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

Wrong
Again you seem to see questions or the seeking of clarification as supposed ‘straw man’ arguments, I’m trying to understand your thinking and that’s hard when you seem unwilling to answer questions or address criticisms.

I mean let go through your examples -

But that’s what you seem to imply with some of your comments (which I’ve quoted) can you actually explain your thinking, I think I’ve asked you twice now and seem no closer to getting one.

Again may I try and work you view out? Boom and Busts only happen because of interference in the ‘free market’?

But as I’ve often said there never has been and never could be a ‘free market’.
So wouldn’t it be best to have positive management tools when it came to looking after the economy?

Yes it is another example of me asking a question that is why it has a ?at the end.

I mean you talk about misrepresentation but the full quote is “Thing is I think you need to explain a bit more are you saying there was no economic problems in the US between 1873-1879 when some seem to believed “18,000 businesses went bankrupt, including hundreds of banks, and ten states went bankrupt, while unemployment peaked at 14% in 1876” (wiki)And are you trying to say that there were no ‘real’ economic problems in the US until the 1930’s? I mean you seem to have said there were. [my bold]

I’m beginning to think that this scream of ‘straw man’ whenever I ask you to explain something is just an evasion tactic.

Well that SEEMED to be your thinking as you say above in your view any company that gets into short term problems is completely unviable and absolutely “NEEDS to fail” or be sold for a fraction of the potential price in a fire sale. I think that could be called letting it crash and burn and as to ‘helping people’ apart from the repetitive anti-government rhetoric you don’t explain why a policy of crash and burn actually helps people. What you seem to be saying that the best way to ‘help’ people is for them to become unemployed unnecessarily, that suppliers should suffer or go to the wall unnecessarily an so on. That’s what seems to be meant by allowing their resources to be once again allocated.

 

Wrong

This isn’t a defence of your original reply it is a retreat, even a rout, which you are trying to hide behind a smokescreen of weak bluster.

Again I ask what ‘several depressions’ are you talking about?

You seem to have gone from the emphatic NO government intervention to some kind of government intervention during every depression, to saying that there was no Keynesian intervention.

But I was not the one saying there wasn’t intervention that was you. As to Keynesian intervention in the 19th century well Keynes was I think still only in his teens when it ended.

It seems to me that rather than clearing the waters you are trying to cloud them, another form of evasion.

 

Wrong
Even your attempts at clarification don’t clarify.

We have been through that before that viewpoint and as I’ve said that viewpoint is vastly simplistic, reinstating this view again when you still haven’t addressed the criticisms of it brought up last time doesn’t make it any more valid in fact your silence on those criticisms would seem to point to flaws you seem unable to counter.

So again where is this other world you are basing your assertion on? I mean you seem to be saying that economic ideas that hadn’t yet being formulated were not used so proving they wouldn’t have worked? That doesn’t seem to make sense.

Well according to wiki “Fractional reserve banking predates the existence of governmental monetary authorities and originated many centuries ago in bankers' discovery that depositors generally do not all demand payment at the same time”
As I’ve said you hold an Austrian school opinion but as pointed out those ideas are disputed – I’ve even presented some criticisms here (against crash and burn for instance).

But isn’t going back to the pre-industrial world (say the 18th century 1700-1799 the US only existing from say 1780’s) a bit far back and so vastly different economically speaking to base ideas on which to run a 21st century economy?

 

Wrong

Why is it needed?

I’m all for reform but what regulation would be removed and why?

So what would you stop spending on and why?

Their own personal responsibility?

 

As I’ve often said it is the mentality that seems to be the problem - it is often simplistic, not thought through and plagued by the blinkering effects of either/or thinking.

Take the rather silly reworking of the ant and grasshopper story scribbled above.

It takes a complex socio-economic problem and reduces it to the colours of black and white, like reducing the Mona Lisa to a stick figure line drawing with a big grin and dots for eyes.

The ant is hard working, honest and decent, an upstanding citizen - the grasshopper is a feckless, lazy, drug addled, manipulative, scrounger.

Black and White – just how simplistic can you get?

I don’t know how many times I’ve pointed out that this is the old right wing con game of the supposed deserving and undeserving poor.

To repeat - 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 individuals and families but just at different stages of life or circumstance.

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

*

IT ISN’T BLACK AND WHITE

It is not a matter of worker ants and lazy grasshoppers, but that is the simplistic way of right wing propaganda.

