Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

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I came from a middle class neighborhood, but I have been around poorer minorities and become more aware of the issues that poorer Whites have.

I have a group of five friends that I keep in touch with from a former job. We have a private Slack channel and meet for lunch occasionally - all tech people in our mid 40s. Three White, two Black. I don't think any of them are racists, but two of them say things that show their complete ignorance of the real world. We were talking about the difference between the education system in one part of the metro area - where the school system had lost accreditation and the school systems where we live - all top ranked in an affluent part of town.

Their solution was, why don’t they just move? In the part of town with the unaccredited school on the opposite side of town average rent was $650/month. On our side of town, rent is $1600 a month. On top of that; public transportation is basically non existent because the county didn’t want to connect to the metro system because it made it too easy for the “wrong element” to come up here.

Not to mention they blamed the housing crisis in 2008 on “poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford”. I had to explain to them how things really worked in real estate from someone who used every trick out there to get real estate without putting any skin in the game, did “strategic defaults”, and bought a new house three years later. Poor people couldn’t do that.

Last but not least, I had to explain that welfare and other benefits to the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars it wasn’t even worth worrying about.

What do you mean "welfare and other benefits of the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars"? According to a quick Google search [1] social security and unemployment makes up about 33% of the budget and Medicare makes up about 27%. Meanwhile military is "only" 15%

[1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age. The amount you get out has some relation with how much you put in when you worked (it may not be perfectly linear, perhaps favors poorer people, I don't know). Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans. So I would not consider any of these programs to constitute "welfare and benefits of the poor".

> Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age.

Social security is only available to people who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security. Make your living trading without ever being a regular employee, no social security (also true of some state government jobs.)

But you are correct that neither it nor Medicare are means-tested, poverty-focussed programs.

> who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security.

Ah yes. I (sort of) touched upon that when I said "the amount you get out has some relation to how much you put in". But yes, if you never contribute to Social Security, you don't get anything at all even after reaching retirement age. The point is all of those programs involve people getting money out of a system that they have contributed to themselves through their taxes. None of them are "pure" charity, where beneficiaries get something for free.

> Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans

If you don't include that as "welfare and benefits of the poor" I don't know what you would include. I guess you're right in the sense that only a small portions of ones taxes go to pay people who never worked and never plan on working.

I double checked and you are right that most of SS and medicare go to retired people. They probably aren't considered "poor". Do you know of any unbiased (or low biased) place that counts what percentage of the budget goes to poor people (food stamps, housing projects, extended unemployment benefits, etc.) ?

All the links I see seem to be around 9% of the budget goes to "safety net" programs.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-w...

I see.. Thank you for the information. I will have to rethink my take on the US division of taxes

Things that I would qualify as welfare and benefits for the poor would be things like TANF, SNAP, Section 8, CHIP, Medicaid, etc.

These are things where eligibility is determined primarily based on some criteria that try to determine need rather than based on having paid into the system to fund it.

Social Security is essentially a government run pension. Unemployment and disability benefits are effectively government run insurance programs. The size of payment you receive and your eligibility is based on how much you paid into the system. Medicare is kind of halfway between health insurance and a pension because the premiums are subsidized if you paid into the system earlier in life. Low income people do generally get slightly better payouts proportionally to what they pay in so you could argue that some portion of these programs is a welfare benefit for the poor, but low income people also tend to die earlier, so some have also argued that they are a net transfer from low to high income people.

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