We shouldn’t push a positive mindset on those in poverty

https://www.covidmoneytracker.org

b) Who will do the work? All the automation will do the work. They have kiosks up in McDonalds right now that mean they only need one person needs to be at a register. But as far as it disincentivizes work..nit has been show it does not, but still people cannot believe this.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/no-strings-attac...

"Overall, the programs analyzed suggest either no effect on labor market supply or a slight reduction in work and earnings. The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large."

b) Who pays for the jobs that are entirely parasitic and remove value - and add friction - today?

I don't think UBI implements a particularly good safety net without other measures - at the very least open education at all levels, open healthcare, open culture, open media, and open democracy.

But if you're implying that money exists to force people to work I'd consider the possibility that you're describing what is essentially a form of slavery. Or at least extreme political control.

It stops being slavery when people are free to choose what to do with their talents, abilities, ambitions, and interests, and when job markets value that contribution instead of - quite literally - attempting to minimise its value.

The fundamental difference is between finding and promoting people who are good at inventing and organising the future, and finding and promoting people who are good at controlling everyone else's time for their own personal benefit.

The latter is what we have now, and it's showing very clear signs of making far less sense as a stable system with a future than some UBI-adjacent scheme would be.

The entire system is predatory and cancelling student debt is not the solution because it just means the lenders make all their profits off the backs of taxpayers. The real solution is to make student loans dischargable and for lenders to bear the risk of debt again. Then the markets will return back to normal.

[*] In theory, education makes a society produce more on an absolute level -- but only in theory.

Giving people UBI is completely different. UBI is in itself a direct cure to poverty. The people receiving UBI are no longer poor at all. UBI abolishes poverty. You no longer have the issue of "the poor" anymore, as it's a category that does not exist.

UBI is like giving food to a starving person. It directly cures the starvation. It reverses the very condition of starvation itself.

Unlike the indirect approach to addressing poverty, there's no question about whether it would work. The remaining question is whether our economy depends on poverty as a negative incentive much like it depends on prison.

The obsession with sending everyone to college was based on a correlation/causation mistake with college degrees and income levels.

I’m all for a flat tax with no tax loopholes but to increase my taxes more than I’m already paying is something I will never vote for.

https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

More tax doesn't fix widespread, rampant, government corruption. The US takes in enough tax to have plenty of nice things. For citizens to see any benefit the military industrial complex needs to be defanged with prejudice, the US needs to pull out of all foreign police actions, etc.

The highways and roads I drive on are terrible. Let's start there. Why is that in such a poor state with me paying 35% marginal tax? Where is my money going? Yep that's right, "social justice consultants" and the military industrial complex.

On the UBI note it would never work out anyway. Yang's numbers were several order of magnitudes off similar to Bernie's healthcare numbers. We'd have to collect far more money than we could even with a progressive tax system and that's if we only offered it to actual naturalized citizens. If we offered to everyone who exists in America there's absolutely no way it would work simply by the numbers. These programs work in countries with defined borders, strong citizenship laws, homogenous cultures, and populations 1/10th the size of America. We are different. We need different solutions.

Also, the massive death toll of the pandemic, combined with singinificant behavior changes caused by fear of the same death toll, have left many industries reeling and redistributed wealth allocations in many people's budgets (away from dining out and tourism and into other places like gaming or real-estate), which had hard to measure outcomes.

Not to mention, prices for most goods are currently controlled by a handful of companies like Amazon and Walmart, who are in a perfect position to silently collaborate on increasing prices instead of taking a hit on profits like they would normally be forced to if they were in tight competition.

So it isn't the case that rural public transportation simply can't work.

Or how do astronauts get to the ISS? Checkmate. Transportation infrastructure bad.

A solution doesn't need to be 100% perfect for every situation in order for it to still be worthwhile.

Yes, they are, which is why you build more infrastructure...

And it is even terrible for well-off healthy adults whenever something happens to their car (say, engine trouble).

Not to mention, car accidents are a significant cause of injury and death, and being habitually sedentary leaves a high proportion of people in horrible physical shape and is a leading cause of ballooning healthcare costs, poor quality of life, and preventable deaths.

