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Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

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Re: Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

#41

Post by gruez »

h0l0cube wrote: post #21

To phrase child welfare in terms of a capitalist mindset: if you care about expanding your business and keeping labor costs down, you care about the size and quality of the domestic labor pool, and thus you care about the access to education, the stable living arrangements, and mental welfare of your fellow country people and their families, and thus you support welfare to your poorest country people. To do otherwise…

I don't doubt that redistributing income to "poorest country people" helps in "expanding your business and keeping labor costs down" in some amount, but is it a net positive? ie. if the government levies a 10% tax to give to the poor, can you expect your revenue to increase by 10% to offset that?

Re: Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

#42

Post by supernova87a »

I have to admit I'm a confused mix of beliefs right now.

I agree that funding for children is among the best return on investment [1] (to the point that I think we should rank initiatives and spend on kids first before anyone else gets their turn in line for the same ROI), but I can see that purely dumping money into people's bank accounts is a rough tool to do it.

In fact, our recent history has shown that any kind of allocation of money to some goal mostly leads to the thing being targeted simply getting more expensive (higher education I'm looking at you), given how practiced private equity is at exploiting these things. And the other poster above is correct, of course you're going to see some number of people previously on the edge move into positive territory as soon as you roll out any measure like this.

The question is how efficient and effective can you make the expenditure of tax dollars? And how free market vs. controlling you have to be to do it?

So if some service (child care, health, education) is so important and we want to be efficient about it, doesn't that call for some public entity to provide some basic level of service that people can opt out of and pay more for privately if they want? So that we don't get private enterprise just sucking at the teat of free government money, inflating prices, and at last some guarantee of us getting what we allocated tax money for?

[1] https://www.impact.upenn.edu/early-childhood-toolkit/why-inv... and some other articles I've seen on the topic, will try to find and edit comment

Re: Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

#43

Post by gruez »

pydry wrote: post #17
josephcsible wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We bombed Nazi Germany during World War II, and then occupied much of it for a while afterwards. Did we do that "so our hegemony can be asserted all over the place"? If so, then I think asserting our hegemony is a good thing. If not, then what definition/test of it are you using that the wars you don't like count, but that one doesn't?

>If not, then what definition/test of it are you using that the wars you don't like count, but that one doesn't? 1) Are they committing genocide? 2) Did they attack you?

So you'd be cool with the US sitting out ww2 if japan didn't bomb pearl harbor?

Re: Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

#45

Post by xyzzyz »

davmar wrote: post #35
h0l0cube wrote: post #21

To phrase child welfare in terms of a capitalist mindset: if you care about expanding your business and keeping labor costs down, you care about the size and quality of the domestic labor pool, and thus you care about the access to education, the stable living arrangements, and mental welfare of your fellow country people and their families, and thus you support welfare to your poorest country people. To do otherwise…

If the capitalist mindset you described were accurate, then we would have the kind of society you described because we’ve had a very capitalist economy from the start. But that’s not what we see, so unfortunately what you assert cannot be true. However, you’re right that we live in capitalism. And it creates child poverty.

> However, you’re right that we live in capitalism. And it creates child poverty

You don’t have to create child poverty, as child poverty is the natural state of nature.

Re: Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

#46

Post by gruez »

Galanwe wrote: post #14
tamaharbor wrote: post #2

I wonder how much of an impact the printing of additional money to fund this experiment had on inflation.

How did you come to the conclusion that the money was printed...?

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

Re: Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

#47

Post by throwaway6734 »

supernova87a wrote: post #42

I have to admit I'm a confused mix of beliefs right now. I agree that funding for children is among the best return on investment [1] (to the point that I think we should rank initiatives and spend on kids first before anyone else gets their turn in line for the same ROI), but I can see that purely dumping money into people's bank accounts is a rough tool to do it. In fact, our recent history has shown that any kind…

>but I can see that purely dumping money into people's bank accounts is a rough tool to do it.

Why? We do it with social security and that seems like a well liked program. Individuals are generally pretty good at deciding what they need

Re: Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

#48

Post by zozbot234 »

supernova87a wrote: post #42

I have to admit I'm a confused mix of beliefs right now. I agree that funding for children is among the best return on investment [1] (to the point that I think we should rank initiatives and spend on kids first before anyone else gets their turn in line for the same ROI), but I can see that purely dumping money into people's bank accounts is a rough tool to do it. In fact, our recent history has shown that any kind…

Giving money to households with no strings attached is the polar opposite of "private enterprise just sucking at the teat of free government money". I'm not sure why you think one would follow from the other. Public services have even poorer incentives than subsidized private ones (which again, this is not), they're only acceptable when the private sector alone will absolutely never provide that service under competitive conditions.

Re: Expanded Child Tax Policy Slashed Child Poverty

#50

Post by wonderwonder »

tamaharbor wrote: post #2

I wonder how much of an impact the printing of additional money to fund this experiment had on inflation.

The 2008 bank bailout cost 700 billion. Almost all of that money went to rich banks and bankers.

The child tax credit costs ~100 billion a year. The payments cut monthly child poverty by roughly 30%. We have direct evidence that growing up in poverty dramatically reduces your odds of graduating high school, going to college or getting a well paying job later in life. So I would posit that pulling kids out of poverty has a long term net positive effect on the economy. Also its just the right thing to do if we can.

As a comparison, ~$76 billion in PPP loans were fraudulent. ~250 billion of covid relief benefits went to the rich and corporations. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-cares-act-sent-you-a-...

But its the poorest of us that are causing inflation...

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