Study: More Than Half a Trillion Dollars Spent on Welfare But Poverty Levels Unaffect

No, you don't give them CASH, because they might spend it on wine. They need to learn to sleep on pavement without requiring a sedative.

 

Holy shit.

 

You can get continuous welfare - enough to live comfortably - by popping out kids left and right?

BRB...going to get knocked up.

 

Yeah, because welfare people live like fucking kings, doncha know. It's the life of Rielly.

 

E

Of course I could be wrong but I dont think much had changed except there are different numbers. Kings were being handfed exotic fruits from thousands of miles away while the people right down the road were starving and taxed for everything they own except the clothes on their backs. And in some cases forced to fight to the death for peoples amisement.

 

Yep. I don't understand why she doesn't quit her job and sign up.

 

You have a pretty cynical view of humanity if you think we require a group of anointed bureaucrats to force everyone else to help our fellow men. Where is the evidence that the poor weren't being cared for before all this welfare spending? Because I think there is plenty to the contrary. 1800s charities articles. There weren't masses of poor starving in the streets before welfare. Private charities used to be much more prevalent, however many have gone out of business or been perverted into lobbying groups since the government got involved. In fact, the greatest reduction in poverty, and the greatest expansion of the middle class happened entirely before the federal government started "helping". Private charities demand accountability, have a personal interest in their clients success, and if they don't produce results, they fizzle out. Unlike our government run programs, which we simply throw more of other people's money at it when they fail to produce results. If the 900+ billion dollars that the government spent on welfare last year stayed in people's pockets, how much would have gone to help the poor do you think? How much would have gone into economic growth to create a better job environment? I don't know about you, but I wager that $10 in the hands of one person who actually cares and is volunteering their own time will be better used than even $100 in the hands of some public sector employee.

If you read those articles from the 1800s you'll notice that charity, and assistance in general, was geared towards finding work and jobs for the destitute so they could provide for themselves. As Individual said, and as history agrees, this is a far more effective means of reducing poverty than some far removed bureaucracy doling out stipends to people based on applications, one time interviews, and a set of arbitrary criteria. Even if what you said was true, and humanity did indeed require the force of government to invoke charity... Why do we require it at the federal level? Why not leave that up to states, counties, or cities? Who are at least much closer to the people they're helping.

Despite our high tax rates and burdensome welfare state, the USA still ranks first in the world in charitable giving. However much of it is directed to other countries as opposed to people here at home because (in theory at least) we have the government for that.

 

A poor man's worth of money is still a poor man's worth of money regardless of whether it comes from a hard days work or a government issued check.

 

All that, and yet today, there are people who are so sickeningly wealthy that there is still greater discrepency.

Because wealth has become a theorhetical thing. If money is imaginary, and thus infinite, greed can be infinite, too.

 

A poor man's worth of money is a number, government issued checks are a result of taxpaying citizens hard days of work, past, present, or future.

 

Stop confusing wealth with money. I'm a multi-millionaire in several currencies, which if converted to U.S. dollars wouldn't be enough to make me ineligible to receive U.S. government handouts were I to return and make a request.

Try looking at money and wealth separately, and how they relate to each other.

Obama may have been right about one thing, "Americans are stupid, they don't understand economics.", and until that changes the disparity between those who are rich and those who are poor will only grow larger.

 

Wrong

I’ll repeat - you seem to go so far then stop, and refuse to go further or address the criticisms of your views. You seem to be demanding that I (and everyone else) must only see things you present as you see them.
But ask yourself this – why do you seem unable to deal with differing viewpoints other than saying they must be wrong because they are not your viewpoint?

But as I’ve explained you don’t seem to understand – just claiming you do doesn’t cut it – I mean I could claim I am fluent in Hindi but if I never actually speak or write any Hindi I think it would be right for people to take my assertion as a claim rather than a fact.

Exactly – to repeat in the Austrian model crashes are factored in – in other words the theory accepts and explains WHY these large scale crashes happen, it is factored in.

Now this is the problem – because you are arguing it can prevent them – now it depends on what you read but it seems to me free marketeers go from those that think it could be lessened to those hardliners who think it can prevent. But when looked at the policies of free marketeers seem to make the possibility of crashes (and large scale crashes) more likely.

And as I’ve explained to me the problem is that this idea of preventability can lead to the ‘nothing bad can happen’ mentality I’ve pointed out above.

Using the story as an example you are in effect saying you can prevent for all time accidents (or acts of vandalism) from ever happening, and I think that is foolish.

Utopia, no just Keynes
http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/s...d.php?t=328353

 

Wrong

"You seemed to argue above that it would be better for the economy to have the Baker to spend the money he would spend on insurance on something else and so seemingly just hope nothing bad happened."

Oh for fuck sake man, read the fucking posts and then address what’s been said – read post 535

You asked me to paste in where you had said it and I did –

you said and I quote - Insurance has absolutely nothing to do with anything. We're talking about the money spent on repairing a broken window. A third party service that spreads the burden to the baker over a period of time doesn't change anything.

Doesn’t change anything - to you paying for insurance still means the baker is not spending it elsewhere and seemingly suggesting that rather than pay for insurance he should spend the money on something else and just hope an accident never happens.

 

Wrong

And to repeat ‘free market’/neoliberal economic theories doesn’t seem to have any mechanism when the crashes they encourage come about - besides letting everything fall.

