Comment by SolaceQuantum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SolaceQuantum | Hacker News Reader

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"I personally have lower taxes, high quality healthcare, and live in an awesome location, and I got all of that through an education and training. That is available to almost every American if they just put in the work."

I don't know if that's true. If I'm a child with food insecurity, my lack of nourishment, poor home life, overtaxed regional social programs, and government disincentives will cause me to be unable to focus on my education at my overtaxed school program, thereby setting me back for the rest of my life through no fault of my own.

If I'm one of many children born in a county or state with no access to clean water, I am more likely to develop a chronic illness that will prevent me from putting in the work necessary to achieve your lifestyle through no fault of my own.

If I'm one of many blue collar workers who destroyed my body in my 40s putting in work, I no longer have access to my way of work and the industries I can go into are plagued with known ageism. I am now stuck through no fault of my own save for a lack of future-sight that technology will be the thing to get into 40 years ago.

Moral correctness is all well and good, but if we are gleaning over those less fortunate with our morals, we're not being moral at all- we're just providing justifications for why we deserve what we have and more importantly why people who do not have what we have deserve their poverty.

The message of American conservatism is, "I've got mine, go get yours". Meanwhile the gots are pulling up the ladder behind them wherever they can.

This message tends to resonate with people with little empathy and imagination. They can only see their own experience and find it impossible to imagine another's could be different. Basically, these people are kind of dumb. They don't notice the ladder being pulled away and can't imagine a better way.

Unfortunately, these amount to a good 30% of Americans. Maybe those people were winnowed away during WW1/WW2 in europe, or maybe the way America was settled self selected for optimistic, unimaginative people with narrow vision.

For those more economically minded: We know that 1$ given to poverty will return the economy somewhere along $1.12, while $1 given to wealth will return the economy somewhere along $0.7. There requires no empathy to conclude that providing for our neediest appears to be economically beneficial for everyone, assuming economic growth is a good thing.

I understand and accept that certain poeple do not give a damn about the poor. But in this case the poster claimed something about those less fortunate that may be untrue, which is a distortion of reality I hoped to point out. If the poster simply didn't care about the poor, I could adjust my rhetoric appropriately.

How can a dollar taken from me by the government and given to a poor person generate a positive cash flow overall? Has no one taken economics 101 when they get to government that they cannot understand the broken windows policy that Baathist put forward?

Step 1. I earn money.

Step 2. The government makes fallacious claim using whatever economist dujour is will to prostate themselves to the political party in need of economic justification (no worries both parties here in America have them).

Step 3. The government taxes me based on this reason a dollar. I am negative a dollar that I may have spent on something.

Step 4. My dollar is used to pay the administrative and bureaucratic needs of the system, god bless them if they can do it for less than thirty cents (after healthcare, salaries, fringe benefits, building costs, etc.) my dollar is down to $0.70.

Step 4. The money is given to a person in the lower quartile who then spends the $0.70.

After this process, anyone is going to say with a straight face that there is an overall increase of 12% to my dollar that was taken from me?

What if I was going to save my dollars up to start a business, which could really create wealth, instead I have to save up longer to start it.

If the economists were honest with that statistic, they would admit it is not the percent increase but the turn around time to spend the money, or a pull forward to quickly juice the economy.

Examples of the government being spectacularly wrong about telling me why they need to listen to economists:

1. Cash for Clunkers, hurt the poor with a destruction of used cars, pulled forward purchases.

2. Stimulus 2, is shown to have no impact on the economy.

3. Trade Tariffs, supposedly to help protect industries, they just happen to be the industries that are rent seeking. Hurts the poor by increasing prices.

4. Minimum wage: started for racist reasons, still has a disparate racial impact.

You're not going to save it to start a business. You're just going to spend it on rent, products from China and a car loan. Don't pretend your socioeconomic class is better than that.

Or that person might just "save" it for generations, keeping the money from circulating in the local economy.

> How can a dollar taken from me by the government and given to a poor person generate a positive cash flow overall?

Changes to th velocity of money in different uses. Dollars aren't consumed when spent, they keep circulating.

> Step 4. My dollar is used to pay the administrative and bureaucratic needs of the system, god bless them if they can do it for less than thirty cents (after healthcare, salaries, fringe benefits, building costs, etc.) my dollar is down to $0.70.

No, it's still a dollar, because spending it transfers it to other people, rather than destroying it. And, with government spending, at the first hop essentially all of that $0.30 is still in the domestic economy.

> Step 4. The money is given to a person in the lower quartile who then spends the $0.70.

Also, again, largely in the domestic economy, and in places where it has a higher velocity in the domestic economy than it would if a richer person spent it.

And that's where the gain in total economic activity comes from.

> If the economists were honest with that statistic, they would admit it is not the percent increase but the turn around time to spend the money

That's exactly what economists say produces the return to the economy / increase in economy activity that GP discusses.

This is Econ 101 stuff.

> or a pull forward to quickly juice the economy.

It's not a pull forward. (There are ways you can do that, too, but downward redistribution isn't really one of them.)

Do you have references for those figures? I'm quite interested.

I'm especially interested in how those figures account for the feedback loop as the poor typically work for the wealthy, so I expect the gap in those figures is potentially larger.

Here is your citation. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/the-econo...

Spending from a finite pot will grow the economy more if it goes to poorer Americans. That should be obvious to anyone. The wealthy will save it, the poor will spend it and it will often pass through multiple hands.

> There requires no empathy to conclude that providing for our neediest appears to be economically beneficial for everyone

Unless you have information on the distribution of returns, they conclusion is unwarranted. At best, you can say that if you find a friction-free way of taxing and equally redistributing the gains (including most of the redistribution to the poor), and paying it back (starting by paying back 100% to the people you took it from in the first place) you would improve things for everyone.

But of course, you can't: reversing the redistribution would reverse the gains from the redistribution.

So what it does is improve the mean. It maybe improves the median. But for everyone? No, it doesn't. At least, not in the narrow financial terms those figures address.

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