Poor parents receiving universal payments increase spending on kids
news.wsu.edu
news.wsu.edu
I have to doubt that recipients of pandemic benefits are the ones buying $800k houses and driving the housing boom.
Housing prices are at historic highs in many non-core cities as demand from covid related changes move high income earners and historically low interest rates allow low monthly payments.
A million dollars in financed money is under 4000$ a month in payments. Many, many couples can afford this. About twenty percent of all income earning couples in the us can afford this.
https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac...
Things were already going this way. When I left Dallas housing was nearly unaffordable anywhere near the city (where most jobs are) at $110k/year. This was directly caused by comparatively rich people on the coasts getting disillusioned and moving to cheaper areas and folks who can't afford the coasts in the first place moving to cheaper areas. It turned supply and demand upside down, and it destroyed the ability for people who grew up in those areas to have a stake in the city.
Why people care about it now is beyond me. The only difference I see that it's not comparatively rich people anymore, it's actual rich people that are moving.
Edit: To clarify - if you own two properties, rent one, and live in the other, you own one property in which you reside and one property in which you do not reside.
What counts as "own"?
What counts as "property"?
What counts as "reside"?
> What about shopping areas?
> Entertainment?
What about them?
> There are lots of pieces of property that aren't residential that are owned.
Agreed.
But, to answer your flippant questions:
Legally possess.
Land and buildings.
Physical and temporal occupation of space and time on the "property" above some reasonable threshold.
Not when property is a speculative/investment asset (and when you can leverage it to get credit).
I would expect the starting point to be something along the lines of: Any ownership of a property must be associated back to an individual. Even that of a "company owned" property.
Maybe companies would pay some kind of "property retainer" bonus to people with draconian contract terms that skirt the law and keep the property under the companies control despite some individual employee owning it on paper.
Or maybe, companies would just rent whatever property they need.
If you have considered it a lot, what do you think the best case against this position is?
I believe the core concept of essentially capping/limiting the wealth-storage potential of land ownership as a way to help "even the playing field" is fundamentally sound.
I think think the best case against this position is to point out the difficulty of implementing/enforcing it in a way that is not flawed in some way that makes it more trouble than it is worth. What I mean by that is that I think existing interests and powers would most likely find a way to maintain the status quo and that that way wouldn't necessarily be a net gain for everyone. But that, to me, says more about the system overall than about this specific idea.
* Costs:
If the wealthy people are allowed only one house and one other rental, they will build a huge house and rental in a really expensive area, and forego building rental stock in cheap areas. So that means that poorer people will be hurt as there will be less rental stock available to them. Now, you can say, let them buy condos! But a lot of people are not ready for owning their own condo the moment they move out of their parents house, or if they are just spending a summer somewhere, or they have an internship in a different city, etc. E.g. even though the U.S. has an insanely high homeownership rate (probably too high) there is still a good 30% of the population that needs shorter term housing than the commitment of buying a place, but longer term housing than a hotel. And now they wont have that option, or it will be much more expensive for them as the rental stock is large, expensive units in highly desirable areas, and there are fewer of them.
* Ways to bypass it:
Of course it's a bit impractical. Wealthy people in the US will just buy up apartments in Europe or Asia, and wealthy people there will buy up apartments here. So this just creates a class of really remote landlords, because you've made it illegal to be landlord in your own nation.
Also, corporations will buy up apartments -- REITs. But maybe you will ban REITS, which means much of the drivers of more housing are taken off the picture and they focus on building offices only, exacerbating the imbalance between office space and housing.
OK, we did the downsides.
* Benefits:
Well, someone who owns 2 apartment buildings, their own mansion, and 100 million in equities will now own 0 apartment buildings, 1 rental mansion, their own mansion, and 150 million in equities. How is this a better world? And here, I am assuming full compliance.
Point being, I see the benefit as being purely symbolic. Like you have this law passed, and the existence of the law is its own reward. I don't think this is a good way of doing public policy. In fact, it's extremely disempowering to be even turning the legislative process into a LARP. It's a kind of learned helplessness to use the power of the state as therapy instead of to actually solve social problems. Banning plastic straws is one example of this.
Now if you want to say, "Hell let's abolish private ownership of capital", then at least that is going to make a difference and not just be a symbolic thing. It is an honest attempt to get at the root of the issue. But I think people understand this specific attempt is a bad idea, so what they are doing is retreating to these weird little symbolic acts, instead of searching for the next big idea. And I'm not picking on you -- I see this a lot. Just ordinary conversation, and people say "We should ban X", and it's a little worrying how ready people are to ban random things as a form of satisfying some inner unease, due to feeling powerless to address the real, underlying things.
The rental properties will still exist and either some other REIT start-ups will buy them or their price will drop enough that it becomes feasible for would-be-renters to buy them.
It's maybe possible that your assumptions of Judge-Dredd style mega cities are true but I seriously doubt it.
Regarding remote landlords buying property in the US, I'm really not sure at all how this results in a "class of really remote landlords". They would be subject to the same rules and it's not in any way "illegal to be a landlord in your own nation"
As far as benefits,
>Well, someone who owns 2 apartment buildings, their own mansion, and 100 million in equities will now own 0 apartment buildings, 1 rental mansion, their own mansion, and 150 million in equities. How is this a better world? And here, I am assuming full compliance.
The 2 apartment buildings still exist and as far as their inhabitants are concerned the only thing that changes is the owner becomes more likely to give a shit about the property.
I really don't understand how you could possibly see this as "symbolic" unless you don't assume "full compliance". You have to pick one. Either the law exists with compliance and things change or it doesn't exist/has no compliance and is just symbolic.
Why am I being downvoted? Can someone link a study or systematic review that shows there are significant #s of vacant properties.
I don't really see a problem with that.
edit: Unless I'm misattributing an unintended tone of disagreement to > "I don't really see a problem with that."
Owning one property in which you do not reside is completely reasonable when the rule is "you may not own more than one property in which you do not reside"
I'll edit this clarification into my original post.
Edit to add: More than just a UBI would be needed for the surges probably. Perhaps a more functional Congress would be needed too, at this point.
This isn't some groundbreaking revelation they had. Corporations and firms are always trying to squeeze as much money as possible. After a few purchases, the stimulus checks go into the hands of the corporations, who are are now flush with newly printed cash. Given that there are few real growth opportunities to invest in, everyone just throws their money at property.
Finally, the base tax is gotta be way above primary dwelling, normal homeowners shouldn't be penalized.
All the $$ raised is to be used for UBI or Medicare For All, it cannot be borrowed from or repurposed.
https://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/news/investors-bought-m...
