This is evident in America where you'll find some people take a position against free or subsidised healthcare and other social support, because some undeserving person (who is not in their group) might get it.
Surely someone, somewhere feels like this, but it’s more often a strawman argument used to make opposing arguments more easily dismissible. The discussions I have with people offline aren’t interested in these types of dismissals. I know many people who genuinely want better healthcare, cheaper education, and stronger social safety nets but who disagree with the specifics of proposals. Like most things in politics, if an argument reduces the other side to an easily-dismissible evil, it’s probably not an accurate representation of the counterarguments.
From real world anecdotes, the concern about things like student loan forgiveness (as the most recent example of an expensive social program being debated) are more about the extreme cost of the program contributing to an ever increasing list of expenditures. People are nervous about the amount of government spending and how it’s being distributed semi-randomly. This goes back to the rampant COVID loans to businesses, the stimulus programs that far overshot their target, and now proposals to give certain households with up to $250K income a free $10K.
People understand that these things do matter in a society where we’re all bidding for a limited supply of homes and such. It’s nice to imagine someone having a reduced debt load, but people still think about where that money comes from and how the uneven distribution of that money gives some people (excluding those who paid their loans off early) a financial leg up in places like the competitive housing market.
It’s all connected. The money must come from somewhere, and we’re all operating within the same markets. It’s disingenuous to pretend that there are no consequences for these programs, which IMO is where politicians fall far short of structuring them and pitching them to a wider audience.
SLF is a one-off cost (of between $400Bi and 1Ti depending on which plan you subscribe to) though. It's not like, say, the DOD which is currently burning $800Bi a year and rising - I would venture that the people happy to shoot down SLF are equally happy to keep that budget going up.
> People are nervous about the amount of government spending
...going to people they deem undeserving. They're perfectly happy with the amount spend on the DOD, DHS, etc.
Defense is what the government is supposed to be spending money on. It's a textbook example of a public good.
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar would disagree, for example.
I have also mostly heard "fairness"-based arguments against student debt relief.
And I definitely knew many people that oppose to tax break or something for someone that's not in their group all while they enjoy some other tax break without problem and excuse that their one is fine.
Medicare is what I usually focus on on because a person will take out $3 for every dollar they put in.
The real welfare queens are grandpa and grandma, yet in the 80s under Reagan many of those same people were blaming the poor.
If you want to see who has power, look at what programs people are willing to touch. Medicaid is constantly under attack by Republicans. While Medicare is a sacred cow to both Dems and Republicans.
Before anyone else "well actually"s me, as a retiree myself I'm well aware that there is some relationship between what you put in and what you get out. That doesn't change the system's essential nature. It's more of an anti-abuse and anti-depletion measure, similar to raising the retirement age or adding means tests. There's still a big common pool in the middle, and people can still keep drawing from that pool even if they live well beyond the point where their net contribution is negative.
It would be nice to see some hard numbers re: net negative contributions.
https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Social_Security_(United_State...
Saving money in the bank makes sense for an individual, but not a government or a whole country. Because, they can print as much as they need. So why have a big warehouse full of cash when you can just make it later? The limitation to that is that it will cause inflation if you print too much- but if you warehoused the money and then released it later the same thing would happen.
Anyways, the reasons they print money or remove it from the economy are not because they don't have enough, it's because they're trying to moderate the boom/bust business cycle. (Not doing a very good job of it, though.)
Anyways, cheers
> They seem to be way less opposed for government to bail out corporations from same tax money tho.
That would be my family when I was growing up. A lot of their beliefs are centered people should work for a living. If someone can't work, they are lazy and working people shouldn't have to pay to support them.
My parents have since moderated their stance on this but my dad still believes this is the way things should be. :(
I've moved away from home and very much do not share their view and don't associate with people like this. I still see this belief often enough to believe it's pretty dang common in the midwest among the lower middle class.
Edit:
I should note, everyone I've talked to do make exceptions for a few people they know.
Most of them are otherwise good, kind people. They abhor the idea of anyone else getting something they haven’t earned.
