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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

#141

Post by jimbob45 »

munk-a wrote: post #101
jimbob45 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to disagree with you on that one. Consider the actual Senate elections[0]. There are 20 R seats up vs 14 D seats. The R side is mathematically on the defense. In addition, if you look at the forecasts, most of the seats are foregone conclusions - we're down to ~5 seats that will be actual contests. This isn't to say one side will or will not win but neither side is likely to get the decisive win that each w…

As Bernie is getting a bit older he might chose this election to stand down as well - but even if a "republican" won the seat it'd be a VT Republican (maybe even Gov. Scott) so that race might be more interesting than it might appear now - but the conclusion is probably going to be pretty predictably liberal.

Bernie’s an interesting one. He and Warren should have been appointed high seats in the WH but instead had to occupy their senate seats because their governors are Rs (and would have appointed Rs in their vacancies, wrecking the majority). The minute it becomes clear that the spending bill won’t pass, the DNC should shrewdly push the two of them into government positions to galvanize enthusiasm for the 2022 election.

Granted, that requires the DNC to be capable of shrewd moves and I don’t recall the last time the DNC or the RNC actually made a shrewd move.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#142

Post by rualca »

oconnor663 wrote: post #108
rualca wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Food and clothing depend on other things (cost of employees, equipment, materials, etc.) When the costs of those things rise, the cost of food and clothing will have to rise. Not really. You're pointing to production costs, but production costs just define the price's lower bound, not the price itself. Price depends solely on willingness to pay and pricing strategy, which is higher than the production cost when the…

It seems like there are two effects we're considering at the same time: 1. UBI might increase people's willingness to pay for goods in general, and the prices of goods that are most strongly driven by willingness to pay would rise. (Rent in expensive cities might be an example of this. Milk, soap, and socks probably aren't.) 2. To the extent that UBI is paid for with higher taxes, the prices of everything would go up…

> 1. UBI might increase people's willingness to pay for goods in general, and the prices of goods that are most strongly driven by willingness to pay would rise.

It's reasonable to assume that UBI would be linked with an increase in the demand for some goods and services, but there is no indication that this would reflect in a proportional increase in prices. For example, those who live in poverty already tend to purchase substitute goods due to lower price, which is reflected in some aspects such as the link between poverty and malnutrition. In this scenario it's likely that the increase in purchasing power from UBI would actually cause a shift in the market so that it brings down the demand for said substitute goods and instead spread the newly-found demand through other products.

The same scenario also applies to other markets, such as housing. If UBI grants you a little bit of economic freedom so that you are no longer tied to a specific job or place of residence or even access to public transportation, you can also consider moving to a better/cheaper place somewhere else without your livelihood being a constraint.

Keep in mind that one of the enablers of living frugally/off-the-grif is ensuring that you secure your financial needs. Once people are no longer forced to endure a horrible job to make ends meet, they start to make changes to improve their lives.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#143

Post by imtringued »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #138
UncleMeat wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people don't care much about the poor and instead care primarily about their own wallet. Whether it works or not is irrelevant to some folks.

I care enough about the poor to donate my time and money voluntarily. But I absolutely despise government welfare which amounts to theft and forced donation for something the government is not chartered to do. Most people's protest of federal welfare has nothing to do with insensitivity to the plight of our fellow man.

Would you accept work sharing so that people who would do charity simply work less and those who would receive charity work in a job opportunity that pays them as much as they demand from the economy?

I bet you would be against this because you want to defend your right to private property even though money is just a promise that someone works for you, it's a relationship. It's absurd that people want to own relationships as if the other person is a slave.

As long as you hold onto that promise, the other person doesn't get to work so blaming others for the inability to work (often rebranded as "laziness") you created is hipocritical. As I said before, the best solution would be to simply work less, so that the promise to work doesn't end up in the hands of those who have no intention to let others work.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#144

Post by akvadrako »

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.

No, COVID relief isn't like UBI because most of it, the unemployment benefits, are conditional on not working.

The reason UBI is better than other welfare is it doesn't discourage working as much.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#145

Post by [deleted] »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #138
UncleMeat wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people don't care much about the poor and instead care primarily about their own wallet. Whether it works or not is irrelevant to some folks.

I care enough about the poor to donate my time and money voluntarily. But I absolutely despise government welfare which amounts to theft and forced donation for something the government is not chartered to do. Most people's protest of federal welfare has nothing to do with insensitivity to the plight of our fellow man.

[deleted]

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#146

Post by imtringued »

president wrote: post #123
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.

By root cause you mean the fact that some people work more than they demand in work back, leading other people to demand more work than they do work.