It's just not true. Housing prices are rising due to record low interest rates (most people folks on monthly payments, not net cost) and demand shifts due to covid. Housing prices in core cities have largely fallen.
That directly contradicts the definition in literally the second line of your source.
>Investors — any institute or business that deals in real estate
Institute or business, which doesn't include unincorporated individuals with just a couple of extra properties they rent out.
You can tell they're not included because it says in the article that "investors" only bought "26.5% of multifamily homes" (i.e. multi-unit apartments), so unless you're suggesting that 75% of multifamily buildings aren't being bought as an investment, the numbers don't add up.
I do have add-on thought as far as demand shifts contributing to price increases; A lot of the demand was driven by people wanting to move into bigger houses. Those who didn't have enough equity built-up early on could just tack what they wanted onto their selling price and hope for the best.
One more interesting anecdote; In my neighborhood, housing prices have stayed relatively flat since summer of 2020. There are other nearby cities where the prices have increased more, however they often do not have the same property tax rates as where I reside. (prop Taxes are over 1/3 of my monthly 30y mortgage payment, lol)
I bet if I offered you a billion dollars a square foot you'd sell you beloved childhood home. And If you're the 1 in a billion who'd turn down that deal with that amount of money on the line, I can simply bribe the local government for them to expropriate you.
Housing prices (in certain areas) are high due to low interest rates, covid related demand changes (moves of high income earners from core cities), and wage growth for high income earners.
Lots of people didn’t have to pay rent last year, so landlords (especially smaller ones) had to increase rent for those who could. Also other prices are increasing from inflation and supply shortages.
As long as the price of inflation doesn’t completely cover UBI (which is possible but imo unlikely), it will be at least partly effective.
My rent actually went down.
I attribute the decrease to the two new complexes built next to where we were. But yeah, I was shocked as shit. I moved earlier this year, but still, it was weird.
My wife and I looked at a single family home in 2017 in Boise that was $400k. That was a bit out of our price range at the time. 4 years and a few raises later $400k is now in our price range for a house, but now the same house is $800k. Sigh...
There are probably a lot of problems that should be covered before UBI really, or they're just going to siphon off UBI. Predatory lending is a good one, loans based on UBI payments seem like an easy scam to get into.
To an audience that _does_ speak theoretical CS, your sprinkling in of its terminology weakens whatever point you're trying to make and comes off instead as silly and pretentious.
If you base UBI on cost of living, and cost of living depends on UBI, then you find yourself in a feedback loop. My use of turing complete was not really accurate, but it was the context my mind was in when writing this comment.
I make mistakes and sometimes speak unclearly. No need to be pedantic.
If UBI is too hard to figure out, what's the alternative? more government housing? medicare for all? What's the least complicated way to ensure everyone gets housing, food, and healthcare?
All of them would, because with extra money, there would be more demand for these goods and services, but the supply of the good itself hasn't increased. Thus, companies will charge more. In sum, the total increase in charge will be $10.
If they do, how come? They shouldn't unless everyone gets UBI, it's black and white...right?
The fact is it won't go up, because it'll increase opportunities... there's a lot of alternatives lately to normal housing like land co-ops with tiny houses, yurts, etc... Pool 100k in resources, by some land and you can build a earth bag home that's pretty awesome for under 10k.
It's economical, ecological, and very well insulated.
In addition you are using turing complete in a completely nonsensical way as nobody is using cost of living to compute with.
Based on what you are saying any economic change would be completely unpredictable and the entire human race would be paralyzed by the decision on how to price a Taco. In reality we muddle through while making general predictions about the effects of our actions and reassessing as we go.
And yet, emergent behavior does indeed compute the cost of living. When the emergent behavior itself is based on a stat that itself is based on the cost of living, the emergent behavior will never converge.
> Based on what you are saying any economic change would be completely unpredictable and the entire human race would be paralyzed by the decision on how to price a Taco. In reality we muddle through while making general predictions about the effects of our actions and reassessing as we go.
No. I'm saying that if you raise UBI by $10, then the price of tacos go up by $10, so basing UBI on cost of living is non-sensical because it's a recursive loop.
> Why would it be by magic exactly correlated with the exact figure provided by UBI.
Because if everyone has $10 extra to spend, then there will be more demand for the same number of goods, so sellers will raise their prices. This is not just 'goods' either. There will be more demand for financial assets like stocks, and more importantly, foreign currencies. With the higher demand for foreign currency, it would take more dollars to buy pounds (for example), which means the dollar would lose value relatively. In other words, the dollar will be undergoing inflation.
Unlike ireland where rents can be 60% of your take home pay.
Sadly it might not help around here, because right now, it is very profitable to just buy property and leave it empty, since the prices are perpetually rising.
While wages rise, other countries with no universal income gain a competitive advantage in labor costs, across the board.
Inflation won't eat the whole UBI (probably), because there's still supply and demande that other revenue generate. E.g. if I pay 20% of my income for food and UBI doesn't affect my income much, I won't be inclined to increase my spending on food by a big %.
EDIT: actually, thinking more about this I don't think lower end housing will see such an increase, since most people already have a home. You'll certainly see a rise in price of lower end housing, but it won't offset UBI, since I doubt people will just take ubi to put it into their housing
> While the study does have policy implications, Amorim cautioned that the Alaska program is not a perfect model for universal basic income policies. The Alaskan dividend is a one-time payment which affects the way people spend their money. For instance, research suggests that spending on electronics increases when people receive a lot of money at one time because they can afford those big-ticket items. If they were receiving a smaller amount of money every month, parents may choose to spend on items with smaller or more spread out costs, such as books or monthly lessons.
It should be emphasized that this model is a one time payment per year, as opposed to a monthly payment that most UBI models propose.
It may not be a popular opinion, but I generally see poorer families with more kids, regardless of the race, while more affluent families generally have fewer kids. This puts more economic pressure on poorer families and such kids generally don't end up getting good education or going to college.
Unfortunately, I don't have an alternate solution.
Your argument is remnant of a moral panic over “welfare queens” in the 70’s which continued through the 90’s [1]. It’s been found tax incentives like these actually reduce family sizes over time [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen [2] http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-welfaremothers.htm
I grew up relatively poor, and I am generally very classist (modulo educational opportunities, i.e. for adults with no/little other disadvantages) because, well, I knew and saw a lot of poor people; almost all the same ethnicity as myself.
BTW, for the record, I'm not familiar with the concept of welfare queens.
The question is, given this new information, do you update your priors and your opinion?
While I have been here in the US for many years, much of my life, including college education and a few years after that, was in India. So, not sure if I'm afflicted by the American systemic racism.