As pointed out a lot of people seeking assistance are working, even working full time others want to work.

As also pointed out in the last thirty years or so wealth has vastly increased it riches while the real term incomes of the middle and lower classes have on the whole stagnated or fallen.

The financial crash made that bad situation worse for those middle and lower classes groups. It seems to me that what some on the wealth supported right are trying to do is shift middle class blame onto the ‘scrounging grasshoppers’ in a classic game of divide and rule.

 

So, striving for perfection is cutting off aid to the poor? What about the poor who cannot compete in the labor market? Not everyone is gifted like you and me. If we were blessed with the ability to compete why should we assume everyone is or can be?

False- you and the Cato Institute are claiming that welfare is a failure. In order to make that assertion (in any kind of "study"), a pass/fail criteria must be established.

If the criteria is irrelevant, your claim and the claim of the Cato Institute that "welfare is a failure" is irrelevant.

There again, you demonstrate that you blindly accept (thinking it's irrelevant) the criteria of the Cato Institute and parrot their words in an undiscerning manner. I don't need to know you outside of this forum to make that assessment. Your words reveal your lack of discernment.

Attribution of the criteria used to determine pass/fail is an important part of any "study" (if you want to call it a study).

Yes. A criteria could be "are the poor actually being helped?"

I’ll speak from personal experience here. I was laid off five times in my 30 year (so far) working career. Unemployment benefits, which the Cato Institute most certainly does consider welfare, reduced the depth of poverty that I experienced. I also received a social security survivors benefit for three years when my father died (I was 15). I used it to live and finish high school. Without it, life would have been considerably more miserable than it already was.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the agenda of the Cato Institute will stop at what we traditionally think of as "welfare." If they’re successful on that front, they'll go after social security, unemployment benefits, medicare and the rest next.

So a statistic is "a type of lie" and your argument stands on a statistic?

Since you believe that statistics are lies, shouldn't you be particularly discerning when the source is a think tank? Hint: (think tanks = propaganda)

That's why I asked you to spell out the criteria for "working." In my view, welfare is meant to be aid for the needy. So I would ask, "are the needy being aided?" That is my criteria for a pass/fail test.

To help the poor in their time of need.

Maybe if you didn't think in such a binary way you wouldn't come to such unfounded conclusions.

As you said, statistics lie. The answer is not to be found in numbers but the lives of those being helped.

The criteria you set up is designed to fail. In the crony capitalist system in which we live, there will always be poor people who are at a competitive disadvantage and cannot compete in the labor market. I'm referring to the blind, children, the permanently injured, the mentally ill, etc

 

If the measure of a civilization is determined by how it treats its weakest members, the agenda of the Cato Institute will bring about a most uncivilized civilization.

 

The agenda of the Cato Institute is not just to shut down welfare but to "influence" individuals and governments to a creation of its own choosing.

Undiscerning drones then parrot Cato's talking points not knowing they're participating in bringing about their own demise (or their children's).

ok, i'll get off my soapbox now...

 

^
...as long as you realize that because someone may be against the current use of social welfare doesn't mean that they side with Cato, or that they want the same things.

 

The timing of the "study" couldn't be more critical, considering the flood of veterans needing PTSD assistance.

 

Balbus, prefacing your misrepresentations with "it seems", does not make them any less of misrepresentations.

Lets be clear here, if anyone wants to go back to the economic ideas of the distant past, it's you. Keynes theories, such as expansionary monetary policy, tampering with interest rates, and even his theory on the "velocity of money", are all something straight out of the age of Mercantilism (1500-1700). He himself says it in Chapter 23 of the general theory (a note on Mercantilism)... Have you even read your own book?!?!

He threw out the Loanable Funds Market (The theory that interest rates adjust according to the amount of savings), and returned to the preceding view of how interest rates work.

Here are some quotes from Ch. 23, a note on mercantilism:
"the weight of my criticism is...against the notion that the rate of interest and the volume of investment are self-adjusting at the optimum level, so that preoccupation with the balance of trade is a waste of time."
And:
"Mercantilists' thought never supposed that there was a self-adjusting tendency by which the rate of interest would be established at the appropriate level."
And:
"For some two hundred years both economic theorists and practical men did not doubt that there is a peculiar advantage to a country in a favourable balance of trade, and grave danger in an unfavourable balance, particularly if it results in an effiux of the precious metals. But for the past one hundred years there has been a remarkable divergence of opinion."
And:
"The early pioneers of economic thinking may have hit upon their maxims of practical wisdom without having had much cognisance of the underlying theoretical grounds."

