War on poverty.

[NC252]

More infrastructure won't change the percentage of kids, disabled, elderly people, and college students without jobs. It won't change the fact that in a dynamic, growing economy, there will always be some transitional unemployment (note that we deliberately target an unemployment rate of about 5% to keep inflation in check). So, yes, it absolutely is an argument for some form of safety net.



Poverty in the developed world is mostly a life cycle issue. Also, even with full employment (which we're pretty close to now), a quarter to a third of the population will be in poverty absent transfer payments because of the way market income distribution works. That's why every country with a market-based income-distribution system has independently developed a safety net.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
Doesn't look like full employment to me. Are you saying that the able-bodied people who choose not to work and you choose to be poor do not affect the numbers?

 

[djacobox372]

Helping people cost money... so what? what's your point? What better thing do we have to spend our ridiculous wealth on?

 

[Jack V Savage]

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
Doesn't look like full employment to me. Are you saying that the able-bodied people who choose not to work and you choose to be poor do not affect the numbers?

Full employment doesn't mean that all retirees, stay-at-home parents, people in prison, college students, etc. are working.

And "able-bodied people who choose not to work" might affect the numbers in some way, but it's a very, very small percentage of the total population of Americans in poverty. Less than 5%.

 

[ultramanhyata]

I have offered to people I know that need money to show them how to make AT LEAST! an extra $100 every week and they always make an excuse why they cant.

Some people just have a needle phobia and so can't sell their plasma.

 

[NC252]

Many Americans including myself work very hard to provide the ridiculous wealth that our government enjoys. I am not sure of the answer but I know that if you throw that much money at something in such a short amount of time and does not make a dent then something is wrong with the system that we are using to try to fight poverty.

 

[Badger67]

IMO a mandatory urinalysis/piss test is justified in this scenario. If a person is in need of a welfare check then provide a sample.

They have tried this, and wasted money, to catch very few people.

https://www.aol.com/article/2016/02...elfare-recipients-and-the-results-w/21314760/

http://time.com/3117361/welfare-recipients-drug-testing/

https://thinkprogress.org/what-7-st...-drug-testing-welfare-recipients-c346e0b4305d

1 million $ plus spent testing, to kick off very few people. If you saved 20K a person by kicking them off, and have a 0.02% rate of drug usage or lower, you are wasting a lot more money than you could ever save for the program.

 

[Panmisiek]

Unemployed people shouldn't under any circumstances receive money for being unemployed. Instead, create local offices for public service. For example unemployed people without proper employment could work anywhere between 10-20 hours a week doing simple jobs, cut grass in parks, collect rubbish, sweep streets and instead of money they could receive vouchers for food, drink, have electricity, water and gas bills paid to certain amount until they find proper employment. Vouchers only for basic needs necessary for survival, no alcohol, no drugs and so on until they find proper employment.

Giving people money its a lot more costly than vouchers I mentioned. People will still work to have their needs satisfied and local office will have people to deal with simple jobs around area. For example in case of heavy winds or thunders, remove fallen trees from roads and other stuff.

And if you dont wanna work at all, then starve. Less leeches leads to healthier and prosperous country.

 

[NC252]

Full employment doesn't mean that all retirees, stay-at-home parents, people in prison, college students, etc. are working.

And "able-bodied people who choose not to work" might affect the numbers in some way, but it's a very, very small percentage of the total population of Americans in poverty. Less than 5%.

I've never seen any statistics on this even though I have looked where do you get 5% from?

 

[Jack V Savage]

I've never seen any statistics on this even though I have looked where do you get 5% from?

It's lower than that, I'm sure. I'm eliminating everyone in poverty who obviously doesn't fit in that category (elderly, children, disabled, full-time students, unpaid caretakers, people who work but are supporting others who don't, and people who are between jobs at some point in a year and miss the poverty line because of the gap). That gets us down to probably below 5%, but I don't know what percentage of that remainder actually fits your description. Definitely not 100%.

 

[Islam Imamate]

I'm sure you'll find a strapping, probably Canadian, man who will talk about you that way.

 

[lecter]

I'm no supporter of welfare but I honestly do wonder if without it the US would be like Brazil or South Africa with very wealthy gated areas on one side of a city and the most frightening slums on the other side with insane crime and murder rates.

Doesn't sound too bad.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Doesn't sound too bad.

Would you really prefer to live in any of those shitholes over the US? I have a cousin who lives in Brazil and is well off and even she has thought about moving over here because of the violence.

 

[lecter]

Would you really prefer to live in any of those shitholes over the US?

If I did, I would live there right now. So I assume the answer is no.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Poverty is more about no income than low income. The vast majority of people with pre-transfer below-poverty incomes in any year are kids, the elderly, and the disabled. Other big groups are college students, unpaid caretakers, and people who temporarily were without work during the year. No amount of infrastructure spending would change the fact that large percentages of people in those groups will not have above-poverty market incomes.

This seems like an obvious point if you think about it but it for someone reason its a point that's often forgotten in these discussions.

 

[ripskater]

President Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964. Since then we have spent over 22 trillion dollars to fight the war on poverty. That is more than have spent on all of our military interventions (real wars ) combined since the American Revolution. Could this money have been better spent somewhere else? (Infrastructure?) Would the poverty rate still be at 15% as it is now or would it have skyrocketed? Not sure of the answer but I think that without the social programs that we now have (welfare, food stamps, public housing, etc....), we would still have the same 15% poverty rate. And we would have 23 trillion more dollars!! What say you?
http://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/the-war-poverty-50-years-failure

There will always be poverty. We should just strive for opportunity. Some will take advantage of opportunity and some will ignore opportunity to keep accepting that welfare check and forever be hostage to it.

 

[Jack V Savage]

This seems like an obvious point if you think about it but it for someone reason its a point that's often forgotten in these discussions.

I overlooked it myself for a while. Started with a thread here when some anti-safety-net clown made a comment about the percentage of some benefit program who didn't work. I looked into it, and saw he was right but that the majority of recipients were children and disabled people, and that started me looking into the issue more. Like you say, it should be obvious, but it didn't reflect how I thought of poverty. You can also look around the developed world and the numbers are pretty similar. There are vastly different levels of post-transfer poverty (different strength safety nets), but pre-transfer poverty is around a quarter to a third everywhere (with age demographics driving the difference). Having a market-based income-distribution system is the best way to grow the wealth of the country as a whole, but it's inevitably going to leave a large portion of the country in poverty without a safety net (which every country with a market-based economy has independently developed).

A lot of proposed solutions really miss that point. In addition to the infrastructure thing, I see a lot of people talk about education. The percentage of 25-plus-year-olds with college degrees in America has gone up almost 500%, but it has had no noticeable effect on poverty rates. Why? Because it doesn't change the fact that a lot of people have no income because they are kids, elderly, etc. And there's a zero-sum aspect to it, too. We're a richer society, but labor costs are embedded in almost every good or (more obviously) service we buy. So households with lower incomes will inevitably have trouble buying necessities.

 

[kpt018]

@Jack V Savage doing good work in this thread to correct the record. There is a lot of bullshit out there about poverty and political leaders are basing bad policy on it. I think if people take the time to learn the truth about who is in poverty, what that means and how they got there they would likely have an opposite view on what we do about it.

 

[sickc0d3r]

This seems like an obvious point if you think about it but it for someone reason its a point that's often forgotten in these discussions.

It literally has to be repeated every time one of these threads pops up.