Bump
Normally I would be opposed to this sort of thing, but you can’t argue with results.
The concept of free money for the poor is how we ended up with Social Security. The concept was so popular that FDR came up with the competing idea of SS so he wouldn’t have to face a primary against a popular candidate. SS was supposed to last just 10 years. (Yeah, uh-huh.)
Don’t end poverty, end welfare!!!
Free money to the poor, and free insurance money to all without insurance would cost 1/100th of all the programs we have now including Obamacare.
But, really helping the poor is NOT what liberals really want - they need them there forever for a constituency.
What they really want is two things: 1.) redistribution - take money from those who have it, and 2.) take away our freedoms and put us under government control.
That’s what it’s always been about, and the hidden reality.......
Takeaway line:
“The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money.”
Yep, they actually quoted a celebrated member of academe there.
Have ya seen the British welfare class? That is what “free money” does to a people and culture.
The Japanese are an amazingly resilient people, much like Americans of a couple of generations ago. They also have a law which enables people to seek shelter in any public building in the even of disasters of this magnitude until such time as the authorities are able to provide temporary housing alternatives, such as modified shipping containers in the public parks.
We thought that the homeless (mostly winos) who haunted downtown would take advantage of the law and move to more comfortable quarters such as the hallways of the city building. But they did not.
For some reason, the preferred the convenience of downtown and street living to the shelter of city hall, just a few blocks away.
Did any of them work and earn their keep?
I imagine a great deal of guidance and training was also involved.
I just don’t know. As a general rule if you give money for nothing, you will just keep getting more nothing. A thirteen person pilot program is one thing, an overall public policy is quite another. They have their thirteen, we have millions on publics assistance, with disastrous results.
OK, so did any new vagrants replace them, or are there now eleven less and a similar program will reduce the number even further, ending with zero vagrants on the street.
Important because if ya have a net increase, then the program will eventually bankrupt the nation and crash the society, because, eventually socialists always run out of other people's money.
Let everyone print their own money. See how that works out.
Want to end poverty?
Pay poor people to be sterilized.
It’s the only way.
I’m all for this. Take every Indian, welfare recipient, food stamp recipient, etc...and give them each $10,000. And that’s it. No more money or government food or anything, ever. Then, we layoff every government employee associated with these programs. I’d go for that.
Free money hasn’t fixed poverty yet, though poverty in our country seems to involve obesity, quality phone service, utilities, housing, medical treatment...and free money.
I believe when the poor in this country became fat, we no longer had people starving to death.
Milton Friedman advocated a graduated, negative income tax. At the very least, it would represent an improvement over the status quo.
“Giving them money” is misleading. It’s taking my money from me by force, using it for your stormtroopers, tanks guns and bureaucrats, then giving them whattever’s left.
And then telling me they’re raising taxes and fees to hire more bureacrats and stormtroopers to point more guns at my head next year.
However, equating giving street people cash with giving poor people in Namibia and Malawi "free" money - these are actually "micro-loans", not largesse - is more than a little deceptive. The two economic situations are entirely dissimilar.
The Calvinistic reflex that you have to work for your money has turned into a license for inequality.
It's quite a bit older than Calvin, actually, it's as old as humanity. And the sort of "inequality" the author cites here is not inherently bad. The people in Namibia and Malawi, for example, were paragons of equality - they were all dirt poor.
It's an old argument repackaged, and the package never seems to leave out what the real load is. According to this Cato Institute study, spending in 2012 amounted to an average of $20,000 per recipient, $60,000 for a family of three. In most places in the country a family of three could live very comfortably on that sum including mortgage and savings. But they don't. And the reason they don't is that they don't get that money.
Color me a bit cynical over the author's claim that a simple gift of money never resulted in its being wasted. I'm sorry, I simply don't believe it. We'll see in time if the effect was permanent. It's an interesting experiment, and I'd love to see it succeed, but it hasn't. An optimist will state that it hasn't yet, a pessimist that it never will.