You are familiar with the concept—it's exactly what you put in your original comment.
It really isn't in the metric of most people having kids to get more benefits. No matter what the benefits are, the costs of kids eats them. I am not accusing you of this, but it is a popular trope in some news circles to point out the welfare mom popping out kids for more benefits, It really doesn't work that way. You can watch people locked up in prison for killing someone over $20 tear up over their kids. If you don't have children you might not know the immense desire parents have to provide the best they can for their kids.
As far as poor families having more kids, yes I am one of them. But I have gone to university, and I have paid more in taxes than my entire family ever received in benefits. So that was a good investment.
The reasons why poor people have more kids has been well known among public health and economic researchers for years. It's lack of family planning and economic opportunities.
The child rearing also scales when you have a single earner family unit as even the stay at home parent’s eyeballs can be shared. And after a few years the older children themselves provide some of that as well.
What doesn’t scale are things we used to consider luxuries. Plane tickets, paid summer camps, or private school tuition.
I think it’s more selfishness on the part of higher income earners than anything else that prevents them from having more children. Both in time commitments and the thought of having to give up or pare down an expensive vacation.
My mother was an english teacher in a predominantly hispanic area. The women (it was mostly women given time of day) openly admitted to having more kids for the checks. I have no problem with that personally. They hardly paid anything extra for their kids. They had grandmas, sisters, friends, churches, etc to take care of the kids. And my mom watched them too during class. Didn't cost them very much. Education in this country is free.
The 'studies' that find having kids costs more money, assumes everyone lives like rich white people.
OTOH the birth rate is below replacement rate, sometimes much below, in quite a lot of developed countries. increased immigration will lead to social unrest; not increasing the birth rate leads to demography of Japan (now) and China (in 20-30 years).
children should be a pressing political issue no matter which way you look at the problem. if you add environmental impact of every child, even more so...
"We found that the relationship between wealth and fertility was much more likely to be positive than negative."
It does seem that lower income families have more children. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p... (The data is in an excel spreadsheet.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
It shows a clear downward trend in number of births as income rises.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
It is an observation and I will accept if there is a different reason, causation vs correlation.
Additionally, what is the problem with having more children if the family is able to support them at some baseline with these credits? If a credit allows a family to plan for and have a child that they wanted, what is the harm to society and you caused by this?
How utterly depressing if this truly is a common belief.
For example, i am a conservative Catholic. You can tax me sure, and spend it on welfare for atheists who love abortion (or whatever other group... just making up a culture I have little in common with), but then I, and others like myself, will want to have opinions on how my money is spent. If you didn't take my money, I wouldn't care.
A lot of strife over welfare in this country is due to the fact that we hold several cultures that are at odds with each other. For example, the amish don't like war, yet they pay taxes. If you asked the amish, they'd vote against war, but conveniently, they are outnumbered, so their money is co-opted. If the amish believed in protesting, and making a big fuss, this would be a major issue. Luckily for the powers that be, they don't. Ultimately, the more government programs / spending one has in a pluralistic society, the more civic strife there will be. This is unavoidable
I'm just curious and I don't know any conservative catholics in real life.
Catholics are encouraged to donate to them and volunteer their time, and there's usually a once-a-month supplemental collection for them at Mass.
However, welfare and taxation is not charity and you do not grow in virtue through taxation. Welfare is meant to keep a good society. As catholics we have responsibility to vote (if we live in a democracy) for policies that form a just society (this is the original meaning of social justice before it was co-oped by the woke). There is no fundamental conflict between providing for non-christians here, as they too may fall on hard times.
Sorry... were you trying to get at something here?
And I am now curious about your beliefs that conservative politics will lead to a just society.
Of course not. Politics will never lead to a just society. There is no such thing as 'conservative' politics; or at least, such a thing is not advocated for in the United States. This is because most 'conservatives' are united not in any particular vision of the country but rather by what the country should not be. This isn't to say that individual factions don't have clear ideas of how society should be; just that no faction predominates. With that aside, by most meanings of 'conservative', it is used to mean limited government, little welfare, lower government spending, and policies encouraging social conservatism. Yes, I am broadly in support of these things.
On its own however, these things will not lead to a just society.
You need both conservative politics and a moral society to achieve a just society.
Unfortunately, the government cannot create a moral society. That is up to individuals to accomplish. We cannot vote on society being good. Many individuals in the united states view their only obligation to politics and the community is via voting and government. This is the worst take ever imaginable. After one votes, after one protests, after one calls their senator/representative, there is yet more to be done for community. Most people do not ever get to this level. It's not just volunteering to help those who are of a different class than you. No no no... that's the uninteresting part of civic duty. The interesting part is what you do for people like you. Do you spend time making your friends worlds a better place? What about your family? Do you make sure your friends and family aren't falling into destitution? Those things are the intangibles that no amount of voting or politics will ever fix, when a culture is broken.
For example, many liberals want universal child care paid for via public money. I don't think this is a good thing because I don't think children should be raised by businesses. They should be raised by their parents (they should be educated by them as well, in the early years at least) and their families.
In order to achieve this goal of having more parents stay home with their children, we both need to not have universal child care (should probably severely rethink public schooling too), as well as create a society that understands that parents staying home is the right thing to do, and thus does not do it. The first part is easily governmentally achievable; the second part is not. Although it's true that our current society incentivizes both parents working, there is no fundamental reason they have to (other than most people's desires for more material goods). Many subcultures in America achieve a one-income family (Amish, many evangelicals, many conservative Catholics, etc).
As another aside, I give thousands of dollars to direct action charities. I have no problem with this and would like to give more. Yet, I would resent if government took this money and instead used it, preventing me from giving it to those in need. In a lot of countries with more welfare, the people themselves become less charitable, because any social problem they expect someone else to fix. Those who fall behind anyway are looked at as failures. Far from forming community, welfare atomizes society. Thus, I am very suspicious of government welfare. Better for it to come from individuals. Tax breaks to encourage charity are fine, and better, indeed.
So no, I don't think conservative politics will achieve anything other than not directly incentivizing people to do bad. Fundamentally, I'm conservative because I want the freedom to do good.
One is that we're engaged in our own internal culture-war around liturgy, the dwindling priesthood, and what to do about social issues that pit Western society's priorities against long-standing Church doctrine. When the most prominent Catholics in the news aren't acting Catholic, that drives us crazy.
But I don't think pluralism is really the problem; Catholics, at least in America in my lifetime, never had any kind of puritanical control. The problem is that there's a new amorphous religion of the state that insists it doesn't exist.