It is a tremendously exclusionary, resource inefficient, fragile, and environmentally destructive form of transportation and social organization.

I recognize those towns are not universal. Then again, the situation of your wife's family is not universal either. Which is the crux of the problem with discussions such as this one: people like to reach for generalities that reflect their own life experiences or observations, when the reality is that those perspectives represents a narrow worldview. Heck, even the people who study poverty for a living cannot come up with a consistent narrative (as demonstrated by the opening paragraphs of the article) since it will be influenced by the questions they ask and how they conduct their research.

You only have to look to other developed countries to see how fast, cheap, and efficient public transit is not only a major and driving force in the economy, but also a critical part of the social safety net. Just because America's public transit systems have been hobbled by the oil-industry doesn't mean we shouldn't be improving it for everyone's benefit.

Poor people in Europe can easily hop a train to get to another town or village if needed. In the case of a really rural community, they will have buses to the nearest train station.

> That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central planners, who are often incompetent.

Aka America’s self fulfilling destiny.

Because they have no choice, and are constantly forced to dump money into it to keep it on the road. This is absolutely pertinent to this discussion. Public transit systems are restricting because they are so poorly implemented.

I live in a small town, but when I was looking into taking the bus to work in the morning, it would have taken two hours each way, every day. That's extremely poor public transit and creates a huge amount of pressure to buy a car instead.

If one aspect is education and mindset, but the other aspect is having the financial empowerment required for the education and mindset to be fruitful, then giving assistance that takes away the burden of "getting by" while still empowering the recipient to make her own choices (along with proper education to do so) seems like a great melding of solutions.

That's the fun thing, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both! And I would moreover argue that if a government scheme can be sabotaged like this in the first place, the government scheme is itself at fault given its obviously lacking transparency, and a "libertarian" response is all the more appropriate.

This reads a lot like the kind of condescension I mentioned receiving from my wealthier friends and family growing up. Well intentioned, but people usually privileged enough to only know what they knew about poverty and assistance programs from magazines, research journals and politicians selling compassion. Rarely were they the people who experienced the consequences of what they were advocating for themselves, giving them a comfortable perch from which to preach what felt helpful and moral, but never knowing what it meant to be wrong about the results firsthand.

If it's true that these programs can be done the right way and are being deliberately sabotaged (with which I tend to agree), then they are being sabotaged by more than just the "means testing" and "market-based solutions" crowd. I know firsthand, because some of the most destructive of these initiatives in my life have come directly from undivided Congresses made of the politicians telling us that "we can't afford not to go all in".

But somehow when one of the supposedly non-hamstrung programs still comes with impossible red tape, unintended consequences, or otherwise leaves the recipient worse off than when she started, even the "all in" programs that make it through via unchallenged bills or executive action, somehow end up being criticized in retrospect for not being "all in" enough. "We just didn't commit enough. We need to double down."

Failing that, it's always the fault of "those other politicians" and when all other excuses fail, then it always falls back to victim blaming. "They just don't know what's good for them" or "they just don't know how these things work". Yes, both the "change your attitude and work ethic" crowd and the "government assistance" crowd blame the victim, if you know how to spot it.

I'm certainly not arguing that you're wrong in the assertion that many of these institutions are designed to fail, but I do think, for anyone committed to actually solving problems, that taking honest account of how these institutions are failing beyond just "they need more money and fewer restrictions" is among the necessary first steps.

Confronting the problem by dedicating yourself to the results rather than dedicating yourself to the politicians who say nice things and then shrug their shoulders when their solutions don't work, even (especially?) when that means coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that the "team" you trust may not have earned that trust beyond words.

Or the uncomfortable conclusion that the people supporting the other "team" are doing so not out of ignorance or deception but out of a reaction informed by genuine personal experience that you may not have had. That those people, still in need of solutions not being provided by either team, are turning to the devil they know and can manage, rather than the one they cannot.

