‘America does so much more to subsidise affluence than alleviate poverty’

This stems from the fundamental conservative beliefs that the system is fair and your station in life is a result of your actions or efforts. Thus a fundamental opposition to actually charity and instead dangling opportunities for people to help themselves.

Running those programs is of course non trivial so the capitalist naturally offer to run them for the government at a modest fee.

Just replying to myself to make what I hope is an obvious point: Yet, giving money does not in itself create any new stuff to buy. It pushed prices up, and (at least temporarily) profits for those businesses providing the stuff. Nevertheless, it does even things out, and the higher profits will spur more competition in those industries that produce the things poor people are buying (if allowed), which ultimately achieves the desired result.

But any which way you look at it, and even if not perfect, giving money is the best way to help of the available options.

Close, but the most efficient way to help people is to provide the services they need without depending on the private sector to deliver them. For example, if cash benefits are universally increased by $500, low-end rents will also increase by approximately that same amount, like clock work. UBI would be a catastrophe for many reasons, but this is the most straightforward of them.

UBI will always be the best answer. MLK advocated for it as the best way to alleviate poverty. Even Milton Friedman believed in a pseudo-UBI through his Negative Income Tax.

>A much more efficient way to help people is just to give them money directly, and then people can spend it on whatever they think they need.

Capital tends to accrete capital. If you aren't actively hostile to passive capital accretion, eventually you'll end up with a handful of people making most of the capital allocation decisions.

That's the same problem with pretty much all government programs. A recent example that has affected me is the childcare subsidy brought in by the federal government here in Canada. It was supposed to be an extra 300-900 a month to make childcare cost 10 dollars a day. Instead it has became a large bureaucracy directly ruining an ok private system that existed previously by driving up costs substantially everywhere and making the experience much worse for my kids via spurious regulation. Specifically my day home now charges 70 dollars more a month to cover the onerous additional paperwork and filing requirements of the program (I don't blame them, given the extra work I would have expected more of a cost increase), my day home had to remove perfectly fine play equipment from the backyard because it was 1800 dollar Costco play equipment rather than the multi hundred thousand dollar professional public park grade stuff, and there are a substantial number of additional bureaucrats employed by my government making more and more busy work for everyone, which may ruin the much better day home style care system in favor of large institutional day cares (up to six kids, one care giver that stays constant vs 20+ kids and a string of day care workers that can and does change regularly). If they had just given the money to the parents and kept the existing regulatory regime things would have been better, instead the government made it worse.

Yep, the cost to run these programs is more than it would be to have a 20k UBI given how to each person living in poverty.

Is it? SNAP, TANF and EITC are very much giving people money. The biggest missing piece by far is universal healthcare followed closely by housing scarcity.

That’s how the critics of these programs spiked the programs. “Welfare Queens” were supposedly driving around with Cadillacs, so controls had to be in place.

I spent several years working on social services IT. The biggest welfare beneficiaries are companies like IBM, CSC, Accenture, Unisys, Northrup Grumman, etc and their employees.

That’s why some politicians were so terrified of the COVID relief programs. The government efficiently provided direct cash aid to millions of people with minimal fraud while the complex controlled systems like unemployment insurance were just raided by fraudsters. We made people’s lives measurably better, saved the economy from collapse, etc, and then took it all away.

I disagree to an extent. I know people on WIC, TANF, etc. who get subsidized internet, discounted property taxes, etc. Almost all of the ones I know game the system to their advantage one way or another.

I see people stop working because they'd rather not deal with others when they already have their needs met - I have no problem with this.

I see people who continuously pop more kids to keep the gravy train running - this is an issue.

I have seen people sell the products (a lot of it is food) they get for free and people who sell the vouchers because they already have too much; this to me is an issue too.

I see people who lie all of the time to get benefits they wouldn't qualify for otherwise; literally millionaires lying to get free stuff from the government.

I don't have a big social circle but it seems everyone I come into contact with is on the take and sucking hard on the government teat.

I think the approach needs to be more holistic and consider all of the different programs people qualify for - between WIC/TANF most people will get more food than they can consume. I think they should be nontransferable (maybe it already is, I don't understand how people end up selling them) and I don't think they should be progressive. Means-testing should be ended and everybody should qualify for these programs.

