I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.
However, when it's the government that comes and asks you to give them $100, so that they could in turn give it to Joe, an acquaintance of Steve living the same lifestyle that you have never even met, somehow now it is your moral obligation to pay up, as Joe clearly deserves your money. How does that work?
You're also ignoring the fact that someone who is eligible for this kind of social security and spends it all on booze is probably unwell and needs treatment for addiction and the conditions that cause it. In many cases, the cause of addiction is poverty itself.
This fear of being "scammed" by the Joes and Steves of the world is completely irrational. The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways. What's being proposed is that instead of spending tax dollars on killing poor people abroad, you spend it on helping poor people at home, regardless of their work ethic.
So, say government increases the income limit for one of the lower tax brackets by $5,000. That's great for people who make more than that, which btw isn't all poor people, but at the same time it also gives more money to everyone who was already doing okay. Meaning inflation will soon eat up the extra money and we're right back where we started.
In order to help the poor with upgrading to non-poor, the government has to explicitly avoid extending that benefit to the rest of society, has to continue taking from middle and upper income people. It needs to be targeted, and tax cuts are a great way to target middle/upper classes while helping poor people less.
If my alcoholic friend from college came to me because he was short on rent or needed to buy them groceries, I wouldn't give them $100. I'd offer to buy them groceries or write a check to the landlord directly.
The government can do the same thing. If someone needs healthcare or education and can't afford it, pay for the healthcare or education. A social net doesn't mean a blank check.
Before you make soap box comments you should be aware of reality. You might think I'm arguing against welfare benefits but I am not. The whole time I watched this state of affairs I seethed because it was middle class tax payers making up the difference in pay for walmart and other corporations who pay poverty wages.
If society agrees to give $100 to Steve then you have no say in how that move is spent.
If you think it's better not to give to Steve anything and you lobby to change the law and are successful. When Andre is affected by this change he decides to make up the difference by breaking into your place and killing you. At least Steve doesn't have his hookers right?
Because to a first approximation, that's not what ever happens. "Steve" is far more a political talking point than a real person.
Neither of course! Either believing your own experience to generalize well or believing someone random on the internet would be crazy talk.
What you should believe is the research on this, which admittedly is difficult with anything this politicized. What I base it on is a combination of reading some of that (though I'm no expert) and knowing some people quite well who have had state level responsibility for programs of this kind.
Fraud, and "Steves" certainly exist, but it seems that the numbers are small enough they don't have much systemic impact, there are many much bigger issues.
That's what I meant by "to a first approximation"; not that it doesn't exist, but the effect isn't of 1st order importance.
Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.
Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo.
Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building?
I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses.
Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company).
In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine.
Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".
Furthermore, suppose you were to budget 3000 calories of basic food for every person in Uk, you'd find it's a tiny fraction of national budget.
We had a 'homeless' guy build his house in a forest, but ofcourse the government showed up to remove him. Many people would sort themselves out if we did not prevent them from doing so.
The narrative of shortage is an obsolete idea from the 19th century. We produce more food, steel, oil, and every other real industrial good than we know what to do with. These discussions are like fighting WW2 with medieval tactics.
Today's economy is not limited by production like it was 100 years ago, its limited by consumption. By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty, the '1st world' is reducing consumption and destroying it's economy.
Think about it - how can we have abandoned factories, unemployed workers and surplus of all materials?
Think what 'productivity growth' means - if 40 hours a week was enough to feed and clothe everyone 70 years ago, and productivity went up 400%, how many hours do we need now?
That why we have useless hobs, and 60% of employees believe their job is useless.
The problem is not about morally corupt rich people being in charge, its about morons being in charge. If they were clever but evil, at least the system would not crash every 8 few years
I am sick of hearing about poverty as a growing problem. It simply isn't.
Median income, and the lowest income quintile, have grown steadily. The percent of Americans living in poverty has been declining. Median wealth is still lower than it was before the 2008 crisis, but it was growing strongly before and has grown strongly since the Great Recession.
All trends are upwards. Do not confuse growing inequality with growing poverty. Some are getting richer faster than others, but statistically everyone is getting richer.
Is there a specific metric in mind when you say people are being pushed into poverty? Or is it something you have just heard elsewhere?
However, even though the overall rates were returning to flat before the pandemic - the percent of people below 50% of the poverty line in the US has been historically higher by 50% than it has been in history since the beginning of the measure.
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
If you're an HN reader, you have to realize that for the most part you are in an incredibly fortunate bubble of being in a job that is in demand in a financially supported sector of our economy - it is not that way for many Americans (or many other citizens of other nations).
Today even an "average poor" person can live better than a king 400 years ago.
It shows about a 12% drop in homeless people 2007-2019. The US population overall grew just under 10%, too, so the drop on a per capita basis is higher than that. I imagine 2020 led to a large increase again, though. I also can't vet their sources without registering so take it with a grain of salt.
Specifically in UK in-work poverty has been going up and up for the past ten years.
I don't think number of houses is the problem, either. People need houses in certain places. That's why homeless hang out in San Francisco where a flat costs 1 million dollars, while a couple of hundred of miles away it would presumably be much, much cheaper.
As for your production, it still all costs energy, and getting energy also costs labor (and even wars, remember the wars about oil).
Abandoned factories simply have turned out to be not economically viable. If you think you can do better, why don't you pool your money with some friends, buy such a factory and start it up again?
You merely display the typical arrogance of socialist who always believe they could run everything better with a "planning economy". And when they finally get to try it out in the real world, they get a major painful reality check.
Take your factories: since they were not economically viable, it would be wasteful and a net loss for society and the economy to start them up again.
You are partially right about increased productivity, and it actually has improved the lives of many people. I personally am very glad that I don't have to spend my waking hours doing hard labor on a field just so that I can harvest some potatoes. Most people in the west have enough to eat, and clothes they can wear, many even have a nice smartphone on top.
Some resources are still limited, though, such as nice places to live in.
And the world population has also grown by a couple of billion people compared to 100 years ago. Your job that fed a family at the beginning of the 20th century still feeds a family today, only in China.
You post is narrow minded and presumptious - I am not socialist, we don't have rent controls in London, and there are economic terms other than 'socialist' and 'capitalist'. Try 'Shumpeterian'
But if you want to go on believing that the only choices are socialism or economic collapse every 8 years, go on.
About 10 million cars are produced in the USA every year. An RV/Trailer type thing is like a car - so quite easily you could imagine producing that many of these 'tiny houses' every year with car style factories.
About 600k people are homeless in the USA. That's about equal to the number of RV's produced every year.
So that solves 'physical' homelessness quite quickly if there was an effort to. (that disregards that some homeless choose to homeless out of mental illness etc)
Many have emotional problems.
Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs.
It’s ironic you say the government doesn’t have infinite money to spend.
We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter. There is not a person, well one, on my block in Marin County that has not benefited financially from the virus, but will be getting $1400 to blow.
I am worried about inflation.
I suspect clever lazy people without barriers to social or economic participation usually seek out, and often obtain, jobs where they're paid to do approximately nothing. Lazy people, assuming that category is even meaningful, aren't masochists who want to live in poverty. There's more going on there.
Without the job, they would have extra 8 hours (plus commute time) a day to meet their non-job friends.
You can argue that there may be no actual lazy people, but that is another discussion.
"We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter."
Are you really not aware that the bill for that will simply come later (as it is a debt taken out on behalf of the population), and in the process of creating those two trillion, existing money has already been devalued?
Unless my physics course misled me, no, it isn't.
They create the money so they literally do. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be deployed wisely of course.