> It's America--everybody thinks everybody else is living their lives the wrong way.
I'm explaining why it is that others think they are living the wrong way.
> One is that we're engaged in our own internal culture-war around liturgy, the dwindling priesthood, and what to do about social issues that pit Western society's priorities against long-standing Church doctrine. When the most prominent Catholics in the news aren't acting Catholic, that drives us crazy.
Absolutely, and it's because the church in America is splitting into two cultures. On one hand, there are catholics who want to be American, and fit in with secular society. On the other hand, there are those who don't see it as that important. These two groups have different cultures.
I've always wondered if this belief about poor people is traced back to puritanical Calvinism.
I've been homeless and hung out with (separate occasions) homeless folks while occasionally interacting with passerbys.
There was always a curtness and subtle discomfort in others' speech and body language.
I can't imagine the social/mental effects of their presumption over time.
Of course when people find out you have financial security, you are either pandered to or treated as a "normal" person, depending on relative strata.
Has it occurred to you that this is because low wage employees might actually commit more thefts and such?
I mean... I've been on a grand jury, and i've seen the lengths some companies go to prevent theft from what I presume are low wage employees. These systems costs lots of money. If low wage employees were actually not stealing, then why would they expend all this money on these systems? It would seem any actuary would be able to tell you you're throwing money away. And yet, they continue to have the systems.
I don't think low wage employees are 'bad'. I'm just pointing out that if the employer behavior is so irrational, then certainly some company would start that wouldn't do that. That every single one does I think indicates that this is a common enough problem.
Surely the your team would be more productive if the LOCs were tracked per day and they had to get permission to use the restroom, or better yet use a piss jug. Did Jim really go to the doctor, or pick up his kids from school, or did he just go to the bar and get drunk? Better demand that note, and GPS track him.
I think it’s a combination of class (ie white collar workers are more similar to the management and owners), and low wage workers being considered more replaceable, thus managers feel freer to engage their baser impulses. Throw in a bit personal bias and stereotypes and voilà! You have a horrible situation.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-...
I think it depends largely on how much you're exposed to it.
Generally it's the billionaires making 3% or whatever of every dollar that's getting run through those benefit cards.
But that doesn't mean that tax incentives or contracts already agreed upon shouldn't be honored.
Be upset at your government for bribing a business if you think it's a bad political decision, but it's just as rational for the business to accept it as it is for anyone to accept Snap or any other benefit.
When you start justifying $ redistribution for everything under the sun, don't be surprised if some of it gets redistributed in ways you disagree with.
Further, if other people presumed to stick their nose in your business in the same way to judge you, I'm fairly sure you'd be very offended. And rightly so, because it would be very rude.
The root of the problem is with the judger, for thinking that money from the government is somehow less worthy than money from other sources (wages, inheritance, government-subsidized business wages, etc).
Freedom means freedom to make poor decisions, but when that money was given to you by taxpayers and is specifically earmarked to feed your kids, not spending it on your kids makes you a bad person.
In short, it talks about how in US poor people are being judged as moral failures. Buying "display items" like expensive handbags makes them look less poor. So it is an investment because when they look less poor, others treat them better. Others being predominantly people with power over them - bureaucrats, managers and so on.
(the article also discusses racism)
EDIT: and you see this at all levels of wealth too - there's certain expectation of a lawyer arriving in Mercedes or BMW, otherwise some people will think them incompetent, for example.
If the system is effective for the vast majority and the cost of those abusing the system is less than the cost to prevent the abuse then that's generally a win. (Of course you have to be careful of second order effects and unintended consequences. If people can easily get away with abuse will abuse of the system grow?)
In other words, you don't need to convince people that abuse of the system isn't wrong or that it is impossible, i.e. the "don't judge" comments, you need to convince them that the system is effective in both costs and outcomes.
It's pretty easy to understand why someone who perceives themselves as working hard and paying taxes would be upset when someone else seems to be using their government benefits to buy more than the "bare necessities" without the hard work.
Whether that perspective is helpful, good, or correct is a different matter but it's certainly not an affront to "freedom" as you mentioned. Money from the government might not be less worthy but it does come at the cost of someone else.
This is partially true at best. Spending does not equal revenue, and it doesn't need to. The best way to think about government taxation is that is money that is collected and destroyed. Then new money is printed to pay for government services.
In other words, the government spending money did not take any additional money out of your pocket...in fact, for the past 40 years, for the most part, the government has been trying to put money back in your pocket through tax cuts. Of course, we are now at the point where another tax cut doesn't effect 70% of tax payers because their tax burden is so low or non-existent.
For what it's worth though I agree with you. Government programs should be funded and planned based on net-benefit to society not strictly on an individual idea of fairness.
An example would be homelessness or drug rehab programs where it ends up being cheaper and better for society to help people than to continuously ignore and/or punish them.
But that doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not your attitude is actually constructive. You seem to be stuck in the 80s era of Reaganomics/welfare queens thinking, which has since proven to be incredibly ineffectual, destructive, and misery-causing.
Did it though? Government spending != spending your wallet money. Because money is fungible, I can easily make the case that all of your tax dollars went to whatever you value in government, and that we borrowed the rest of the dollars to pay for these beneifts.
And yes, because it's money from my pocket (as I explained), if someone asked me directly, I would have opinions on how it ought to be spent.
It’s not surprising that with more money, people spend more. People with kids spend on kids. But not kids exclusively.
The question that wasn’t answered was whether this was an efficient intervention. If our goal is to help kids then there are likely other interventions that are better than cash to everyone, including non-parents (ie, daycare, school lunches, library programs, etc)
From the paper, linked in the article. Quite disingenuous to assume that low income families must be wasting money on substances, while the statistics always show that richer individuals obviously can afford and do spend more.
I am assuming that everyone just spends more on stuff. The part of interest, that I don’t see in the paper, is if the ratios change with added income. Not the absolute amounts.
What is of interest to me is that if someone spent 10% of their disposable income on education, do they spend 10% of their extra cash on education? Or is it different. Likewise for substances. What’s the baseline percent and the percent spent of extra cash.
And then compare across socioeconomic classes.
It’s frustrating to see such bonehead statements like people who get money spend money without describe other things of interest. I don’t think anyone debates that rich people spend more than poor people.
Please be civil and consider whether you’re actually trying to have a good-faith discussion.
> people who get money spend money without describe other things of interest
Did you read the passage I quoted? And the table in the paper nearby? They clearly show the effects of the benefit on different categories of spending split across income groups, just like you’re asking.
