What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#131

Post by lmm » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 2:14 PM UTC

stephencanon wrote: post #118

djtriptych wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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”?

It doesn't matter. Voters don't hate the upper-middle-class, and they don't hate fund managers enough to vote differently. And sure, it would be nice if the electorate were less racist (and I'd support efforts to change that), but in the here and now we want to introduce positive policies, and we have to do that with the electorate we have rather than the electorate we wish we had.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#132

Post by bluedino » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 2:16 PM UTC

jfarmer wrote: post #48

bluedevil2k wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welfare, food stamps, Social Security disability

How many people do you know personally who rely on those things to survive? I don't mean people you've met, but people you've grown up with, friends, family, schoolmate, etc. — that sort of thing. For example, can you name three people you know who have applied for social security disability? How likely is it they'll qualify for it? How long does the process typically take? Who do they have to convince and how?

Apply 3 times and you get it (disability). The amount of people on disability has exploded in the last 15-20 years.

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#133

Post by lmm » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 2:25 PM UTC

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…

In theory a donation of $1 in the US is exactly equivalent to a donation of $.70 or so in the UK. But psychologically it seems that people are much more willing to donate more and get money from the government.

(The other thing I've wondered about is how much of the US's charitable donations are simply tax fraud).

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#134

Post by peteretep » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 2:50 PM UTC

nahname wrote: post #128

mcherm wrote: post #60

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. [...] Successfully repeating this experiment in poor black and latino populations a few times would [...] I can't be sure what you intended to say here, but the message it sounds to me like you are implying sounds quite racist to me. I DO care about poor Cherokee -- a…

>every one of the "racial differences" (especially the mental ones) that have been claimed have turned out to be baseless and untrue. You should re-phrase that to point at racist claims. There are quite a few differences between the races. Bone density is one example. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1863580/

    > There are quite a few differences between the races. Bone density is one example.

Or, you know, skin colour, eye colour, hair colour and hair straightness.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#135

Post by at-fates-hands » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 3:06 PM UTC

splitrocket wrote: post #107

at-fates-hands wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Most staunch opponents of wealth redistribution oppose it on principle, not practical terms. Actually, most people don't like it because they've seen how the government "redistributes" their money and most of the time it's wasted. This is why religious institutions tend to get so much in donations. People trust their church more than their government.

Define wasted. Was it burned? Unless you are talking about military expenditures, which have some of the lowest economic multipliers, it paid someone's salary, who in turn went and participated in the economy. Was it ideally spent? No, but read some Edward Denning: you can spend more money ensuring that only the right people get money or you can just wrote checks and accept statistical levels of error.

Uh, just Google: "Wasteful Government Spending" and you'll find a few gems like this:

http://www.policymic.com/articles/48003/14-ridiculous-ways-t...

"Gitmo detainees also have a soccer field funded by American taxpayers. Don't worry, it only cost $750,000 to build."

"The federal government pays pensions of deceased employees, costing $120 million. According to the Huffington Post: "One man, whose father died in 1971, continued to receive payments until 2008 when he himself died, costing the government $515,000, according to the report."

"According to Senator Coburn's 2012 "Wastebook," in 2009, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) implemented a plan "to improve the economic competitiveness of Morocco" costing $27 million"

"$516,000 of your money was spent to make a video game providing taxpayers with the opportunity to relive prom."

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#136

Post by nathanvanfleet » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 3:09 PM UTC

It's sad that long-term programs just don't happen. And if they ever do happen they don't survive forever due to "austerity" measures.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#137

Post by notdrunkatall » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 3:38 PM UTC

svantana wrote: post #111

notdrunkatall wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a Swede, you're shockingly uninformed.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+welfare+immigration&o...

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#138

Post by notdrunkatall » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 4:02 PM UTC

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

Is it a shocker that I misread that table? Obviously, you meant that facetiously, suggesting that you believe that someone who espouses views contrary to popular liberal ideology is necessarily a stupid person. But the fact that I made a mistake no more means that I'm stupid than does the fact that I disagree with liberal ideology on many points; on the contrary, the fact that you believe it does says much more about you than it does me.

At any rate, the rest of my points stand. Now that you've pointed out my mistake, maybe you'd like to follow up with a quick 1-2 punch and knock the moron out of the ring, eh? Come on, it should be easy, right?!

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#139

Post by mratzloff » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 4:07 PM UTC

kiddz wrote: post #125

I read through a lot of the comments so far and they expectedly turned into a stream of educated opining for and against the validity of stipends for the poor. Although many points are well said, do they really matter? Seems like the fundamental point is the ongoing lack of experimentation around poverty alleviation that leads to a Duke researcher only having a small Indian community that she has been studying who th…

Every time a sociological or economic scientific study hits the front page of HN, there are people who try to argue against it based on one or two anecdotes, often second- or third-hand even. It's so silly.

Re: What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?

#140

Post by notdrunkatall » Mon, Jan 20, 2014, 4:15 PM UTC

stephencanon wrote: post #118

djtriptych wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The right thing to do would be to test the idea before shoving it down voters' throats.

It would not only be morally correct, it would provide great ammunition for fighting against those who would be against it.

But that's not going to happen, because despite the rhetoric of the left, no one knows whether it would work or not, and a failure would be catastrophic for the left politically.

So we'll trudge on, doing the same shit, implementing the same policies not to fix actual problems, but to appease our consciences and to feel like we've won some kind of political victory against that evil other side.

The whole game is a farce.