The good news is that these first steps are unifying and results oriented. The bad news is that it requires people to confront their own biases that they think of as mutually exclusive postulates to be accepted and instead turn them into non-absolute theories to be tested and refined. It likely means realizing that our "teams" don't matter so much, and that spotting the good from the bad on both sides is harder than it seems.

They unequivocally made my life worse off than without them, and I know I'm not alone.

Us both being willing to accept that our respective experiences are polar opposites, but still valid and worth consideration, is key to making sure neither you nor I are so dedicated to supporting something for the sake of supporting it that we lose sight of why we're supporting it.

Just because it helped you doesn't mean something similar that you're supporting today can't also harm others. Likewise, just because I was harmed by something doesn't mean I should be closed off to the notion that something similar could help others.

If we can keep this in mind when dealing with people of opposing viewpoints, and acknowledge how individual experiences of otherwise similar things can be very different, then I think we'd reach better, less judgmental and vitriolic conclusions on how to solve these problems.

There’s a lot of scope for service design in government, and human-centered design. Of course, there are also lobbyists at every turn trying to hobble the process because there are profits to be made.

It would be amazing to see an America where its culture of innovation was laser focused on making life better for everyone. I wish we were there today.

Many were bait-and-switches. "This program will cover all of your costs for {x}", and then months later, "sorry, the program actually doesn't cover {x.1} or {x.2}, so you owe money and penalties now".

Other programs were of the more indirect, but still very consequential, "we're incentivizing or mandating people to do {x} to help those without means" only for the businesses with means to easily absorb the costs or penalties while the freelancers (as I was at one time) or people working for small businesses (as I did and continue to do) are put in situations in which they cannot.

Whether its healthcare mandates or regulations, used car or appliance buy-back programs, mortgage assistance programs, aggressive minimum insurance liabilities, they are all sold on the notion of helping the less fortunate at the expense of the more fortunate, yet I can trace so many of them to situations that directly impacted my family and lead us to facing homelessness multiple times.

If I gave the impression that means testing was the core impediment, then I can say it was only but one of many.

That said, I agree that means testing just adds a burden to the recipient and a means manipulating the recipient. I don't view this as partisan, though, and there are plenty on the left happy to use assistance as a form of social behavior manipulation as well.

To do this honestly and properly, we would need to remove ALL means testing.

Unless you you murder someone how do you even get fired as an incompetent corrupt bureaucrat administering program 456-B-1. You don't you collect your money and try to grow your staff and budget. People you are supposed to help are an inconvenience as they tend to want you to do your job. Of course they have no recourse.. so they can be safely ignored.

There is no metric of success, no metric for failure.

This would sound much more honest if we didn't just have 6-12 months of mainly left-wing people calling for healthcare discrimination of the unvaccinated.

That in itself is IMO a good enough reason to oppose nationalized medicine.

capitalism isn't some miracle that created the current american politicoeconomic environment. the single biggest (but not sole) factor (i.e., luck) in that was geographic: it just so happened 2 huge oceans separated us from the biggest war in history.

cheerleading for capitalism is at best a non sequitur.

This is false dogma. China has been UNARGUABLY a wild success. Now subtract every human life that ended prematurely or was lived in relative poverty because the USA funded terrorists and facist overthrow of their democratically elected socialist government

The last 5-6 years has made me thing so much of _why_ this is the case is rooted in:

1. Race and how people are perceived--the rise of race issues in the referenced period is so confusing to me, as I thought we were getting past them, but it is very clear that a huge percentage of the US population is still have 19th century views on race.

2. Certain companies (like Amazon) who few low-skilled workers as machines to use up and throw away.

As for the "inflation-adjusted minimum wage" ... the argument used to be "small businesses will suffer" but strangely I haven't heard that in a long time. In fact, I don't hear anyone refuting the idea of IAMW. It's so insane to me that we don't do this. Maybe that would give politicians an incentive to keep inflation low? (Because they want to keep the minimum wage as low as possible?)

