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

I'll be glad to answer that after you answer the question I've asked you:

Are you a producer or a parasite?

Still waiting…

 

I didn't bother to go to the link, but I am still productive.

 

You don't think that's an answer do you?

 

I believe most people would consider productive to mean that I produce something, albeit without being paid as I enjoy what I do, and those I produce for do get paid as a result of my work.

If you wish to argue over that, then consider this post to be the answer to any further argument you may present.

We still seem to be ignoring welfare spending and poverty totally. I asked the question previously, yet to be answered clearly, "What is the root cause of poverty?"

 

Imo, there is no single cause of poverty.

So what do you think the root cause is? (and don't bother saying "government." we've heard your opinion on that many many times)

Poverty would likely exist (and probably get worse) without government.

 

outthere2

Thinking it over, I don't think it's the money per se - it's the amount of money that's the issue with me. When it reaches millions upon millions it gets a little ridiculous. These guys spend approx 20million a year in various forms. But then again Greenpeace spend approx 200million a year lobbying. The thing that grinds my gears is that it seems like a battle we the general public have little influence over.

The reason I thought you were on a particular side was the determination you seemed to show that the brothers had some negative and nefarious control over government, and a Uni' for e.g. I'm not sure the influence with the Uni' was as you described. It just seemed you were seeing things that maybe were not there. A distinct prejudice/bias. But, if I'm wrong I'm wrong.

Fair enough. Like I said, I did think you were on a particular side. If the Institute/The brothers don't represent you then maybe.......
Ok, I won't argue that point. Like I said, fair enough.

I don't know.

I don't think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Global_Change_Research_Program
...are listening to them.

Please don't make me be right : /

Greenpeace: $200 million a year

 

this is the longest thread in the world

 

If there is no single cause of poverty, then it is quite likely there is no single cure for it either.

But I do feel that government is a primary cause of the growth of poverty. Government is the only entity that has the power to exert controls over the entire population which results in defining poverty. Government actions result in the individuals having to find various differing means of compensating, like in the other thread "Papa John is Mad About Obama Care", where government by increasing the costs of doing business to both his corporate and franchised chain of Pizza restaurants simply compensated by raising the price of the product to offset the expected cost increase, which may or may not be adequate and if not, result in additional increases as the true cost becomes known.

Poverty will always exist, with or without government, and will probably only get worse, and more costly with government actions which while reducing the effects have little overall impact on reducing the causes.

 

And you and I just made it longer.

 

Let me fix that for you.

 

Roo,

Do you ever even make an attempt to engage in intelligent discourse? Don't bother to answer, I think the answer is obvious.

 

Intelligent discourse is not you saying "I won't bother to read your article, but I'm pretty sure I'm totally right anyways"

And my satire of your douchey attempt to blow off other people's points is not an indication that I do not engague is intelligent discourse. The discourse is really not going anywhere, because you're filibustering.

Really, that's how you argue. You filibuster. Can't win, but refuse to let it end, to avoid losing.

I have given up arguing against your arguments, because I've seen them all trampled to death, and spend quite a bit of time chewing on them myself. You go in a lame circle, using the same mantra, and when there's good agruments against it, you refuse to read them, blow them off because you say they're off-topic, or whatever.

So, I'm not interested in arguing against your points, I'm interested in agruing against the crooked methods that you use in an ongoing way, to create the sloppy illusion that you're holding your own in the agrument.

 

Indie

And I repeat which ‘facts’ are you talking about, we have been through this time and again you really need to explain yourself rather than just waving vaguely to a mirage and calling it fact.

 

Indie

"What is the root cause of poverty?"

Oh for fuck sake Indie LOL you know we have been through all this already several times in this thread and numerous times in other threads.

Poverty is a complex issue it is not as simplistic as some would like to portray it.

Many on the right seem to claim, overtly or covertly, that people claiming government assistance are lazy feckless scroungers milking the system to live off the hog without working, they have chosen ‘poverty’ as a lifestyle and only by cutting assistance will they seek to be ‘productive’.

That is basically what is implied in the Cato piece.

But it isn’t that simple – for example (as pointed out many times) a lot of people that seem to need government assistance to get by are working.

So it would seem that one cause of poverty (where people need assistance), are the low incomes being paid by some employers.

*

Also as explained to you more than once there is a need to get a good definition of poverty, the US definition doesn’t seem to be that good and I agree with those that are calling for its reform.

As I put in post 899 (among others) in this thread

But there are problems here first the way the US defines ‘poverty’ doesn’t seem very good -

The current federal poverty line was created in 1964 by Mollie Orshansky, an economist working at the U.S. Social Security Administration.1 Tasked with setting a threshold for what it meant to be poor, she started by analyzing the cost of one of life’s basic necessities: food. Orshansky’s first step was to determine the cost of feeding a family on the “economy food plan,” the cheapest of the four food plans deemed nutritionally adequate by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). She then estimated that the average family spent one-third of its budget on food. The poverty threshold, then, could be set by multiplying the cost of the most basic food plan by three... Except for annual adjustments for inflation, the poverty line has not been touched since. (Beyond the Poverty Line By Rourke L. O'Brien & David S. Pedulla

But what about housing, water, electricity, the environment etc

*

Another thing that I’ve tried to discuss with you (but which you evade) is the issue of social mobility. For which the US has a rather bad record.

Social mobility is the movement (or lack of it) between differing socio-economic groups. In this context it is about how difficult it is for people born into disadvantage to get out of that situation.

Now some on the right argue that if such people just ‘acted responsibly’ and ‘worked hard’ they could pull themselves out of advantage (again the implication that they are feckless scroungers).