Here's a quote from William Potter, a 17th century mercantilist, "The greater quantity … of money … the more commodity they sell, that is, the greater is their trade. For whatsoever is taken amongst men … though it were ten times more than now it is, yet if it be one way or other laid out by each man, as fast as he receives it … it doth occasion a quickness in the revolution of commodity from hand to hand … much more than proportional to such increase of money."

Sound familiar? It's almost an exact replica of Keynes "multiplier effect" theory.

Another Mercantilist by the name of F.W. von Schrötter wrote that Thrift caused unemployment because savings withdraws money out of the economy.

Sound familiar? It's almost an exact replica of Keynes "Paradox of Thrift" theory.

Even your dribble about greed causing our economic problems is something straight out of the 16th century. John Hales, a theologian and economist from the period attributed the economic problems and excess speculation of the time to "mans all pervasive greed; greed and the desire for profit were the great social evils. The only solution for this, opines Hales, was to purge man of self-love. To remove the self-love that is in many men, to take away the inordinate desire of riches which many be cumbered, to expel and quench the insatiable thirst of ungodly greediness which they be diseased..."

Mercantilism was an age of big government, heavy taxes, heavy regulations, and protectionism. It was AFTER this era that the classical liberal, laissez-faire era took place. So again, the idea that I'm suggesting we return to the ideas of the past is laughable... You really need to reexamine your history.

It'd also be a good idea to actually read the book that you're basing your ideas from.

 

Booms and busts happen because of Bank Credit Expansion (inflating the money supply). This can take place in a 'free market', however in the absence of government intervention, the banks involved would fail and be weeded out (bank runs, insolvency, etc). The reason why the government does not allow the offending banks to fail is because the main beneficiary of credit expansion, is the government.

Banks and government have a symbiotic relationship that causes and perpetuates booms and busts.

It's certainly not my original idea... It's the Austrian Theory of Business Cycle. Which you said you'd "been there and done that"....

 

This "crash and burn" notion is a joke Balbus. Business capital doesn't "crash and burn" when they go bankrupt. They don't torch the factories and equipment on their way out. What do you think happens to their resources / capital equipment / land when they get bought up in "some kind of fire sale"? The money is used to pay back unpaid creditors, and the new owners take the resources / capital equipment and use them in more productive ways.

Take Hostess for example. They will not be receiving any government bailout or "nationalization", because they are not as politically connected as GM or the Banks. Yet they are a massive company employing as many as 16,000 people. They've used up all their available means of voluntary credit, and they continue to lose money. Depending on who you believe, they're insolvent because either Union contracts are bid too high, or executive salaries are too high. Either way, they're insolvent, and their business model is a failure. Had the government stepped in, bailed them out, or "bought them up", they would keep the same faulty contracts, the same faulty business plan, and continue to be insolvent.

I encourage you to pay attention to what happens to hostess, and their products.. And pay attention to how much "crashing and burning" goes on. Their factories and brands will be sold off and bought up by new companies who will renegotiate employee contracts, and restructure the business so that it will once again turn a profit. (Which simply means that the resources it uses will once again be a net-benefit to consumers, instead of a loss)

 

Wow. Quite a rant you had, outthere.

Did I say that? No, I didn’t! Even if those who cannot, i.e. are not able to provide for themselves are provided with assistance to a point of removing them from poverty, there will always be those who are simply satisfied with a lower quality of life (i.e. with living below the “poverty line” by their own choice) and those completely happy with letting others provide for them.

Again, you misrepresent what was posted. My statement was that “attribution of the criteria is irrelevant” – meaning that the point of whomever developed the criteria is irrelevant. You asked that I attribute the “criteria” for the “system working” to either myself or the Cato Institute. This is simply another attack on the source without providing any evidence of the success of the welfare system in actually reducing poverty, which, last time I checked was the topic and overall gist of this thread.

at·tri·bu·tion n. the act of attributing; especially: the ascribing of a work (as of literature or art) to a particular author or artist

I explained the basis for my opinion of the welfare system – you must have read it since you quote it in your post.

Your argument regarding attribution of the criteria is the same as one for changing the answer to a question based on who asked it. If anyone’s claim that “welfare is a failure” is irrelevant, why has the poverty rate not been reduced? By now, I’m well aware of your opinion of the Cato Institute – please try to move on to some real evidence.