If people do not spend their full time income then they do not create demand for a full time job on the other side. If everyone insists on working full time while demanding less than full time, then there must be people who are simply unemployed.

It's like household chores. The number of chores goes up with the number of family members but there aren't enough chores to let everyone do the chores as a full time job. So if you assign all the chores to a single person others will get to do nothing. Leading to jealousy and the desire to call others lazy.

If every single person did as much chores as they create the need for chores then everyone would have a fair share of the chores. You take out the garbage you produce.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#147

Post by imtringued »

Factorium wrote: post #90
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?

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…

Are you sure these families aren't simply reporting that their children are being born outside wedlock to obtain welfare?

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#148

Post by imtringued »

nescioquid wrote: post #107
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 many babies, rich people have few babies...Does anyone have an alternative explanation for the surprisingly high child poverty rate? The question makes me think of Malthus. He argued that population grows geometrically, while agricultural production is linear, but the major restraint on reproduction would chiefly be access to food. You could extend that to say that the poor will be less numerous, b…

I find the Malthus argument amusing because populations simply stop growing if there isn't enough food. The worst thing that will happen is that there are lots of hungry people. I don't see how that is different than today.

Meanwhile, in the reality we live in today, our economies are actually struggling because of a lack of population growth. Lots of economists simply assume endless exponential population growth to justify endless economic growth.

The dependence on growth relies on our insistence to work full time. Technology reduces the need for labor. So to give everyone full time jobs we have to grow the economy. It's quite stupid.

Imagine a simplified dishwasher economy. We have a replicator that generates food for free but it doesn't clean dishes. To increase labor efficiency keep building bigger and bigger dishwashers. For some strange reason we still insist on working 40 hours per week loading and unloading the dishwasher. There is something strange about this. Every time we build a bigger dishwasher, we have to eat more (=have more children) just to keep the 40 hour work week filled. This is the dependence on growth.

We have to keep growing just to stand still at full employment.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#149

Post by imtringued »

clcaev wrote: post #102

This is not a zero sum game. By providing funds for necessities, there will be increased demand. This demand will spawn new supply, which will bring prices back down. If this child tax credit is left in place, it should cause our economy to restructure some, paying more attention to essentials for children. Those providing for these needs create jobs, further economic activity, and tax revenue.

I fully understand that people do not want to share their income with other adults because "it's already too late".

However, sharing income to increase the potential of future adults? There simply isn't any good argument against that. They are the ones who will take care of you when you are old.

Re: America is substantially reducing poverty among children

#150

Post by imtringued »

45yu56bwedfg wrote: post #36
chiefalchemist wrote: post #27

Poverty is more than an financial state. Giving away money to move someone from just below the poverty line - which is artificially low - to just above that line is honorable, but "curing" poverty is not that simple. Unfortunately, articles like this help the myth persist. More political magician-y mumbo jumbo. It's also important to ask: at what cost? If these monies were financed by printing more money, then that's…

Money is always printed. The only difference is how fast we inflate the current supply, not that we inflate it. Inflation is a function of the system itself. Its fundamental. Poverty is a desired outcome of this system.

This argument is absurd. Inflation is high right now and it's because people are getting higher wages.

I just can't comprehend how people have become this stupid. the 80s neoliberal policy package was intentionally aimed at killing inflation in response to the oil crisis. The way they reduced inflation is through global trade, destroying unions and deregulation. All of this was to make sure that negotiation power of workers dropped like a rock and inflation followed wages. Low wage growth lead to low inflation.

A money system with low inflation or even deflation systematically undervalues present labor for the benefit of the holders of the biggest share of money. Someone who spends all their money massively benefits from wage increases and therefore inflation. Just look at Bitcoin. If you own $100k of Bitcoin and it goes up 10x you will be a millionaire. If you only own $1000 then you only get $10000. It's rigged in favor of the already rich and rigged against those who are poor.

Literally every time someone talks about raising wages people use the inflation counter argument. "If we pay people more it would drive price increases and therefore inflation".

People take this shit for granted and then when they complain they talk about how 2% inflation is eating away at the $500 they have in their bank account and don't even consider that 2% inflation eats away at someone with $1 million in their bank account.

Let me tell you what saving in monetary terms does. It's just reducing your demand for labor. Labor cannot be stored. You either use it or lose it. Your insistence to not spend your money has to be balanced by letting the unpaid party take on debt in hope that you spend your money one day. So excessive saving is what drives excessive debt, not some stupid moral sense of irresponsibility. The alternative would be to keep the unpaid party unemployed and unemployment is a pretty obvious driver of poverty.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that saving lets the bank lend. No, the supply of credit is infinite. The only limit is the availability of solvent borrowers.

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