I have a disability and some of the accommodations are a regular schedule (no weekends/overtime/on call) and being able to take time off unpaid when I’m sick. This is the bare minimum I need to be able to do knowledge work.
I don’t mention this because some people don’t think I deserve special treatment just because I “claim” to have a disability. If I can take time off for “vacations” whenever I want, they should be able to as well.
If I didn’t have these accommodations, I wouldn’t be able to work. Any explanation of how being bipolar severely impacts every aspect of my life is met with “life is hard for everyone”. (Exact quote from my parents, btw.)
To put it quite simply, no one should be given anything I wasn’t given.
When it comes to taxes, they see it as the government taking what they earned and giving it to people who haven’t earned it.
Are you sure you don't mean "can work but won't"?
For people who can't truly work, it's up to charities to support them. The government shouldn't be taking money from working people for it.
We're seeing these effects in corporate life, too: A charging station for EVs has been put up for the company and client EVs. I'm the first employee to have received "free access" to the charger as a benefit instead of more money. (to be fair: I'm the only one with a pure EV until now, too).
Now people are voting against putting up more chargers and enabling employees to charge for a smaller fee than normal, because "there's no normal gas pump being installed".
Nobody will lose anything with two more charging stations. But before somebody with another car gets "something nice", people prefer getting nothing at all now.
The described action would be more like "remove all parking lots instead of letting martin_a charge his car in a space" - which would harm the guzzlers to own the EVs.
This is exactly what’s going on. People know that these expenditures ultimately come out of the company’s operating budget, which diminishes the funds available for other things. Installing EV chargers is a great environmental move in my personal opinion, but we can’t pretend it’s unrelated to discussions come raise/bonus time when people are told that their raises are smaller than expected because budgets are stretched this year.
The EV chargers may be a tiny contributor, but they’re still an unbalanced distribution of the company’s funds based on something completely unrelated to performance. People are keenly aware of these things.
Contrary to EV driving nature saving unicorns? Ever heard that many simply can not afford EV. Or healthy food. Or many other things.
Meh, it's not the best word, I'm no native speaker. There are some very vocal people pushing against this initiative which are "inciting" (DeepL) others to stand up against this.
> But this isn't so much a foot shoot.
Not sure about it.
We've got some money left from a good business year, so the CEOs wanted to make some "small projects" for the production site, with some kind of "longer impact" than one-time payments. With payments, taxes will eat most it and the holding corporation would probably step in and mess it up, as other companies from the group are struggling a little bit.
So they've built a barbecue area for example. A handful of people wanted that (it hasn't been used more than two times up till now) and some people have said that they'd like their next car to be an EV/hybrid and that it would be great if there were more charging stations. So they thought it would be a good idea to invest some of the money in chargers.
As there's this "inciting" now, it seems like that plan will be cancelled and the money will find its way into the holding group and be lost to the employees right here.
Not sure if that isn't a foot shoot in the end after all.
Oh, that happened, but only a quarter of people took part in it because of "meh"... Now they are complaining...
We also got bicycle leasing now and some other stuff, not all is bad...
> Nobody will lose anything with two more charging stations
Money doesn't grow on trees.
I feel like American Exceptionalism has just turned into collective denial.
Study participants based out of USA : Most discussion focussed on the study
Study participants based outside of USA : The study is not conclusive because the study is done somewhere else and not generalisable.
They don't say "it doesn't apply to US"; but rather they are "not generalisable".
People will be on the side of free or subsidised healthcare and other social support regardless of their unpayable public debt rising even further and that it eventually may crush individuals from society that are perhaps not even born yet.
The "opponent" in this case is the wrong person who has a different political view.
Who do you think pays for it? TAXPAYERS! It's not free!
And usually in those kind of "free healthcare" systems the private clinics get looked down upon or are even restricted/blocked via laws in order to "preserve the 'free' healthcare system".
Thus the people have even less choice. There are many countries with this kind of a "free healthcare" system.
I'm living in one of them.
Want to go to a specialist? Sorry bro, that's gonna be 6 months of waiting time...
So anyone who is not piss poor will go into a private clinic.
