'd be very interested in any statistics for that. Where I am lottery tickets cost about the same as a Starbucks coffee, and I'd bet the average lottery player buys tickets less than the average Starbucks drinker buys coffee, making me wonder about the label of "less fiscally responsible", unless we're also grouping all Starbucks drinks in there. And given the astronomically poor odds of winning, I also wonder how much more regular players win vs those who buy a ticket once every month or two - does it really help enough to be obvious in the statistics.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#56

Post by inglor_cz »

munk-a wrote: post #23
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's not. Monthly lottery winners are. If you know that 'free money' is just a temporary thing, you don't quit your job and move somewhere where that amount of money is enough to survive, and just stop working.... if ubi is permanent, and guaranteed to be "enough" to minimalistically survive, many more people would do that.

Monthly lottery winners are a pretty poor basis for evaluating UBI since that is promoting an arbitrary individual to wealth - rather than providing a baseline income to a whole community. The effects of the later can easily be conceived to be quite different from targeted welfare. One of the common counter-arguments against UBI is that because the boon is applied across the board (and not just effecting the needy) t…

> providing a baseline income to a whole community

The rich oil sheikdoms in the Gulf are already providing a good income to all their citizens (not the working class gastarbeiters).

We should definitely observe them and learn from their experience. It is not precisely the same as UBI, but closer than anything else I can think of.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#57

Post by markus_zhang »

oconnor663 wrote: post #48
markus_zhang wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cost is not controlled I'd expect expenses of food, clothed and renting to rise after UBI being implemented.

I can see the argument for the price of rent rising, but why would the prices of food and clothing rise? My understanding is that those are highly competitive markets, with low margins on top of the cost of production, at least in their non-luxury segments. Is that wrong?

Not necessarily non-luxury but also the middle brands I think. But it's difficult to prove though. As a user said the pandemic also sees a decrease in supplies so it's kinda difficult to do "tests" properly.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#58

Post by SomaticPirate »

I’m a bit surprised by these comments. This seems like data driven evidence of a government policy working quite well.

Yet there are people complaining about this causes inflation and is “printing money”. The article clearly points out that most of the spending is on essentials and directly contributing to the children’s quality of life.

Not the article I would expect to see fiscal hawks on.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#59

Post by riboflavin123 »

> depending on how it is measured, somewhere between one in six or one in five children counted as poor

This is an alarmingly high number. I've been primed by media to blame this on an inverse relationship between income and number-of-children (i.e. poor people have many babies, rich people have few babies).

Does anyone have an alternative explanation for the surprisingly high child poverty rate?

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#60

Post by markus_zhang »

encoderer wrote: post #38
markus_zhang wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cost is not controlled I'd expect expenses of food, clothed and renting to rise after UBI being implemented.

Costs cannot be controlled. That’s not how it works. That’s how you get empty shelves. I think some inflation will happen but not dramatically in food and clothing. We do not have many naked and starving people in America. It’s the premium consumer goods that will see higher demand - think dishwashers not Chanel.

The state can definitely influence the prices of goods (e.g. it can affect the price of money). Direct control is indeed infeasible.
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