In other words under many free market theories during the last crash all the banks should have been allowed to collapse (with runs on them and depositors money disappearing), all outstanding loans would have been called in to pay creditors, all businesses that needed cash to keep going would collapse, and so on….

And then sometime later the free market theory goes the economy would eventually ‘re-balance’.

But as said it’s a bit hard to pick up the pieces again if their theories turn out to be wrong and people are fighting to death over a tin of beans in a burnt out Wal-mart.

Utopia, no just Keynes
http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/s...d.php?t=328353

 

Wrong

 

Indie

Oh hells bells Indie we have been through this many. many times over the last two years – can you actually address the criticisms of your ideas rather than just restating them over and over again?

Here’s an example from the Small Government thread from October 2010

“As pointed out before protection is a vague term that is open to interpretation. Protection from harm, protection from exploitation, protection from hardship, protection in sickness (all can be argued to involve aspects of extortion and aggression).

I mean if someone is born into power and wealth which gives them protection from exploitation and hardship and another is born into poverty which opens them to exploitation and hardship, then there is in that society an inequality of protection.

The society is benefiting one over the other and if the ones getting the greater benefit are few compared to the others then that society is benefiting the few and not the many?”

As pointed out many times before we both want the state to provide protection it is just that you seem to want to mainly only protect the few while I wish to protect everyone.

 

Wrong

Since we seem to be highlighting New York how about the book How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis publish 1890

During the 1890s many people in upper- and middle-class society were unaware of the dangerous conditions in the slums among poor immigrants. Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who himself could not originally find much work, hoped to expose the squalor of the 19th-century Lower East Side of Manhattan. After a successful career as a police reporter, he decided to publish a photojournal documenting these conditions using graphic descriptions, sketches, photographs, and statistics. Riis blamed the apathy of the monied class for the condition of the New York slums, and assumed that as people were made more aware of these conditions they would be motivated to help eradicate them.

In 1889 Riis wrote a magazine article exposing some of the harsh conditions of New York slums which was published with a number of engravings of his photographs. Due to its disturbing pictures and articles, the city's rich newspaper owners refused to publish it. Yet soon the article proved to be popular and Riis spent the better part of a year expanding it into the book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, published by Charles Scribner's Sons. The book was also successful. Soon after its publication, the New York Times lauded its content, claiming it to be a “powerful book”.

In How the Other Half Lives Riis describes the system of tenement housing that had failed, as he claims, due to greed and neglect from wealthier people. He claims a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness and reckless behaviour of the poor and their lack of a proper home. Chapter by chapter he uses his words and photographs to expose the conditions inhabited by the poor in a manner that “spoke directly to people's hearts”.

How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York explained not only the living conditions in New York slums, but also the sweatshops in some tenements which paid workers only a few cents a day. The book explains the plight of working children; they would work in factories and at other jobs. (Wiki, edited)

Here are some of the pictures.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ies-unrecognisable-19th-century-New-York.html

This book along with the “publication in 1895 by the U.S. Department of Labor of a special report on housing conditions and solutions elsewhere in the world, The Housing of Working People, ultimately led to the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901, known as the New Law, which implemented the Tenement House Committee's recommendation of a maximum of 70 percent lot coverage and mandated strict enforcement, specified a minimum of 12 feet for a rear yard and 6 feet for an air and light shaft at the lot line or 12 feet in the middle of the building (all of these being increased for taller buildings), and required running water and water closets in every apartment and a window in every room. There were also fire-safety requirements. (wiki edited)

But working conditions still continued to be harsh with long hours for little pay for dangerous work or in dangerous working conditions as shown by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that took the lives of 146 workers (the youngest was 11) That is until unions were able to get governments to bring in regulations that improved the pay and conditions of workers.

 

Wrong

Also your newspaper clips have the smell of that old con game of the deserving and undeserving poor to repeat it again –

The deserving being those that don’t ask for help and so don’t need any. And the undeserving being those who do ask for help thereby showing that they are scroungers and wasters who don’t deserve any help.

So it was plain - the argument went – that there was no need to give assistance to the disadvantaged.

The problem was that these people were often the same people but just at different stages of life or circumstance.

And as I pointed out at the time this is very similar to the right wing argument often put forward today that if people are responsible and make “better decisions” they don’t need assistance but if they’re irresponsible and make “poor decisions” they don’t deserve assistance.

 

Indie

As I pointed out to you in post 558 - wealth and poverty are relative, so can you answer the question I asked in that post can you define what you mean by ‘poverty’

 

oh ok... so this:
"Insurance has absolutely nothing to do with anything. We're talking about the money spent on repairing a broken window. A third party service that spreads the burden to the baker over a period of time doesn't change anything."
actual means this:
"it would be better for the economy to have the Baker to spend the money he would spend on insurance on something else and so seemingly just hope nothing bad happened."
hmmm...

And sorry.. putting words in bold and adding a caption to them doesn't change their original meaning..

Your quote does well to depict the deplorable conditions of slums in the 1800's, but relative to the overall standard of living, our slums today are at least equally as bad...Whats your point? You seem to think I said there were no poor or something. What I actually said was that there have always been private charities to care for the poor, and that the greatest reduction of poverty and people entering the middle class was done prior to large scale welfare spending. Do you deny this?

I also said, "People were not starving in the streets prior to all this welfare spending". Here's my challenge: Post a single Jacob Riis picture from a New York or any slum for that matter of a poor person who'd starved to death on the street. Just one will suffice.

did you read more than the first sentence? or perhaps you just smelled them? lol...