I wasn’t referring to you as being boneheaded and don’t want you to think that you’re targeted. I’m commenting on the paper and other discussion on the topic that seem to be cherry picking parts of data without questioning or digging into. Then I explained why as I think basic questions are missed and non-significant findings are presented as if they are significant.
Because when it comes to government subsidy incentives, the argument is made that it encourages businesses and the wealthy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/22/cuts-to-unemployment-benefit...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/business/economy/unemploy...
And that it would be spent in rent.
UBI is incredibly popular amongst conservatives, except for 2 particular groups: conservative pols and their rich conservative donors.
> How are you supposed to staff an incredibly shitty low paying job if people aren't literally starving?
Why should anyone be forced to do that shitty of a job? Why can't the wage be increased and/or the quality of treatment be increased?
> Offering more money or better working conditions is a nonstarter, they would rather just move the work offshore.
This works for things like software developers, but not for the majority of food & service industry.
Because if you did that we wouldn't have billionaires.
that sounds like a good thing
Are you sure there's just one "conservative" narrative on the issue?
Even if we limited the discussion to considerations that only conservatives find compelling, I suspect we'd see at least 2-3 distinct issues.
> “Low-income parents do need to spend a greater part of the money they received on basic necessities—for instance to catch up on bills or to fix a broken car—but they still managed with the leftover amount to invest in their children.”
Is the only correlation here that when people are given money, some of it was spent on kids?
Low income people already are almost not taxed at all, given how our tax structure works.
The parents that are taxed enough to matter in the first place are making enough money that they can freely give their kids what they want, in general.
EDIT: s/income/sales
That only means at state level and most places will add taxes at a locality level. Consumption taxes in general are popular throughout the world not necessarily because they're optimal or something like that but because they are easiest to enforce and administrate compared to income taxes. Just look at our complex federal tax code for what can degenerate within 60 years. Now, with a VAT things are somewhere in the middle between sales taxes and income taxes and is subject to the same political pressures to shift around taxation toward "less desirable" activities as deemed by politicians.
Oregon (my own state) has no sales tax anywhere, including localities.'
The entire supply chain is taxed throughout, from labour taxes, to service taxes, VAT, property taxes, etc. and all of this ends up in the final price of anything that's purchased. Since the poor usually spend all or most of their income, these things are a much bigger burden for them than for the rich who save most of their income.
Even if you take away the entire supply chain, people are still paying VAT or similar taxes on anything they buy to eat, wear, use, etc.
Poor people don’t have property to have property tax, though.
i couldn't get out of my funk, i was broke when he was conceived and remained broke because nobody wants to hire someone with a record, so i stayed out of his life in order to hopefully become the father who could one day put him through college. he is 9 now, i still havent seen him and i work all the time, it gets me nowhere, no matter how many self help positive thinking books and actions i take, i am still extremely poor and on the verge of homelessness.
i started to finally catch up, i started a business and it looked like i was gonna finally gonna prove everyone wrong about me, you know, have self respect but the pandemic wiped out my business and delayed the reunification with my son. i not a victim but i don't you know anyone who can give me advice and tell me it's gonna be okay, people see their kids and no matter how hard i try, its like i an pushing a boulder uphill only to have it come rolling back down, each and everyday, i dont watch tv, i dont play games, i dont look at memes all day. i literally work from sun up to sun down and apply for jobs only to have people discredit me based on lack of experience in the field and probably how small my apartment looks on zoom.
side note, i got arrested and thrown in the drunk tank overnight, i was stuck on probation longer because i could not make my payments. and what i got arrested for was punching someone while drunk, so i regret that, tremendously. before that i had no record. but i also lived in one of the worst states when it came to criminal justice. i did ard and my record is clean so i have that going for me at least
I believe this study, and I believe that a vast majority of poor people would spend the money reasonably, but I do think there is a small subset of poor people who will be "perpetually poor." They have little/no financial literacy, they'll spend the money in a fairly frivolous way, and I think giving them raw cash instead of something more or less boxed-in like food stamps can lead to a lot of issues.
I think a lot of people see the majority of poor people acting extremely responsibly and just assume that irresponsible people don't exist. The problem is that they do, even if they are a minority, and we do need to help them too.
I am much more open to a UBI if we have it in addition to our current welfare programs, a lot of people would definitely benefit from having a guaranteed safety net, but I think we shouldn't forget that "the majority" doesn't mean "everyone".
----
EDIT: It appears that I didn't explain myself very well. I'm not trying to give a Reagan-esque welfare-queen thing, specifically because I actually would prefer we increase welfare/safety-net spending instead of reducing it.
I'm not trying to shift a burden of blame on anyone, I'm sure there are socioeconomic reasons to why some people lack financial literacy.
I guess what I'm trying to say (and this may come off as hyperbolic) is that I get a little bit of a social-darwinism vibe when people act like people mismanaging money don't need to be addressed in topics of UBI.
Obviously not everyone says this, but there is at least a subset of people who pretend that nearly everyone, given enough money, is this hyper-rational actor who always spends their money efficiently and that we shouldn't worry about the 1% of people who aren't.
Even if it is just 1%, these are still humans, these are still people we should take care of, and these are people that depend on the current level of social safety nets.
When Covid began, the Ontario Government just handed out cash. You could go to a website and 5 minutes later be set up for a $400 direct deposit into your bank account. You didn't need to prove anything. You just gave them your bank information and personal information and how many kids you have. People got anxious about the hypothetical kind of person who could abuse this. The response was basically: if we try to carefully scrutinize every person, it's going to cost us more, and we're not going to get the money out fast enough. This is for parents who suddenly have to buy Chromebooks and other school supplies for their kids.
If you ask me, I think it all stems from a deep feeling all humans have, but that some cultures greatly amplify: the anxiety that someone isn't rowing while you are.
There was a fair bit of PPP fraud, but that's okay! It was designed to be relatively easy for businesses to get that money, because getting money into the hands of small businesses was critical. Plenty of the fraud could have been prevented with additional paperwork/validations/etc., but amount saved from fraud by doing that would be completely outweighed by the cost of businesses failing that otherwise could have been saved because they couldn't get the money fast enough.
I think even if you could somehow prove that there was a ridiculously huge amount of welfare fraud, I'd still be somewhat supportive of it; I think there's an inherent value of knowing that a safety net exists. If you lose your job, or get into a horrible accident, or have some condition that puts you at a disadvantage, we (as a society) should be looking out for you, particularly in the most wealthy economy on the planet.
We're not even good at being selfish :/
This line of thinking creates a feedback loop, bolstered by systemic racism and poverty bigotry: the riffraff will abuse these systems so we won't offer them, or we'll make them all but impossible to utilize. And then those individuals struggle and are left with little choice when they're drowning.
