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Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

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Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#41

Post by wavemode »

gosub100 wrote: post #22

Do economists share any culpability here? I thought their job was to apply their sharp minds and apply "systems" to achieve certain goals (not limited to addressing poverty). What if we compare it to other sciences? Say we didn't understand flight as well as we do, and we have this problem where planes keep crashing, maybe 2-3 a year (like it was in the 1980s-1990s) and instead of getting to the bottom of it and fixi…

People often get this wrong. The goal of economics is not to fix economic systems, any more than the goal of psychology is to make the human mind perfect, or the goal of political science is to guarantee that your candidate wins every election.

What these all have in common is they are merely descriptive sciences, not engineered solutions to specific problems. Understanding how something works currently, is not the same as having the tools to make it work better.

To use a similar example to the one you gave - the common cold is one of the most common and well-studied illnesses known to man, but there is no vaccine for it. Lazy scientists? No, it's just that not every problem has an easy solution.

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#42

Post by taxicabjesus »

PopAlongKid wrote: post #3

>Instead, he proposed a “work bonus” plan that passed as the EITC in 1975, the first program to exclude the poorest Americans from government assistance by phasing in benefits alongside earned income. EITC was not initially designed as welfare, rather it was "supposed to be a temporary refundable tax credit for lower-income workers to offset the Social Security payroll tax and rising food and energy prices."[0] TFA m…

> EITC was not initially designed as welfare, rather it was "supposed to be a temporary refundable tax credit for lower-income workers to offset the Social Security payroll tax and rising food and energy prices."[0]

Hah, that makes a lot of sense. The Social Security tax is suffocating for self-employed people at the bottom of the economic dogpile. 12.4% of your already-spent income is an impossible bill for low-income people to pay.

I, of course, diligently tracked my income and paid all taxes due. But... if your income is 'off the books', it's easier to just not pay Uncle Sam than to put a target on your back by filing possibly-indefensible returns.

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#43

Post by gruez »

gosub100 wrote: post #22

Do economists share any culpability here? I thought their job was to apply their sharp minds and apply "systems" to achieve certain goals (not limited to addressing poverty). What if we compare it to other sciences? Say we didn't understand flight as well as we do, and we have this problem where planes keep crashing, maybe 2-3 a year (like it was in the 1980s-1990s) and instead of getting to the bottom of it and fixi…

>What if in the late '70s this new virus started spreading among gay men, and doctors just shrugged and said "well we can treat the symptoms and make our best guess how to avoid it, but damned if I know what's going on..."? How long would we keep awarding academic medals, increasing professors' salaries (and of course tuition), and lauding these doctors as heroes if they never advanced the state of their art?

I mean, we still can't cure aids, nor can we cure cancer, and we still haven't figured out how to stop aging. If you cherry pick the right examples you can make any field seem like bunk.

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#44

Post by dfxm12 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #37
dfxm12 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People work in Alaska. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ An employer that wields that carrot also wields that stick, and can exploit the difference to incredible social harm. It is especially cruel that in the US, so many benefits are tied to employment. It means employers have this huge power over workers and also makes sure that it is almost impossible for some workers to invest the time and money in themselves required to gain the skills…

> It is especially cruel that in the US, so many benefits are tied to employment. And so many taxes tied to employment. Not just US, but pretty much everywhere. Why discourage the most the thing you want people to do?

I'll admit it is arguable that there might be better ways to raise tax revenue than we currently are, but has anyone thought about maybe not entering the workforce because of income tax?

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#45

Post by ToucanLoucan »

hellojesus wrote: post #23
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all that's not even going into things like the pandemic business loans that were handed out like fucking candy, many to businesses that barely even existed at the time, to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, most of which were entirely forgiven after the fact. But that's not socialism of course, that's not "financing bad decisions" and those people definitely 100% used all that money in…

> And all that's not even going into things like the pandemic business loans that were handed out like fucking candy, many to businesses that barely even existed at the time, to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, most of which were entirely forgiven after the fact. It was a terrible system with malaligned incentives, but it was the government's attempt to not violate 5A. Had those loans not…

> It was a terrible system with malaligned incentives, but it was the government's attempt to not violate 5A.

Is there a source for this? This seems incredibly shaky, basically saying that because of public health mandates, the government had to "repay" businesses for lost business/the inability to conduct business, which is just... not the same thing. Lost business is at best a nebulous "I might've made X" proposition, it's not nearly the same thing to, for example, say that the Government confiscated your truck which was worth $12,000 and should pay you as such.

Like, I can see the logic but this seems like something that should be handled in court, not pre-empted by the feds this way.