In practice, that's the case. I think that the idea that it isn't so, and people go to this or that employer out of "free choice", stems from a religious-like belief in "free market", than from real-life empirical evaluation of how desperate and poor people pick jobs - and what options are open to then.

>Still, these people will still have to contend with employers that treat them like commodities, with no real alternative way to support themselves.

True. But at least they will make some more money will doing so - and might even afford to save a buck or too, and eventually look elsewhere.

That is even true in cases where there is even balanced employment-employer availability due to other factors. My country should be more civilized by my dad got 6 years of pension payment reduced because the employer "failed to pay" but on every balance sheet his pay was added because "automatic" and nobody warned him, just the employer. Afterwards the lawyers told him to take the "I'll pay one year" deal of the employer because of the likelyhood of getting nothing due to limited liability companies protection. And this in Europe, not even the US. The balance is so far off it's not even remotely fair game.

A business that cannot fully fund it's labor is not a business. Who wants to pay a subsidy, which is exactly what happens when labor is underfunded, just so someone can mooch for profit? I don't.

The answer to your question is we simply do that labor ourselves.

As far as I know, the economic literature is pretty clear that this is not the case in the US. Even regional changes, where an employer can reasonably relocate outside the e.g. city boundary without much difficulty, don't show job losses.

No.

Some problems are rightly solved at the government level and anything that serves to distract from that is propaganda.

Money, markets - the cost of things regulates behavior, more money = more permissive behavior

Physics - the rules of the world regulate behavior, and the better our understanding, the more lax this regulation is

Norms - mutually agreed upon and generally, widely enforced "rules" that are not laws, but do impose rewards and consequences for behavior.

Laws - like norms, but more formal, and with real teeth beyond being shunned or praised.

Norms and laws act post fact. They do not actually prevent behavior, but can reward for it, or punish for it.

Physics and markets, money do inhibit behaviors. The rules of the world are the rules. Violations = failure. Inability to bear costs = failure.

A few entities trying to set new norms, and play against the generally running market, can do that to some degree, but money and markets are very strong forces compared to norms. And what Dan Price is doing with his $70K minimum wage at Gravity Payments is an excellent example. Price is establishing a norm. Weak sauce in the scheme of what regulates behavior.

Law needs to bolster those ideas and it's law and norms that can change how we value things and with those changes come real market dynamic changes, IMHO.

And this is why "be the change you seek" has limited power and cred. In the niche Price is in, it's possible, and he's doing that and arguably doing it at what others who do not value things like he does, would say he's doing it at a very significant opportunity cost.

And given the current state of affairs, they are RIGHT!!

This does not invalidate an effort like Price is making, nor the ideas, nor the potential for things to operate differently and to a much different overall effect for the population and it's elite members. Not to mention Price himself valuing things in ways that clearly make it all worth it for him to operate how he is. He talks about this all the time too.

But, scope and motivation are sharply limited. It's hard advocacy, and again as the opponents of Price would argue, very, very expensive advocacy.

But "go it at alone, and hope it catches on" is not how this would (or should) work.

It should be made as automatic to do, as paying your taxes, getting police to arrest a thief, or passing a sanity inspection to open a restaurant.

That's how society progresses as a society, when it makes what it wants the future to be either law or an custom/ethical thing that doing otherwise is frowned upon.

Not when things are merely left up to each individual's goodwill to set an example.

Doing it the formal way also e.g. makes it easier for an employeer to pay a good minimum wage AND still compete with other businesses of the same sector: since they all have to pay the same, it's a cost of doing business for everybody, not just for the "good heart" that opted to enforce it on its own (and is driven out of business by others undercutting him and paying worse).

>Hasn’t this traditionally been the American way? People going out and trying to experiment and build the things they wish to see in the world?

I don't know.

For example, from my understanding of Us history, it took a whole civil war, riots, and federal laws accompanied with police intervention to e.g. force the end of slavery and deseggregation. Some good white souls going out and doing it on their own didn't manage to get far...

Probably plenty doing 1. I do this.

2 through 4 is basically asking to be exploited and undervalued, and very few mentally-well people could keep it up for more than a couple of years.