The overwhelming majority not being fraudulent. That's rather the point, isn't it?
Unless of course the system doesn't require the distinction of Public vs Private, which it seems inevitably leads to parasitism.
I have a great deal of anxiety that these folks aren't rowing: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/climat...
... and I mean "these folks" in the GW Bush sense.
No one talks about CEO pay increases in terms of 'if we give them more money, they'll just spend it on drugs, emitting carbon, and other nefarious things'
When CEOs spend their money in frivolous ways, they generally have enough to not need to fall back on additional public assistance. If UBI were instituted in place of other benefits programs, some poor people would spend the money unwisely (or unluckily) and still be short on food, housing, etc. when the money ran out.
Of course this already happens in our current system, but theoretically it could happen more without some degree of government control of where money goes (like how section 8, SNAP, etc. work now).
The wealthy receive the lion's share of the wealth created by public subsidies, whihc they then spend as they please.
1. Marillyn Hewson was paid $30mn as a retirement package last year, and 75%+ of her company's revenue comes from the US government.
2. Hugh Grant of Monsanto was paid $20mn and a significant share of his company's revenue is driven by the US's $20bn farm subsidy.
3. Peter Thiel has saved c.$1bn in taxes by using the Roth IRA structure.
I'm not trying to judge the morality of the above, but to act as though the wealthy don't receive government support tht they spend exactly as they please is a short-sighted position.
Like sure, they don't need MORE than $30mn, but shouldn't we be asking why they got $30mn of public assistance in the first place? By your logic, shouldn't it be like 3 orders of magnitude smaller (Edit: since only the first $30k or so covers basic needs and the rest is allocated to non-essentials)?
What specific issues are you suggesting result from giving cash over food stamps?
Are you familiar with the absolutely byzantine rules imposed by many states on food stamp recipients on what they can purchase?
It was recently discussed in an article here I believe. It goes down to specifying which specific types of cheddar cheese are permissible.
Just removing the mental burden of that alone would be an improvement.
That's totally fair; this is observational anecdata.
Something a bit more objective would be to look at lottery winners [1], a case where someone gets literally millions of dollars injected into their bank account. Despite this a majority of lottery winners end up broke relatively quickly.
Of course, this is going to be a selection bias; typically financially responsible people are not playing the lottery since it's generally regarded as a bad financial investment, but the fact that the lottery exists proves that there's a large enough audience to justify its existence.
> What specific issues are you suggesting result from giving cash over food stamps?
I think there's a risk of an increase in the aforementioned lottery tickets,
> Are you familiar with the absolutely byzantine rules imposed by many states on food stamp recipients on what they can purchase? > It was recently discussed in an article here I believe. It goes down to specifying which specific types of cheddar cheese are permissible.
Yep! I actually looked into the process of applying for them when I was really broke in 2016 [2], and you will get zero arguments from me that it's a draconian system that needs revision. There are a bunch of arbitrary rules about how they can be redeemed and I am somewhat against those, but that doesn't mean that we get rid of food stamps entirely.
[1] https://www.lovemoney.com/gallerylist/64958/lottery-winners-... [2] I actually didn't end up getting them due to an extreme bit of good luck finding a job just in time.
In practice, none of the "UBI trials" I've heard about are anything close to UBI, even for a small community. In fact, UBI seems to be getting rebranded as "guaranteed basic income" (GBI), meaning not universal, but "guaranteed for the people we feel like giving it to". All these trials I have heard of still have an income means test, and some are even limited to particular racial groups.
The study also showed that it basically did not change people's employment status or job training. That was a benefit touted for UBI. If people had income coming in that didn't depend on working they would seek job training and improve their careers. However, that did not appear to be the case generally.
It took a lot of effort to find this. It was buried beneath news spam in search results where things were cherry picked out of it.
Study is here: https://labourstudies.mcmaster.ca/documents/southern-ontario...
What do you think confirmed frivolous spending? What ruled out chronic health issues or other factors?
Your source said 26.2% started education or training. Where did you see this basically did not change?
71.8% who didn't work during the program cited health issues.
So what? You realize the top 1% have stolen >$10T from us overdecades of tax evasion, and you want to punish a few mentally ill people who don't spend money in the "right way" that you've personally determined to gatekeep?
This is the problem I have when people say: "the problem I have with UBI is that people won't spend it the way I think they should." It is such a small amount compared to the larger problems, and it would help so many people.
Engineers have a term for this: rounding error.
You're worried about rounding error.
That's actually not what I said at all, did you finish reading my post? I made it clear that I want continued welfare programs, I just don't want UBI to replace them. I would be much happier if UBI were added.
"They have little/no financial literacy, they'll spend the money in a fairly frivolous way, and ... can lead to a lot of issues."
What issues?
If we had a UBI in addition to all the current levels welfare/safety-nets, is this something you actually disagree with? Why?
Your post took great care to state how much you support welfare/safety-nets, but then oddly decided to take issue with a corner case.
Yes, everything has issues, but why point out the financially illiterate as causing issues? It seems like such a small nit compared to the much larger problems with how existing welfare programs are more at risk for becoming extinct; there is a constant onslaught from Republican politicians to dismantle anything related to welfare. In terms of numbers, that is far more an issue.
Perhaps I over-reacted because I am so used to conservatives looking for a handful of people who spent money on big-screen TVs instead of food as proof that the system is broken.
Perhaps you meant you were truly concerned that the financially illiterate would cause issues because they will need help to use the money correctly. And you weren't actually using that as an objection to UBI?
Did I misunderstand you?
You're gonna have to provide a citation for that kind of claim.
I think this phenomena cuts across class lines. There are lots of middle class households that live way beyond their means and basically just use expansive lines of credit - of which poor people don't have access to - to keep themselves afloat. Likewise, there's tons of "Richs to rags" stories of wealthy people who slowly fritter away their wealth with either foolish investing or extravagant purchases.
In fact I wonder if UBI were implemented if many of these things could worsen as political pressure from the working classes in the form of unions and political parties and the like would weaken. If you're able to feed yourself via UBI, why vote for a "left wing" party, or go on strike, or go to a demonstration etc in order to push for more workplace rights, etc.? Hence why I think actually there's plenty of support for UBI from people who would not normally be advocates of extensive social programs.
Many old school Marxists saw welfare programmes as nothing more than an "escape valve" for the excesses of capitalism. Good as a "transitional demand" but harmful in the long run.