But are they being helped? Or, is their misery only being made more bearable? A more pertinent question is “are the poor actually being helped out of poverty”?

But again, can you direct me to any evidence of a reduction in the poverty rate. Since I believe that you (in a previous post) termed “personal experience” as “anecdotal evidence”, I’ll consider it that here, as well. Even so, your own statement clearly indicates that neither “unemployment benefits” nor the “survivor benefit” kept you from poverty but only reduced the level of it – made it more bearable. If unemployment compensation had not existed, would you have made any preparation (financially) for the possibility of becoming unemployed?

First, I believe you understand my point – that statistics can be manipulated to indicate much less (or more) than the truth and that one should seldom (if ever) accept such as the whole story. I’ve already explained the basis for my opinion of the welfare system – you quote it. Why feign misunderstanding or make false implication by rhetorical question?

Second, has anyone reported figures (yes, statistics) other than those used (12-15%)? If so, who? Where?

And finally, aren’t think tanks easily equated to “propaganda” if one doesn’t agree with their conclusions?

I thought I did that, i.e. spell out the criteria: has the poverty rate been reduced? No, it hasn’t.

Are the “needy” being aided in any way other than to be less “needy” for the moment? Under the current system, it seems most will still be “needy” when whatever assistance provided is expended or consumed. Shouldn’t they be helped to not become “needy” again? Do not many programs actually encourage behavior and lifestyle choices detrimental to being or becoming contributing members of society? (hint: take a look at the programs aimed at providing assistance for single mothers)

But again, overall, are they helped in such way as to alleviate their plight or merely in ways to make it more bearable.

Believing that the system is successful in view of the fact that no real reduction in the poverty rate has been accomplished certainly seems illogical to me.

My question to you remains unanswered.

(It's interesting how your terminolgy changed from "the poor" and "the needy" to "the blind, children, the permanently injured, the mentaly ill, etc".)

So it’s an anti-capitalist argument? Wouldn’t those same disadvantaged – “the blind, children, the permanently injured, the mentally ill, etc.” – be just as disadvantaged under any system? Those people must be cared for – no dispute – but the welfare system has many, many more beneficiaries than would fall into any of those categories. And, many more of those than actually do, should, if the system were successful, be able to overcome the grip of poverty and become contributing members of society making better care available for those disadvantaged you refer to.

There is no doubt that those in need should be helped. There is no doubt that the welfare system provides relief, albeit temporary, for the unfortunate. But, are those disadvantaged you refer to being provided with assistance to the point that they are lifted from poverty? Or do they live from one month to another on the basic subsistence provided by a system that seems designed to keep them “needy” and dependent on government.

Wouldn’t those truly in need be better served by a system other than one comprised of a multitude of overlapping programs administered by a giant bureaucracy and teeming with (perhaps even encouraging) fraud and abuse?

As I have stated before: The US welfare system has failed – it has failed those it was/is suppossedly intended to help and it has failed those (taxpayers) who fund it. How can continuing and/or expanding such a system be any sort of a solution to the problem of poverty and the plight of the poor?

 

tricknologist

That was the intention fro the outset? In just the US or other nations too?

Not to sound stupid but why does that form the end of a republic


orison319

When was this program started?

 

56oldog:

I have no interest in going further with our discussion. The only thing left I would like to say is that you are no longer an unknowing tool of wealth.

I'll now go back to my one liners and cheerleading.

Have a nice day

 

Re-read the quote -- take note of the word "herald"

 

I understand -- completely.

 

From the State of the Union address given by Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 4, 1935:

"But the stark fact before us is that great numbers still re-
main unemployed.
A large proportion of these unemployed and their depen-
dents have been forced on the relief rolls. The burden on the
Federal Government has grown with great rapidity. We have
here a human as well as an economic problem. When humane
considerations are concerned, Americans give them precedence.
The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immedi-
ately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence
upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fun-
damentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief
in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the
human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is
in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found
for able-bodied but destitute workers.
The Federal Government must and shall quit this business
of relief.
I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further
sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few
hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking
up papers in the public parks. We must preserve not only
the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their
self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determina-
tion. This decision brings me to the problem of what the
Government should do with approximately five million un-
employed now on the relief rolls."


As for 'other nations', they would have to answer the question for themselves.

 

Let's not forget, welfare does not exist in a vacuum. The state of the economy is no small factor to be considered. Someone somewhere once said: it's the economy stupid.