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Post by Fast Jimmy on Dec 15, 2015 15:35:11 GMT -6
While my post was mostly in jest, your response clearly was not. The idea that cutting "welfare" benefits (you'll have to specify- are you talking about food stamps? Unemployment? WIC? Earned Income Tax Credits? Child Tax Credits?) will reduce poverty by jolting people into economic prosperity is not something supported by evidence. It may seem logical, but it is predicated by a framework that simply does not exist in real life. People don't say "should I have sex tonight without a condom? Hmmm... let me calculate what my tax returns will be..." Human beings aren't wired that way. We are terrible at making long term risk based decisions, where we grossly underestimate the chance of something bad happening while grossly overestimating our ability to mitigate it. Similarly, we are terrible at assessing immediate risk - people assume right now they are at a severe risk of being killed by an ISIS supporter when in reality, they are nowhere at risk for it... but they are quite likely to plow into a semi and die while reading this post and driving. But even assuming your average low income person calculates the tax code in their head right before they get down and dirty on a Saturday night, you are acting like people are getting rich from receiving government assistance. I assure you... they are not. Unemployment benefits average $300 a week... or $16K a year. That's the equivalent of $7.25 an hour. And that's only for 76 weeks (previously 26 weeks before the economic crisis). The TANF benefit, which directly supports low income families, is rough to $350 a MONTH (for a whopping $4200 a year per family). Food stamps equal just a hair over $2K a year, or $1.50 a meal. Medicaid and federal housing are probably the nicest benefits, but they require abysmally low poverty rates to qualify for in most cases... and let me tell you how nice those project apartments are. And as for the tax credit, look at the price of diapers and daycare alone and you'll see that anyone on government assistance can't AFFORD to get a job. The average cost of daycare for one child is the same as the cost of in-state college tuition. And diapers (of which you go through roughly ten per day for the first six months) cost easily 10-15% of that TANF money, leaving just a shred of money to do things like clothe your children, pay your energy bills and, of yeah, spend money on yourself. Now, if you want to start talking Medicare and Social Security, the real culprits in terms of budget crunches, that's a different story. They were in theory designed to be paid into all your life so you could pull out benefits when you need them later. Poor planning by FDR resulted in no money actually being set aside, but a revolving door of money coming in and being paid out, with little eye kept to future commitments. It's too late now, but privatizing Social Security would have been a good idea, with a government support net for those who exhausted their funds before they die. Medicare is a different beast, as it spends large amounts of its dollars on long-term diseases, such as diabetes and obesity-related conditions, as well as Hospice care and ESRD treatment. More upfront incentives and/or requirements by the general populace to engage in healthy habits would be effective in curbing some of these costs. But these two are rarely what people think of when they say "welfare." They think unwed single moms who keep popping out babies to live off of government money... when in reality, the money given to these people is barely enough to survive on, let alone feel like they are getting away with something. If you ask me, offering free public day care, just like there is free public schools, would not only be a huge help to getting families out of poverty, but to ensuring basic education levels are the same once primary school begins, a real problem with lower income families who could not afford daycare and the socialization and education opportunities it gives more affluent children. We're talking about population control so namely Child tax credit and benefit. Although unemployment and working tax credit also can needs to be overhauled. Really? So you never had a conversation or thought whether you could afford a child? I think that's a line of thought that goes through every responsible adults' mind, either because their wife is pregnant and they're currently panicking or they are actually making a concious decision before hand that yes they want a child. And clearly people do make concious decisions, or contraceptives wouldn't exist, abortion or vasectomies. What the state has done is placed itself between people and responsibilities for their actions. People may have one accident, but if they know the state is not going to pick up the bill for them you really think they won't take precautions the next time? If China's birth rate dropped from 5:1 to 1.5: 5 in the 1970's then it's clear people do make concious decisions. What the Child tax credit and child benefit system has created is a perverse situation where people will use the tax credit system to support their offspring, when they could never afford to have that many children without it. Why do you have 3 children when you can only afford 2? With relatively inexpensive health care of state provided health care, widespread contraception in every pharmacy there is absolutely no reason people can't effectively manage their own families. If people on Gov. assistance can't afford to get a job, which is a similar situation to the UK where the welfare state pays more than a job, then it is a perversion of a system which was designed as a safety net not as a means to create a lifestyle. If you cannot afford to have a child in daycare or basic items to feed your child, why is that person making the decision to have a child? Why is it the states' obligation to fund that behaviour? Which is inevitably paid for by everyone else I might add. This feeds into population control and inevitable socio economics of supply and demand. If your work force is smaller the pool you can draw from is limited, so businesses will pay more to fill those gaps if they are unable to fill them at a certain