But again that is a simplistic view of the issue.

And as pointed out before it would seem that many on the right want to make it more difficult for people born to disadvantage to get out of it.

Read the Effort or Luck thread
http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=400136

 

Indie

Now you do say

But as I’ve pointed out to you many times to those on the left assistance is not a ‘cure’ to poverty.

To repeat from post 108 of this thread -

…you have to understand that assistance for left wingers is not about letting people live in idleness but to help them out of idleness for the betterment of them and the community at large.

For those on the left there were (are) five "Giant Evils" afflicting the working class, identified as "Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness" (William Beveridge) now it must be remembered that when they said "Idleness" they meant unemployment, ‘and hence the starvation of the worker and his/her family. It was not then a pejorative term. Unemployment benefit, as well as national insurance and hence state pensions, were introduced by the 1945 Labour government’ (Francis Beckett).

It was a social contract between people and state – the people would work and the state would strive for full employment to work toward creating the conditions were people had good decent jobs with living wages that allowed people to improve their lot.

But then neoliberal ideas that many right wingers support began to take hold in the 1970’s onward and they are not about seeking full employment (as the Keynesian based models are), it is about having unemployment because that is one of the means of driving down wage prices. It is the same reason why so many neoliberals oppose organised labour movements and social programmes because their removal would also increase the possibility for exploitation, as in work or starve.

The contract was broken those in control of the state were not trying for full employment they were not striving to better the lot of the majority of individuals or the community they were working in the interests of a few to drive down wages or assisting them in outsourcing jobs. It wasn’t about creating long term decent jobs it was about the short term maximisation of profit for a few.

Assistance was never meant to be long term and it shouldn’t be needed by people who are working - an employer should be paying a living wage not been subsidized by the tax payer to pay low wages. Those things have only appeared because the contract was broken and the priority of the managers of government shifted from helping the majority to helping the few.

But the appearance of long term assistance and the supposed ‘benefits culture’ they have created is now used by them to attack the system for not working and call for its reduction or removal to ‘incentivise’ people into low paid jobs that end up only benefiting the few.

 

Indie

Again define what you mean by ‘poverty’. I mean lets say there is a community of 100 people 98 of them are dollar billionaires and 2 are only multi-millionaires. Then in relative terms the millionaires are the ‘poor’ of that community. The point being (as explained to you many times) is that a statement like “Poverty will always exist” is too simplistic because it doesn’t give the context or explained.

Then we come to your assertion that ‘government’ would make things worse in this context, and again this is an assertion that doesn’t seem to stand up to scrutiny and which has many, many criticisms outstanding against it that you seem totally unable to address.

 

Indie

And again on causes and reduction other than basically blaming poverty on the laziness of the ‘poor’ and putting forward ideas that would make the situation worse the Cato piece rather than a help seems more of a hindrance in tackling the situation.

To repeat from above -

Now let us look at the supposed causes and Cato’s ‘solutions’ to ‘poverty’.

(1) finish school
(2) do not get pregnant outside marriage
(3) get a job, any job, and stick with it

One - Why are they not finishing school? The suggestion of Cato is that the reason for this is that such people drop out of education because they are lazy and want to live of welfare because life on it is too comfortable, although no evidence is produced to support such a suggestion.

And if you look at graduation rates if that is the case why does Denmark and Norway with their more generous systems have graduation rates of 85.00 and 91.00 compared with the US’s 76.00

The Cato solution to this is to cut assistance and bring in a free market based educational system. The latter presumably been wealth based would mean that the type of education someone received would be based on the ability of the parents to pay for it.

This would seem counter-productive since it would most likely mean that the most disadvantaged would be the worsted educated and more likely to drop out because they are gaining little benefit from it.

Two – I’m not sure why marriage seems so important to Cato but the idea once again seems incredibly simplistic implying that disadvantaged women get pregnant because they know they can live ‘comfortably’ off welfare. To me it would seem more of a problem of education, expectation and healthcare access.

Now one great indicator of this would be teenage pregnancy and thanks in large part to government sponsored educational programmes and greater access to contraception in the US teenage pregnancy has dropped dramatically in the last decade (44 percent drop from 1991 to 2010) although there are nine times as many teen mothers in America than in other developed countries.

Now once again since many of those other countries have rather generous public assistance but vastly smaller rates of teen pregnancy, the Cato suggestion that such things are linked to generous welfare doesn’t seem to stand up to scrutiny.

(The US rate is 39 births per 1,000 girls, ages 15 through 19 BUT Sweden has a rate below 8 and the Netherlands is close to 4.)

And a number of studies indicate that high teenage pregnancy rates seems more linked to religious beliefs against contraception than welfare.

The Cato paper doesn’t seem to have a solution.

Three – As pointed out there are people on public assistance who are working and many of the benefits mentioned by the study with the suggestion that they should be reduced or scrapped are aimed at low income working people.

The Cato solution would be to lower taxes which would mostly advantage wealth and has only so far not advantaged the middle or lower groups who have basically seen their incomes stagnate or fall over the last thirty odd years. It also thinks that reducing regulation would help, for example Cato has long time advocated the reduction of environmental and work place regulation.

It also wants the poor to save and invest. But if you have a work or stave economy where people are employed in jobs that don’t pay a living wage that would seem harder to do.

 

I'm unsure who closed this thread but i have re-opened it at the request of Individual

 

Indie

Thread reopened

Which programmes?

 

Hint:

"Study: More Than Half a Trillion Dollars Spent on Welfare But Poverty Levels Unaffect[sic]"

Concentrating on the years beginning with 1965, but previous years are interesting in relation.