I strongly believe the opposite. Fighting poverty should focus on things intended to prevent people from becoming poor, including in the next generation, not helping those already poor - more often than not, they have their life choices already made and they are impossible or incredibly difficult to alter, that's not a good allocation of resources.

Ugh, I completely disagree with this. The government should NOT be handing out money to anyone. I also believe that they should be spending far, far less on public programs (though I do think that public healthcare is worthy of consideration).

Promoting affluence and the individual pursuit of happiness are two essential core values of the USA.

I'd argue that is the same reason we should simply have vouchers for education, instead of pouring money into a public school system, simply enable the people to spend money on education in how they think is best for their children.

Indeed. If someone's problem is lack of money, money will fix that problem.

> they usually focus on spending money instead of giving money to people who need it

From my perspective, the issue is that a lot of politicians operate as goal-oriented rather than systems-oriented problem solvers.

Many government programs generally operate as "give a man food" rather than "teach that man to fish".

It's no wonder that many problems are far further from being solved despite decades of cash pumped into them.

PS: If you're feeling butt-hurt about a comment, I welcome constructive feedback. Downvotes are fine, but do nothing to enhance mutual understanding. Tell me why goals are better than systems: I'd love to understand what the issue is.

Perhaps overly simplistic, but my suggestion is to spend money where there are true economies of scale, or services that individuals can't manage on their own such as education and health care. And in all other cases, just give money. For instance the food industry is already scaled up.

The government, advocacy groups, etc. need the problem of poverty more than they need the solutions to poverty. This is consistently true for every societal problem: racism, sexism, immigration, etc.

I don't know if you can identify just one main problem. Another big issue is the all the means testing and second order effects of work requirements, etc. These make it hard to get aid to the people who need it and to allow people to find or train for better jobs.

It's totally systemic. America has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.

The recent Last Week Tonight episode about USA welfare TANF funds covered how a lot of the money budgeted for poverty relief might not even be used for it.

homeless industrial complex

Speaking as someone who’s been trying to help someone stay alive for several years, there is massive inefficiency and bureaucracy standing in the way of people actually getting help, presumably because we’d rather see many people suffer than a few people cheat the system.

> That amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America, or $61,830 per poor family of three.

You're indirectly assuming it all gets passed down. If I were to guess I'd say only 70% does.

Ah yes, the old cato institution nonsense that we spend too much on anti povery programs.

Reason being is because the rich siphon it all off for themselves.

See: https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386....

Note the CEO of Columbia/HCA who committed the largest medicare fraud in history is now US Senator Rick Scott of Florida who just so happened to have plead the fifth 75 times during his questioning.

Catowashing a Fox News article that doesn't cite its sources.

Please make your actual point and not hid behind a libertarian think tank.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/fy-2012-u-s-federal-budget-a...

Poverty is a moving target. The level of absolute deprivation that was moderately common in the 60s is virtually unknown today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_S._Clark%27s_and_Robe...

I'm not an expert on poverty, but I don't think it's as simple as concluding that anti poverty programs are a waste of money. For one, looking at the cumulative amount over time is a pointless metric. Second, we cannot deny that a lot of people were genuinely helped by these measures and managed to climb out of poverty and start giving back to society. Third, poor Americans still have a superior standard of living than most of the world. American poverty is its own league.

"Even if you're stuck in the bottom 5% of the US income distribution your standard of living is about equal to that of the top 5% of Indians. Even if you're in the bottom 10% your standard of living is about the same as that of the bottom 10% in other rich countries (which, so we are told, care so much more and do so much more) like Sweden and Finland. And when we sweep everything together into some sort of quality of life measure the American poor are better off than the French or German poor."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonish...

The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations

https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric...

"A groundbreaking study by Just Facts has discovered that after accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and food stamps, the poorest 20 percent of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. This includes the majority of countries in the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including its European members. In other words, if the US “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest."

Also, official data on US poverty may overestimate the problem.

