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What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#111

Post by svantana »

notdrunkatall wrote: post #87
gruseom wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the psychological and social difference between receiving money from a source which a population would consider to be 'theirs' cannot be overstated It can be overstated; you've overstated it. In contrast to the careful research described in the article, you've just made a bunch of stuff up. Your rush to assume race as the dominant factor is another example.

Do you know what the Swedes didn't have a problem with a decade ago? Welfare abuse. All of a sudden, they have a problem with it now. Do you know who are the ones abusing the system? Hint: it's not the Swedes. Every other country which has accepted middle eastern immigrants in the last decade are experiencing the same problems. If a population does not respect your system, they will abuse it, period. If you can get o…

As a Swede I'm not sure there's any base for this claim, other than that we now have racist politicians who make populist statements like this one without shame, referring to cherry picked data at best.

Generally, if you're going to make racist statements, at least try to back them up with some data and/or source.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#112

Post by Shivetya »

quinnchr wrote: post #97
at-fates-hands wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow - I don't even know where to start. . . >>>>> They most certainly help members of their respective congregations. You missed this part of the article: "In 2010, Catholic Charities USA reported expenditures of between $4.2 billion and $4.4 billion, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which publishes an annual list of the 400 biggest charities in the United States," I'm pretty sure NONE of that is going dir…

No I didn't miss that part. Like I said religious charities devoted to human services are counted towards human services in the source I posted. My source counts charities as religious if they identify their cause as being for "Religious Activities" or "Religous Media and Broadcasting" I'm not trolling. I think religous charities do a lot of good, but I think they also can do a lot of harm. I think it's ridiculous to…

Your not trolling but you have a fixation that religious organizations are bad and therefor anything they do must be discounted.

For what its worth, not supporting is not always the same as opposing. Religious charities have stepped in in many cases well before any government agency has and they usually offer their help without "clauses" and "rules" that come with other forms of assistance.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#113

Post by grkvlt »

anigbrowl wrote: post #42
joelrunyon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised people yell about the U.S. not wanting to help those in poverty. I think that's pretty well refuted by noting that the U.S. is #1 in charitable giving [1]. The bigger problem seems to be people trusting government imposed redistribution schemes rather than the rejection of them altogether. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/19/world-giving-index-...

The US is #1 in charitable giving because it's so easy to get a tax deduction for doing so. If people had to give out of their after-tax income I suspect you'd see a quite different picture.

It's not exactly a tax deduction though... In the UK, for example, charitable donations are 'tax free' effectively, since the recipient will recieve an extra amount based on the marginal income tax rate you are paying. The only beneficiary here is the charity, and only if you make an explicit donation from your after-tax income. It's not like the government is allowing you to choose to redirect the tax you're due to charity. In the US, I believe the situation is similar.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#114

Post by splitrocket »

Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day.

Teach him to fish, he and his family will eat fish the rest of his life.

Give a man a consistent supply of fish and maybe, instead of fishing all day to feed his family, he could go to trade school and learn to be an HVAC engineer, send his kids to MIT and retire at 55 to Naples Florida.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#115

Post by njs12345 »

grkvlt wrote: post #113
anigbrowl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is #1 in charitable giving because it's so easy to get a tax deduction for doing so. If people had to give out of their after-tax income I suspect you'd see a quite different picture.

It's not exactly a tax deduction though... In the UK, for example, charitable donations are 'tax free' effectively, since the recipient will recieve an extra amount based on the marginal income tax rate you are paying. The only beneficiary here is the charity, and only if you make an explicit donation from your after-tax income. It's not like the government is allowing you to choose to redirect the tax you're due to…

It's different in the US:

'The taxable income of the donor is reduced by 300 USD. If the donor's income was in the 35% income tax bracket both before and after the deduction, the donor's tax liability (amount of taxes owed to the government) is reduced by 105 USD.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_contribution_deducti...

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#116

Post by eli_gottlieb »

kabouseng wrote: post #104
notdrunkatall wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: this is what happens when poor Cherokee receive a stipend, but let's not pretend that the Cherokee are the ones we're worried about here. There are differences between the subcultures, and those differences almost certainly extend to how they treat money. Furthermore, the psychological and social difference between receiving money from a source which a population would consider to be 'theirs' cannot be ov…

As an alternative example to what happens when you give the poor a stipend, have a look at the government grant system employed in South Africa, and the absolute misuse and abuse that system is under. I believe the South African example is a closer approximation to what a society would look like with a basic guaranteed income.

South Africa is a very close approximation of what happens when you impose decades of apartheid and then let a small elite class of blacks in on the fun without actually dismantling the inegalitarian economic system itself.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#118

Post by stephencanon »

djtriptych wrote: post #101
notdrunkatall wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me for offending your politically correct sensibilities, but it seems that I'm going to have to be even more blunt: if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comp…

Shocker: You completely misread the data from that source. Table B in the link you posted shows 31,650* white people in poverty out of a US total of 46,180. That's 68.5%. * all numbers in thousands

To be fair, he’s describing “non-black, non-latino”, which I suppose most closely aligns with “white non-hispanic” in that table: 19,599/46,180 or 42%. No longer a majority, but still a plurality.

The whole argument is ridiculous, of course:

> If you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comprised predominately of minorities and cross your fingers that it is a success.

When did we have the double-blind controlled study showing that the mortgage interest tax deduction wouldn’t be abused by the upper middle class "en masse" as a tax-protected store of wealth, contributing to a wildly over-inflated housing market?

Perhaps you can point me to the literature showing that carried interest being taxed as capital gains wouldn’t lead to wealthy fund managers being able to claim zero “income”?

Budget policy in the US (or anywhere, really) isn’t set by enlightened scientists who carefully consider the sociological and economic consequences. Voters and politicians are swayed by pundits and lobbyists, not by scientific studies. Get the right people to endorse an idea with the right (specious but superficially convincing) talking points and you too can help set public policy.

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