What world are people living in? On anything other than a 30% coinsurance PPO, you aren't getting anything done without insurance pre-approval. And that's an extra month or two wait on top of the three month wait to get in the door for a consult.
And hell, while we’re throwing around completely vague and unsubstantiated claims. I have first hand evidence that the top level parent is lying about having to wait as well.
Are you calling them directly to set up appointments?
It's basic stability condition. People will flow to the socialistic welfare or against it, and it's not going to stop until forces equalize, a.k.a it's just as good staying in the worst country as it is moving to the better welfare one. Since people moving tends to harm the other country the immigration is from, it should bring both down.
Only one side has a stable condition. It's a matter of common sense at this point. If one side advocated for closed borders with subsidized healthcare, that's fair enough and maybe even better choice.
P.S. socialized healthcare works well in Israel for example.
‘Open borders’ is a strawman, anyway. You can have policies which promote immigration, provide legal pathways for immigrants to provide labor to the economy (including unpaid labor like raising kids and domestic elder care), and can structure social benefits in such a way that you provide a social safety net, without having to just throw the border open to all or pay out unemployment benefits to anyone who shows up out of work.
Illegal immigration is a market response to a failure of the government to provide a legal framework for sufficient legal migration. People are willing to come to (for example) the US and work illegally without legal access to any social safety net. But allowing people to live under those conditions is both a moral failing (we should not be comfortable relying on the labor of people who face destitution if they lose their job) and a societal risk (people with no safety net are more likely to end up engaged in criminal activity that harms society).
So why not create a more structured arrangement? Create paths to legal immigration, with access to defined, limited, temporary benefits, and with a pathway that over time - as an immigrant’s stake in the country increases - converges towards the full security afforded to citizens.
No, it really is not. There's really no upper limit on how many people might WANT to immigrate to your country (other than the obvious 8B world population size), but there's an upper limit on how many immigrants your country can accommodate in the given time frame. Increasing limits for legal immigration won't stop illegal one, it might even encourage it (e.g. when one person gets an immigrant visa and some of their relatives don't but they still decide do go, illegally)
THAT reduces the incentive to enter the country outside the legal framework, since all the jobs are going to people who have the paperwork.
People do not want to go to live in places where they have no economic prospects.
Even if an immigrant enters a country and is still productive and doesn't even use any social benefits, he diluted the job pool. Those getting out of the job pool get the socialistic benefits. So the average productivity could still go down. Those immigrants compete with locals equally in the job market, so dividing them into one group having benefits and another without doesn't change the stability condition. So instead of an immigrant coming and taking benefits directly, he comes, replaces a working local which just takes benefits.
Open or closed borders are a real dichotomy from higher up viewpoint which analyzes dynamics and stability condition, not a 'false dichotomy'. They represent a constraint in the equilibrium condition, which either exists or doesn't. The most you can do is filter the demographics which can enter or leave. But you'll still reach an equilibrium for each demographic with an open border. Like diffusion through filtering membrane. Or you can restrict the flow, but it only delays reaching the equilibrium, doesn't change where that equilibrium will be.
These stability conditions and dynamics are forces beyond the power of governments. You can play around them and find a reasonable trade-off, or you can try fighting them and get disappointed.
It doesn't matter whether the immigrants don't get the benefits themselves, they compete for wages with people that do. It's funny you're even suggesting to solve this problem with inequality.
By the way, in Israel for example, the construction industry is completely dominated by Palestinians. They don't get any benefits. Israelis just don't work in construction anymore. Even when people are jobless they don't even consider working in construction because the state of employment just isn't worth it.
You can't solve this by creating inequality between immigrants and locals. It's even worse.
And: Did you just commit the lump of labor fallacy?
Why, in this model, are people ‘getting out of the job pool’ for these ‘socialistic’ benefits?
Benefits like.. healthcare that restores them to a state where they can return to work after an injury? Education that lets them develop skills to increase their productivity? Income support to allow them to care for a child, raising another generation of productive citizens?
I don’t understand why a society offering those benefits is automatically unable to also offer a structured immigration program.