"US low-income households greatly underreport both their income and non-cash benefits"

"There has been “a sharp rise” in the underreporting of government benefits received by low-income households in the United States. This “understatement of incomes” masks “the poverty-reducing effects of government programs” and leads to “an overstatement of poverty and inequality.”"

Put another way, the government has funded programs, programs that do well to perpetuate the programs, but too little to actually address the problem they were created to address.

It's the Poverty Industrial Complex.

That aside, with regards to the data / statistics you've sited, my understanding is, many experts believe the income levels set by the government to define the poverty line are artificially low. If the line was more realistic the poverty rate would be much higher.

If this is even a slight bit true, then the government's "war on poverty" is another lost war.

That article suggests high taxes are the reason for the increase in poverty from 1964 to 2012 yet taxes on the top tax bracket were cut in half over that period.

It's clear as night and day that the reason why wealth inequality and poverty has been skyrocketing over the last 50 years is due to plummeting tax rates on the wealthy.

$20,610 is ~$1717/mo.

I’ve been poor. I deal with chronic pain and, for a long while, it rendered me unable to work.

First: $1717 is a very low amount of money to live on.

I covered my costs in about $1200/mo while I received from room and board from family. It was extremely difficult to get my spending down to that, I had to default on loans and I expect it will take the better part of a decade to build credit again.

Second: how does one obtain this $20,610? I was denied virtually every social program I tried to sign up for. I was only able to cover my costs thanks to the charity of others.

Per the Urban Institute, a less right-wing source, the poverty rate was 13.7% in 2021.

https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-proj...

So a minor investment in making people’s lives suck a little less has improved the rate by almost a third.

I agree with the Cato Institute that we should invest more in the safety net.

So over 25 years the poor got the same amount wealthy bankers got in 2008?

https://theweek.com/articles/479867/federal-reserves-breatht...

By contrast, the US total budget request for military spend is $773B in 2023. That says something about the government’s priorities.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

The government authorized. Don’t say spend. Spend assumes it went where it was supposed to go. Authorizing and then absconding with funds is what really happened.

The government is very good at filtering that money through processes and contractors that extract as much of it as possible. The main benefit of reducing the safety net to a basic income is the elimination of a massive amount of administrative overhead.

As a random example of subsidy of the wealthy, every year, the government loses at least $70B to just the mortgage interest deduction, which is allowed for the first $750K of the value of up to two homes. That is $2,160 for every poor person in America, or $6,480 per poor family of three.

edit:

> Little of the deduction’s benefits go to households that have difficulty affording a home. Data from the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey show that in 2011, 10.5 million homeowners faced what HUD calls “severe housing cost burdens,” meaning they paid more than half of their income for housing. Some 90 percent of those homeowners (and about 40 percent of all homeowners) had incomes below $50,000, yet JCT estimates for 2012 show that homeowners with incomes below that level received only 3 percent of the benefits from the mortgage interest deduction.

At the same time, 77 percent of the benefits from the mortgage interest deduction went to homeowners with incomes above $100,000, almost none of whom face severe housing cost burdens. Some 35 percent of the benefits went to homeowners with incomes above $200,000; taxpayers in this income group who claimed the deduction received an average subsidy of about $5,000.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is...

Here's an analysis of that claim: https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-Ant...

Here's Tanner's paper where he lists the programs he includes: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/american-w...

I'll include a few here: Pell grants, SSI, and Medicaid. Including healthcare is the only way to reach that number, since it's the source of the vast majority of that total.

> In 2012, the federal government spent $668 billion to fund 126 separate anti‐ poverty programs.

This is simply not true or at best, misleading. The 2012 expenditure was $3.6 trillion, and 70% of that was defense, social security, medicare, and interest expense. You're saying more than half of the remaining spending for the entire government was anti-poverty? That makes zero sense.

I assume what you meant was 'authorized', and it was an amount spent over a long period of time. $20k per person, great. What percent actually gets to them? Maybe half at best? Great, so $10k. Over how many years? 5? Ok, so $2k a year at best estimates. Realistically it was less and over a longer period.

Cool, poverty is solved.

It's also notably harder to get to move up the economic ladder, the perception of employment stability, and trust in employment are dead in the American mind. My sister is a teacher who has a background in law, but she loves teaching. Sadly, teaching is what keeps her in poverty. It boggles my mind that those who craft new economic units are of some of the least paid.

