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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

#121

Post by dillondoyle »

listless wrote: post #106
SomaticPirate wrote: post #58

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.

It’s not that it’s not working. It’s that it’s not a sustainable model. Or if it is, we need to cut a LOT of other stuff.

Or raise taxes among the top earners, corps, cap gains. Seems worth it to me.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#122

Post by ip26 »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #97
riboflavin123 wrote: post #59

> 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?

"Poor people have more children" gets by without enough examination. It's a weird, tautological statement. Only workin adults provide income to a family unit. Children and the disabled members of a household divide that income. Given the same income, a family with more dependents is sent into poverty by the mathematics of division.

Right, so given this a naive observer might imagine the rich would elect to have more children, and the poor fewer…

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#123

Post by president »

SomaticPirate wrote: post #58

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.

A bug fix can still work well even if you don't address the root cause. But sooner or later it will reveal itself again.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#124

Post by chii »

vpribish wrote: post #78
inglor_cz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess rent will be the one to go up in case of UBI. UBI fundamentally does not solve the problems that: a) some people do not want to live next to some other people, and are willing to pay extra for that privilege - now they have even more money to use for that purpose, b) in the most expensive regions, demand exceeds supply a lot. I even think that a vast majority of UBI would, at the end, accrue to landlords.

in the current context of this experiment rent dropped by 30% in SF while this was going on. Sure some of that was people fleeing dense urban areas to escape lockdowns, but also some was people decamping because the economic pressure to work in a city was lifted. UBI might be a terrible threat to landlords' incomes as people redistribute.

the drop in rent would be more attributable to the WFH policies instituted by many companies rather than any UBI imho.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#125

Post by iammisc »

lkbm wrote: post #103
iammisc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 app…

> 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. From what I can tell, it increased by 80%[0], from $2,000 to $3,600. (It varies for different household structures/incomes, but in general the poorest get the most.) > If the claim is that the timing of payments is reducing poverty.. that's quite the claim. As someone who's got som…

Is the claim that 1600 dollars made the difference between poverty and subsistence?

I have nothing against the child tax credit. I think it's great. But I am hard pressed to believe 1600 dollars has eliminated poverty. If it did... Great that's a really cheap way to do it!

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#126

Post by grecy »

listless wrote: post #106
SomaticPirate wrote: post #58

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.

It’s not that it’s not working. It’s that it’s not a sustainable model. Or if it is, we need to cut a LOT of other stuff.

It works very well and has been sustainable for many decades in a handful of other countries around the world.

It's simply a question of priorities, and evidently that is not high on the list.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#127

Post by chii »

inglor_cz wrote: post #56
munk-a wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> sheikdoms in the Gulf are already providing a good income to all their citizens

which is looking to failing as soon as the price of oil drops. The saudis are now having to pay VAT to the state, for the first time recently.

UBI doesn't work if the productivity of the country would drop as a result of implementing a UBI. And i can't think of any reason why productivity would not drop, since there would definitely be some people who are currently productive, but would drop that productivity if there would be a UBI that's livable for them.

The argument that there would be a percentage who would increase their productivity (such as starting their own small business, etc) is merely speculative, since if they could start a small business, why don't they do it now, without waiting on UBI? If the UBI is what enables them to invest their time and capital, what makes UBI the only way to obtain capital, rather than seed capital? If it is _only_ UBI that can give them this seed capital, then they are effectively being subsidized by tax payers to entrepreneurship - if that was the goal, why not make that explicit, and give grants for such?

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#128

Post by chii »

notJim wrote: post #44
throwaway210222 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if ubi is permanent… The most likely outcome is that very quickly all the UBI money will be going to the few landlords and soon people will need "UBI plus a job" to pay rent and make ends meet. And whilst the masses our back out in the wilds scrounging up their money, the landlord class will be consolidating into an every smaller group. Inflation is what happens when too much money chases a limited supply of goods.…

> The most likely outcome is that very quickly all the UBI money will be going to the few landlords and soon people will need "UBI plus a job" to pay rent and make ends meet. This doesn't make sense. If it was the case, raising the minimum wage would have the same result, but studies have shown that people are better off when the minimum wage goes up. Landlords do not have infinite power to raise prices, because they…

I would argue raising minimum wage doesn't have the same effect, because the value produced by the job on this minimum wage, in totality, is still higher than the minimum wage (because if it weren't, those jobs would then be gone, and the person would end up with no job, rather than a raised minimum wage).

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#129

Post by karaterobot »

listless wrote: post #106
SomaticPirate wrote: post #58

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.

It’s not that it’s not working. It’s that it’s not a sustainable model. Or if it is, we need to cut a LOT of other stuff.

Maybe. Hard to say what "a lot" means.

But anyway, assuming there is some connection between things like child poverty, later life income, incarceration, taxes, welfare usage, entrepreneurship, etc., etc., it's entirely reasonable to hope this could be a net benefit even in purely monetary terms, which of course is not the only way to measure its success.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#130

Post by tastyfreeze »

nullspace wrote: post #109
Factorium wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70% of African-American children are born outside wedlock: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Nonmarit... Which is driven by a welfare system that punishes married couples with lower payments (witness the huge rise in out-of-wedlock births since the welfare schemes of the 60s/70s). 35% of African-American children live in poverty: https://www.nccp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/wpc10-fig3.j... Creati…

> Which is driven by a welfare system that punishes married couples with lower payments Is this true? If you're not married, then doesn't only one person get to claim the benefits? Not benefits x2?

Single parents get more money than two parent families. Only one parent gets to apply but the payout is higher for a single parent. The system absolutely incentivizes single parent households.
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