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#46

Post by 4death4 »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #21
mathgradthrow wrote: post #15

My father and I fight about this a lot. His take is that if you give peiple money, they won't work, which will be bad. I understand his complaint, but the empirical evidence for it is that, when welfare was tied to having children, people apparently gamed the system by using less money on their kids than the welfare provided. This seems like it's probably most american's understanding of a welfare system, and my fath…

> His take is that if you give peiple money, they won't work, which will be bad. There are a lot of people with money (high net-worth) that work (have some position in a company that they could get fired from), e.g. Jeff Bezos, many if not all CEOs, etc. So your father's take is either A) false, or B) what people with money are doing is not work, and is therefore bad.

The issue with this argument is that low wages are basically marginal. E.g. a low wage earner could get $100 dollars UBI or $200 dollars working a job. A CEO, on the other hand, could get $100 UBI or 11 million working a job. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely getting out of bed for the extra $10,999,900. I might not get out of bed for the extra $100, however.

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#47

Post by themoonisachees »

nvahalik wrote: post #30
datadrivenangel wrote: post #6

We're not fighting poverty, we're fighting poor people! Which is a very expensive war, so it might be cheaper to give some of that money to the poor people, so they can spend it more effectively.

Yes, but _why_ are they poor? This is the thing that bothers me about this conversation more than anything. It's like giving pain killers to someone who has pain—in some cases that may be the only real solution but arguably the vast, VAST majority of the time, there is a basic desire to do the same thing repeatedly hoping for a different outcome. Giving money to people who aren't willing to change only perpetuates th…

So? Surely not all poor people have a "desire" to be poor (nobody wants to but I get the point of your post is maybe some people want to take actions that make them poor), and should we not help them? Furthermore, don't you think that the behaviours of the people who "want" to be poor are such because they can't afford nice things and turn to cheaper and more destructive forms of escapism, such as drugs?

You make it seem like we shouldn't give painkillers to people in pain because some people do stupid things that cause them pain. But the fact of the matter is that giving the money currently spent on poverty (because we do in fact spend a _lot_ of money on poverty) to the poor people directly is more efficient. They, again and again, make more out of a dollar than that dollar would have made if it were spent on, say, food banks. If the case for empathy doesn't work for you (and clearly it doesn't) then surely the case for efficiency of government spending should?

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#48

Post by lambertsimnel »

mypastself wrote: post #31
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His take is that if you give peiple money, they won't work, which will be bad. There are a lot of people with money (high net-worth) that work (have some position in a company that they could get fired from), e.g. Jeff Bezos, many if not all CEOs, etc. So your father's take is either A) false, or B) what people with money are doing is not work, and is therefore bad.

Couldn’t it be the case that it’s much harder for poor people to find employment they enjoy as much as CEOs enjoy theirs? Or that ultra-rich CEOs are able to reach that status in part because their work ethics is an extreme outlier?

Couldn’t it be the case that a universal basic income that gives low-wage workers more choice would increase competition among their employers, resulting in low-wage work becoming more enticing?

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#49

Post by gruez »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #40
hellojesus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. The only reason people work is because the expected value of their work maximizes their utility curve when compared to the opportunity costs. I go to work because I need money to live. I find employment by maximizing the pay I'm able to get conditional om my skillset and preferred job functions. But I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activ…

> But I don't see why people with lower skillsets or utility curves that weigh leisure more highly than work activities should be allowed to leech off the productive capacities of others. This is a good example of a "thought-terminating cliché"[0]. In this case, the statement assumes its own veracity, which makes it difficult to respond to in a discussion. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3…

Ironically by invoking "thought-terminating cliché", you are partaking in the very offense you accuse the parent of. Is it fair to redistribute wealth from people who are working, to give it to people who don't? There's plausible arguments for both sides, but rather than trying to argue for why we should, you drop a link to some fallacy on wikipedia and call it a day.

Re: Anti-poverty programs should be unconditional

#50

Post by jamilton »

nvahalik wrote: post #30
datadrivenangel wrote: post #6

We're not fighting poverty, we're fighting poor people! Which is a very expensive war, so it might be cheaper to give some of that money to the poor people, so they can spend it more effectively.

Yes, but _why_ are they poor? This is the thing that bothers me about this conversation more than anything. It's like giving pain killers to someone who has pain—in some cases that may be the only real solution but arguably the vast, VAST majority of the time, there is a basic desire to do the same thing repeatedly hoping for a different outcome. Giving money to people who aren't willing to change only perpetuates th…

The poor are poor because they don't have money. If you give them money, they will no longer be poor, QED.

I say that somewhat jokingly, but I think it's basically true. AFAIK welfare/basic income studies have shown that giving people money directly tends to work really well for increasing their life quality long-term, even long after the payments end. I don't know on what basis you think the vast majority of poor people are poor because of a poverty mindset/being financially irresponsible.

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