They do jobs that pay them barely enough to afford their shitty lives and invest between commuting and working 50-65 hours doing so in between being parents and spouses and doing not only all the things you do save take time off but doing the paperwork, phone calls, meetings, and leg work to convince people that they are in fact still poor and still need benefits.
If were to sit down and spend time optimizing these people's financial lives you would find that the amount "frittered" away is so tiny compared to child care, food, rent, medical costs that it wouldn't make a difference. Taking someone that for example makes and spends 20,800 and helping them not "fritter" away the 800 will not provide them with a means to climb out of poverty. There never was in that scenario enough resources no matter how they are budgeted.
The most canonical example of this absurdity used to be complaining about poor people buying TVs with tax return checks as if someone who is $40,000 below a middle class household income would SOMEHOW be doing OK if they hadn't spent that $500. My other favorite example is people complaining about poor people pulling out an EBT card and a smartphone wherein the EBT card signifies that the government has decided that your income is $5000 short of what is required to eat and live and the phone costs $200 once + $20 a month while providing vital utility.
Ultimately the benefits you describe as being targeted are pretty much targeted at keeping people from climbing out of poverty. Look at health insurance you can get medicine and care for nothing up until about $2000 a month income and then you have to buy your own insurance. Subsidies are great but they apply only if your employer doesn't offer an "affordable" plan the definition of affordable being if I recall correctly about 12% of your gross salary for the individual plan. There being tax benefits this inspires your employer to offer an "affordable plan" for individuals while jacking up the cost of covering your family. For example with my employers plan the employee + spouse costs 4x as much.
Ultimately moving up from substantial poverty to ordinary poor is actually a net loss. You could if you don't ever want to move up or believe you will be able to be better off staying a little poorer working part time and collecting benefits. Think about that! Would you like to work 60 hours to be as well off as you were working 24? How do you think people respond to that sort of incentive structure?
Ok, but why is it that lottery winners tend to end up broke pretty quickly [1]? The use of the word "perpetual" wasn't meant to imply the duration of poverty, but more of propensity towards it. I think there is a subset of poorer people who do not know how to manage money terribly well.
I agree that a very large percentage of poor people might be perfectly fiscally responsible but socioeconomic reasons prevent them from breaking out.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2016/01/08/...
People budget poorly in response to an instant massive change in wealth because much of America not just the poor are living financial lives with very short horizons. They make decisions based on gut feelings of can I afford that not mathematical projections. Having a balance of millions feels perceptively like unlimited money so many find the limits of their funds.
Likewise because say a tax refund is too little money to change their lives and not needed to pay bills poor people "fritter" them away on things that they want. This might be unwise compared to saving for a rainy day but it's not a cause of poverty it's a gut decision. Giving people money in a savings account over time with incentive for delaying withdrawal would be likely to produce a different gut decision.
It is deeply ironic that anyone who gets a 6 dollar coffee or 5000 on a vacation probably wastes more than Jane poor did on the TV while declaring the virtues of austerity.
Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security & Defense are the largest share of the spending contributing to this debt, but the proposals for more welfare spending continue unabated & our adversaries have reached or surpassed defense parity in either quality or quantity, or both.
At what point, if ever, do Americans acknowledge the horrific fiscal situation the Baby Boomer generation bequeathed to us and accept that painful & deep spending cuts must be made, instead of piling more spending atop expenditures this country cannot afford?
You can make a deeply compelling argument for welfare spending on an emotional or data-driven basis. The merits aren't the issue. The issue is affordability and prioritization at a time when US politico-economic-military stability and sustainability is at serious risk.
1. The US will be paying interest on it forever.
2. The US is chained to maintaining low interest rates forever no matter what unless it wants to bankrupt itself. The Fed is not so independent from the rest of the government that it can set policy to bankrupt the US.
3. This game can go on basically forever as long as the economy keeps growing faster than the debt. That will happen as long as every dollar in spending creates (one dollar times the interest rate) in recurring tax revenue. So, the government can spend... as long as it spends wisely.
If you want some financial science fiction, imagine a world where you can borrow money directly from the Fed at an interest rate that exactly balances your disk of defaulting. In that world, the USG can borrow at 0% interest because it structurally can't default. That's the world we're heading towards.
Any good arguments on why this can't continue forever? (obviously other nations can't do this)
A new reserve currency need not be the Yuan or the Euro. There's ample cryptocurrency analogs with the transactional capacity to assume the dollar's reserve/transactional role.
Overconfidence in the dollar is what national security experts might term: "Strategic narcissism".
- The need to find buyer's for your country's debt at rates that don't greatly exacerbate the problem.
- The surprising frequency with which countries were forced to default on their debt & the implications for social order.
- How government debt impacts corporate & personal debt appetites & rates.
- What uncontrolled debt & spending does to your currency and the cost of necessary imports.
Secondly, when you borrow money, you borrow it from other people. Most US debt is in the form of treasuries issued to American people and businesses. The people offering the loans to the US government are the often same ones benefiting from it. It's less like "buying a pizza on a credit card" and more like "lending my wife $20 to pick up groceries for dinner".
Thirdly, the US government controls monetary policy. If you want rack up debt on your credit card, you have to pay the interest rate that the credit card company wants, and you have to pay it in the denominations they ask for. The US government controls the monetary supply and the interest rate at which they obtain debt.
And there are many more differences, like the fact that institutions trust storing their wealth in debt issued to global nuclear powers, more so than they trust issuing it to the average Joe on the street.
But lets go with this equivocation for a moment. It ignores an incredibly significant part of the equation to the affordability of debt. It always ignores the fact that the US is worth in excess of $200+ Trillion dollars and that combining all debt (personal, government, business) and getting an accounting of the Net Worth of the United States comes in around $141+ Trillion.
That is, we have a debt equal to our income and assets many multiples our current debt and income levels. I have a mortgage that is a multiple my income, so the US is doing much better than myself and I am quickly ascending the Net Worth ladder despite this debt.
It also ignores the fact that this money --specifically money spent directly on the welfare of citizens-- is investment in said citizens in order to continue to grow the wealth and prosperity of the country as a whole and keep us competitive with the rest of the world.
It makes zero sense NOT to improve the lives of as many American citizens as possible in a global economy.
Thank you. Exactly this.
I am very fiscally conservative, but I have no problem with welfare in general. However, this country cannot afford it. Many other countries can, and I think that's great. We cannot. There is really no question here.
There is absolutely a question here, and it is obvious.
Other countries raise more revenue (taxes) and pay for more things. That is "great", you say. The US could do the same.
Other countries spend less on other things (classic example is defense). The US could do the same.
The US can absolutely positively definitely afford welfare, and universal health care too.
If we prioritize these things the way other countries do.