Plenty of us probably doing 5 in some way (I personally designed low-cost electronics lab gear, I'm sure plenty of others make cheap/free online courses and tutorials of a high standard), but it doesn't matter because employers are only looking for the credentials. I'd even go so far to state that many degrees aren't actually indicators of a particular valuable skillset, but indicators of class.

6 doesn't make sense in the broader scope. If everyone in every country did this, it would hurt the global economy more than it helps it.

Let's see (only what I have answers to):

Cheap rents and affordable housing.

Allow more vertical building.

Protective nets for periods of illness/unemployment/etc.

I and my employers pay a fund that covers it.

School districts equally equipped, with good teachers.

From the taxes, it's not so expensive.

Free (or very affordable, no-loan-based) college education if their kid passes a hard tamper-proof exam.

From the taxes, it's not so expensive if you only pay the smartest ones.

Taxes on outsourcing work outside the country.

Well, that's income, but I disagree. Just forbid making any business with tyrants. I know, I know...

Is a "market wage", supplemented by payments from public money to reach decent living standards, acceptable? That's what UBI would be, in theory at least.

#1 is clearly harmful, to the individuals involved and to society as a whole. #2 is probably also harmful, not so much because it matters what everyone thinks about how particular rich people got that way as because believing those falsehoods probably means believing a bunch of other falsehoods about, e.g., how business and society actually work, and it's probably bad if everyone believes a lot of false things about that.

Suppose some rich people actually got rich mostly by good luck. Believing that rich people get rich because they deserve it will then mean overlooking the importance of luck, and believing that people who don't get rich deserve not to be, and probably to believing that people who are poor deserve to be poor.

That's harmful because it begets a lack of sympathy towards others in need.

There are no doubt positive effects too; e.g., if you think that hard work reliably makes people rich then you may be more likely to work hard, and maybe it's good for society if everyone is willing to work hard. (Though I have my doubts about how well that sort of self-deception can actually be expected to work.) But it's not at all obvious, at least to me, that the overall effects are good, because of harms like the ones I described above.

(... Maybe you were being sarcastic, in which case I apologize for missing your point. But it looks to me as if you meant what you wrote.)

If you mean that in a sense where we should be doing all in our power to make sure that only those deserving enough get rich (comabtting corruption, stripping people of ill-gotten fortunes, preventing trust building and unfair competition, removing money from politics, stopping government welfare for the rich, etc) so that the ideal is closer to reality, than I agree.

However, most people supporting this world view want to do just the opposite: take it as a given that rich people are deserving of their wealth, and so using all of societies resources to help the rich to get richer, since by definition they are most worthy. This is a deeply dangerous and disgusting tactic that has been causing significant harm to societies all over the world.

Yours is an entirely ideological point of view. There is no reason to believe people would just sit at home and wait for the system to pay them. Even if someone did just sit at home, you have to prove that that would be worse overall than having many others' needs ignored.

We already have a class of people who "sit" expecting the system to pay them: it's the rich. We already practice socialism for the rich, giving incredible amounts of public money to companies in tax cuts and subsidies, it's time we do socialism for the poor as well.

https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-throwi...

This is both factually and logically unsound, as well as ethically dubious even before you get into the totally pseudoscientific race angle that was used to sell these political policies to gullible racists.

†Not coincidentally, the Rhetoric of Reaction lists the standard three arguments used against social progress through history as: perversity (anything you do to help will only make things worse), jeopardy (any change will risk what we have now) and ..... futility (it doesn't matter what you do, nothing will change). Bell Curve very strongly following this latter rhetorical strategy. These arguments naturally re-occur when you're arguing against something that everyone knows is a good thing, just as FUD is a popular sales strategy when you're a comfortable monopoly. You don't have to claim to be good or even just better, you just need to undermine the alternatives and the status quo survives a bit longer.

The data and facts are simply not on your side.

In the end, people need to be meaningful participants in their own lives.

The idea that when doing something harmful we should have done it bigger is absurd. People need meaningful lives. Giving them a bag of money doesn’t do that and it makes them dependent.