wage level. This is the economic reality of supply and demand. What Gov. involvement using working tax credits and child credits/ benefits has done is artificially depress wages as the state subsidises low wages. Now you create a system without border controls and mass migration the burden on the state inevitably increases, while further depressing wages. Socialised welfare and free market economics are wholly incompatible and what we've seen is the result of that with over burdened social security/ welfare budgets. If you remove incentives and state subsidisation, while mandating minimum wage increase you remove the state's artificial influence from the free market, which is being distorted by the state's direct involvement, while removing the debt burden placed on tax revenue. Thatcher captured it best when she said "Socialist Govs. do traditionally make a financial mess. They run out of other people's money" The state should never be involved in subsidisation via social welfare, it is woefully ill equipped to do so, it's only involvement should be in regulation to mitigate the volatility of free market. As to the privatisation of social security, I take it you mean state pensions specifically in this case? The state has again distorted the system with it's involvement something which has to be addressed as life expectancy has increased, frankly it's become the highest social security cost outside of the NHS. State pensions should be taxed as with all other income types and the tax breaks given on private pension's increased, while individual savings accounts increased. This is always the difference between the neo liberal left wing drive towards socialisation and the free market classic liberal view of restricted state involvement. The greater the state's involvement the more it squeezes out the private sector and the worse it becomes in providing support, state dpts are invariably inefficient. This is the issue in the EU where the state expenditure has bloated to encompass 50% of the work force, yet it is entirely funded by taxation of the private sector. If your workforce cannot provide for offspring or survive without state intervention then the economy is unbalanced, state intervention is distorting the natural balance of the free market by subsidising that. Of course people think before having sex. Some people more than others, certainly... but those thoughts consist of "if I have unprotected sex with this person, will I wake up with itchy bumps?" or "what is the chance that this will result in a pregnancy that I neither want or can afford?" These are real thoughts that cross people's minds. But you know what thought never crosses someone's mind? "Hmmmm... now that I think about the tax code system, that tax break would really be great. I'll go ahead and risk having sex without contraception because of it!" So if no one in any circumstance would be influenced by the tax code, then the current tax breaks (or the act of removing them) will do nothing to change behavior. Privatizing Social Security means taking the contributions someone puts in while they work into a retirement account they own. It grows as they work, it goes down as they spend. Similar to a 401k/403b account. Instead of the system that exists today, where the money I pay in today goes to pay my grandparent's monthly social security payment, with no money being set aside for me, only the hope that my grandchildren work and pay into it. Privatization introduces risk of funds going up and down (as opposed to the defined benefits nature of current Social Security or most pension programs), while also introducing the possibility of running out of money. A safety net for those who run out as well as smart investment strategies could mitigate both of these risks while preserving the nature of a compulsive retirement benefit. The myth that governments are horribly inefficient with administering programs is just that - mythological. One need only look at healthcare: the cost for private insurance companies to administer an individual policy prior to the ACA was 20% of the premium paid on average. For Medicare, the cost to administer was 8% - meaning 92% of the money paid in was purely for the cost of medical expenses alone. That is amazing efficiency and overhead. Now, granted, a significant portion of that reduction is scale - Medicare is the largest insurer in America. But that only reinforces the idea that concepts like single payer insurance systems reduce inefficiency, waste and oversight programs. So saying "government is wasteful" is a misnomer. In addition, the federal government is the world's largest employer, meaning more jobs and income pumped into the economy. There is no black hole in spending - it all goes somewhere... unless you are a multinational corporation and it can leave the country or disappear into tax shelters. Which makes many free market solutions WORSE than the government spending one. And lastly, I'm not saying government programs pay more than getting a job would. That's not the case AT ALL. The value of every government program a poor family with children would qualify for is less than what you would get from a full time minimum wage job. The problem is the increased cost you incur when you incur by re-entering the work force with young children. Again - the average daycare costs the same as in-state university tuition... per child! Do we expect a destitute family of four to afford paying to put two kids through community college without school loans? Because that's the reality of putting two children through daycare. It goes from making twice as much working even a minimum wage versus staying on government assistance to a situation where you are actually LOSING money by leaving your kids. Again, my suggestion of government daycare just the same as we offer public school options for older children would both alleviate the roadblock to returning to the workforce with a family as well as improve education levels prior to primary school, a win-win for your average impoverished family. They can make more money than they would by staying on the system and then they can also provide better advantages to their children by doing so. |
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