The important question is: which countries get the best outcomes for their people through government spending? There are strong arguments that the US is not at the top of that list.
Well sure, but we'd have to pay off our debt first. If you want to raise taxes to pay off debt, I'm actually more in support of that than raising taxes to pay welfare. So far, all tax raising plans to pay off welfare just continue to increase the debt (and it's not like the anti-welfare people end up decreasing it either). So really until then, I'm not in support of anything other than lowering the debt.
I'm not sure that raising taxes will help. The US federal government pulls in a larger percentage in taxes as percentage of GDP than ever before, and yet is still spending it all + some. This is not sustainable.
> The important question is: which countries get the best outcomes for their people through government spending?
No it's not. The important question is: which countries get the best outcomes, whether via government spending or not, and do so while not being in debt?
But I'm unclear on the importance of paying down debt in this case. Will it lead to a better state of things, or is that expectation just a habit we have from thinking about household debt?
Govt debt is different, and US govt debt is even more different.
It is not strictly bad to carry debt at the national govt level. Especially when your debtholders are mostly citizens. People talk about China and other countries holding US debt, but the numbers are not significant.
So what is the right level of debt? That's a good question, but it doesn't seem to be terribly relevant right now (and literally no one knows the answer!). When your debtholders will no longer lend you money, then it becomes an issue. We are not there yet, regardless of what the number is.
Debt to your bank is usually OK. Everyone benefits from the transaction, at least by design.
Debt to your citizens is great! Your debt limit is a meaningful fraction of the sum of economic value of the nation. Your creditors are also the beneficiaries of your spending. The more you spend, the more you can borrow, because you create economic activity on behalf of your creditors, who then have more to lend.
Debt is absolutely very different when the debtors and creditors are the same people.
Debt to other nations (if you're the US) is also great! But that's a special circumstance.
Except it's not. Debt to citizens represents tax payments that are owed from all citizens to the subset of citizens owning debt.
The rich own a disproportionate amount of bonds. This is expected.
By taxing all people to pay interest to the rich you're just taking from the poor to give to the rich.
Especially considering that the next generation is made up of larger numbers of children of the poor rather than children of the rich, this is tantamount to stealing from the future of the already disadvantaged to give to the ready advantaged.
There is a stratum of taxpayers who do not benefit directly (i.e. loan repayments) from government debt because they do not hold bonds. And as you say, in the upper economic strata, bond holding is more common.
So the strata that are least-benefitted are somewhere in the middle to upper middle class (such as it is). But these people are mostly OK -- their needs are met, most of their wants are met, but they could optimize better. NBD.
AND: If those strata did optimize better (move some income/savings into govt bonds), then the govt could borrow more and everyone would be even happier except the folks who obsess over the number for political reasons (when political party "not-mine" is in office).
Of course there is a "donut hole" in the middle where the social benefits available (programs) are inadequate, and the economic benefits (bond holding) are unreachable.
But the proposed programs which are running into this wall of discussion are in many cases designed to address this gap. There are good arguments about how best (effectively, cost-effectively, etc) to address the gap, how to design the programs.
But the argument that "we can't afford it" is short, pithy, and easily-comprehended, but much too simplistic to be honest. "We don't want to" is more correct.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
- https://www.thoughtco.com/communist-countries-overview-14351...
UBI isn't communist, it's socialist — but it's a step in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, the FedAccount proposal[0] (for example) is both communist and authoritarian.
[0] https://www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/89-Geo.-Wash...
In many (if not most) cases, their lower performance is directly attributable to the socioeconomic status of their parents, and their parents’ ability to be present and proactively supportive, rather than in a constant state of reactive anxiety over housing and grocery expenses.
I'm not sure non-teachers fully grasp the poverty that a surprisingly large percentage of children in the United States experience.
There's plenty of people who don't get good grades for reasons outside of their control.
Or we drop the idea that parents should be responsible for their child’s academic performance; moreso when they’re struggling with low wage jobs and scraping by.
We should look to Asia for a good model. The culture promotes parents taking an active role in education and schools publicly rank students to motivate achievement. The results show in international competitions, college admissions, and grad school admissions.
Some parents have time and others don’t - just like the USA. The main difference is the style of education itself, and the way that children are taught.
While I don’t have a solution to the USA problem, it’s definitely not because “parents are uninvolved”.
I mean we can use statistics effectively to suss out cheaters.
The notion of 'money for grades', while a neat idea for discussion, is definitely macabre, just another version of 'Squid Games'.
A small child bonus, maybe a bit means tested, but not enough to perversely incent people to want children for that reason (some people think like that), would be worth it.
In fact it's probably one of the best ways to spend surpluses that we have. Early childhood education and formation is really foundational and the marginal value of a few extra dollars for those who materially need it can go a very long way.
It'd be political tennable if the Left were not in a civil war between traditional leftist and progressives, and the right were not at war between populists and the groups of traditional republicans.
Teachers, parents, or caseworkers don't need that stress either.
School is not work and should not be rewarded based on productivity.
Turn off disasters.
First build a town with surplus cash with enough Healthcare, jobs, industrial areas, police and fire. Now grow your city until you unlock the ability to tax specific segments. Make sure your city is still in good condition before you start the experiment.
Clone the save file so you can run a control.
City A change nothing an let the Sim run for a year.
City B lower taxes for the low income to 0. Your city should have enough surplus income to make you not go into the red starting this experiment.
Post your results for the Tale of Two Cities simulation.
Edit:
Someone posted this:
https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid...
And then deleted it, probably for fear of reputation or downvotes. Chilling discussion doesn't serve to educate or bring us closer together.
I am happy to see the link from Will Wright and it make a point perhaps we shouldn't trust the initial Sim City engine to modeling, but I would much prefer a person who never flew a plane but has spent time in a flight sim trying to emergency land a plane rather than someone who never flew a plane or used a flight sim.
One of the original authors, Will Wright, gave an interview many years ago expressing his horror when he found out that city planners were doing precisely what you suggest.
Quote:
“I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something that we wouldn’t want to do,” Wright said in an interview in 1999.
But that didn’t stop companies from believing Maxis could design realistic simulations.
Will Wright didn’t believe that was even possible.
“Many people come to us and say, ‘You should do the professional version,'” he continued.
“That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality.
The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.”
Turn on infinite money cheat
Build a cool park, make sure it has lots of wild rides
Clone the save file
Let park A run for a year and change nothging
Remove all exits, food stalls, and bathrooms in park b and runf or a year
post results for a year. be sure to show that the happy meteres.
Does Sim City model economics well enough that the result is meaningful?