Give people skills and self empowerment. Not free money.

The Moynihan Scissors is real.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/was-the-moynihan-report...

Is there some evidence of homeless billionaires on the streets with their kids? Did you mean to say that there exist homeless kids and also there are billionaires?

I don't know what the parent commenter's life is like so I hesitate to cast too much doubt, but I have found that people who mentally model "the poor" as "essentially like the rich, but without access to resources" have never spent a great deal of time interacting with or relying on poor people (or rich people, for that matter.) [1] In general, there is a far greater poverty of culture and spirit among the "wealthy-country poor" than any middle-class or rich person who hasn't experienced it can imagine. These are people whose great-grandparents were robbed of societal status through offshoring or legal mayhem, and whose subsequent offspring lived in derelict, unprincipled circumstances for decades as the country crumbled around them, and that doesn't even touch the trouble of drugs.

There are many poor people for whom hard cash would transform their lives and the lives of future generations, but by and large these are not the poor people committing the majority of crime and decay visible to the upper classes. For the majority of the "troublesome poor", you could stick them in mansions with bank accounts stocked for six generations, and in two years you'd still have trashed, overgrown real estate and overdraft fees. [2]

[1] = This is specifically restricted to the poor in wealthy nations; poverty in the form of "living poor in the wild country of my ancestors" is different than poverty in the form of "living poor in a wealthy city", which is why dirt-poor immigrants to the US often succeed immediately--their principles and convictions are set up for success, they just needed access to easy money.

[2] = The analogy I most like to use is the bathrooms at my old high school; due to a series of naive clerical decisions, the advanced classes took place on the highest floor of the school, and the basic, remedial classes on the ground floor of the school. The bathrooms on the third floor were mostly clean and working, while the bathrooms on the first floor were perpetually filthy, broken, and covered in graffiti. They were each cleaned at the same rate, but the users of the first floor bathrooms grew up with expectations of trash and graffiti, and thus perpetuated their own dispiriting environment. Money or access to cleaner bathrooms wouldn't have changed their behavior; only a deliberate and manual restructuring of their value systems would, and that is not a hands-off task.

As far as I can tell, my choices for dealing with injustices and terrible coincidences in life are:

1) to assume someone else is responsible to solve the problems for me, or

2) to assume I am responsible to solve my problems.

The former winds up leaving me bitter and angry with others in my life for not doing their job and taking care of my problems.

The latter helps me develop a sense of agency and helps me cope better with injustices and uncontrollable hardships in my life.

In this perspective, "fault" means "who caused this problem?", while "responsibility" means "who should try to solve the problem?"

Thus, taking responsibility for your problems doesn't mean assuming guilt for their existence.

This also applies in an inverse way to fortunate coincidences - in your lottery example, this mindset would say "I did not earn this money, so I'm not going to take pride in having won it, but I am responsible to use this money well."

This attitude also doesn't mean absolving wrongdoers of the harm they've done. Taking responsibility for healing the hurts others have done you may often include telling third parties about the harm and seeking help in repairing the injustice and preventing similar ones for potential future victims.

As that implies, "taking responsibility" for your problems also doesn't mean solving your problems solo. If help is offered, take it! If you need help, ask for it!

Just don't sit around waiting for someone else to deal with the hardships and problems for you, because that leads to despondency, disempowerment, and hopelessness.

That's how this has worked in my life, anyway. I really wish I'd been raised with this idea - I didn't encounter it until my mid-thirties, and it was a significant discovery for me.

I take it that's what was meant by the notion that you're responsible for everything that happens to you. In this case it has nothing to do with praise or blame. Rather, it means that whether something happened to you by chance or through your own fault, the onus to clean up the mess falls upon you.

The working poor are the most compliant workers with the least bargaining power.

A person proves incontrovertibly that they are hard workers willing to contribute to society (and not lazy poor as the rhetoric so cruelly propagates) and we immediately cut off community aid and put them right back on the marginal bubble.

It's helpful when your employees are kept on a treadmill that moves slightly faster than they can run.