Maybe even more perplexing is that wealth inequality is geographic of all things: https://itep.org/the-geographic-distribution-of-extreme-weal... This is in part due to the fact that we continue to tax income rather than wealth, and those of vying for scraps are among the first to champion such policies. That all ties back to the first thing I said, which is that economic fluidity is a long ladder now.

This presents a highly complex challenge. It is really not so simple.

Consider San Francisco, for instance. As a city with predominantly liberal and Democratic values, it is surprising that public schools have been closed throughout the year. And we all know how that had significant negative impact on underserved and economically disadvantaged children.

While some fortunate children have responsible and hardworking parents that just take kids with them leave them in the car while they clean houses (first hand experience), this is not the case for the majority: not supervision at all.

Addressing this issue is far from straightforward. When attempted to raise concerns, I was may labeled as anti-science and trumpy. I also mentioned that private schools have managed to remain open, their effor was to close them rather than finding solutions to support public education.

I really do not know and I think nobody who is not poor cares. Regardless what they say.

“There is a Clinton-era welfare programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In 2020, poor families received just 22 cents in every dollar it disbursed. The rest was used by states to pay for things such as job training and even abstinence-only sex education.”

> Yet today, 15 percent of Americans still live in poverty. That’s scarcely better than the 19 percent living in poverty at the time of Johnson’s speech.

The poor then had much more thing poverty than we see today. Probably biggest change is more drug abuse now though.

You can look at an anti-poverty program fund flow as:

money in ==> gov't processing ==> agencies providing service ==> service

(the "agencies providing service" would be NGOs or local organizations.)

You can look at your figures as "money in." The relevant figure is "service."

It's a lot harder to get that number.

> bringing total anti‐ poverty spending to nearly $1 trillion

How much of that is spent on administering the programs and paying those administrators? May be more effective to simply consolidate it into a negative income tax.

> One example of this is policing in the US: modern day policing arose from slave patrols [0].

This seems poorly supported, even by the cited article - it just says there was a group A doing X, then A doing Y, then later the police did Y too.

And, what about:

- police forces outside the South?

- influence from policing around the world, especially England?

Every time I hear about slave patrols becoming police departments it smacks of a genetic fallacy: just because some slave patrols became police departments is that really a good explanation for why the Chicago PD or LA PD are bad?

Richer tenants are also more likely to buy soon, which also limits the market.

You would think that you could arbitrage this problem away by increasing the landlord size (and proportionally undercutting rents).

I.e. if 10% of renters will wreck their house but rents are higher by 30% on the whole, then a large landlord should be able to shrink that gap (i.e. principle of insurance - they can eat the loss) - versus a small landlord who would want extra padding to account for the risk.

higher risk means that i need to charge more on each client to make up for the losses that i make on others. it doesn't give me higher returns on average.

if landlords earn double over a long period of time then the risk isn't as high as they claim.

Winner takes all mentality seems to be everywhere in the US gestalt. From tipping practices to healthcare. The headline isn't really surprising in that light...

You believe this is a pejorative term for supply-side economics and that is why you use it here. In practice, you do not understand economics and default to FUD and political harassment.

I think we often simplify individual instances of poverty, or poverty as a whole, to either “not their fault” or “their fault” when in reality it could be any mix of the two for an individual.

Systemically, we do have policies that lead to some guaranteed level of poverty - our economic system requires that there be some optimal level of unemployment, the minimum wage basically determines the minimum standard of living for a fully employed person, and policies like how much SSI/disability pay directly impact the recipients’ standard of living. And then of course there are contributors like cyclical/generational poverty in ghettoes and certain rural areas, the war on drugs (the associated gang/criminal activity, imprisonment affecting careers, children growing up without a parent), an often poorly performing public educational system.

On an individual level you can say “well, if you made XYZ choices maybe you wouldn’t be poor” in a lot of cases, but in aggregate it’s basically guaranteed some people will experience poverty, and that is also a factor for most of those individuals. Some people will always get imprisoned or grow up in unstable households, or not have skills/opportunities for more than minimum wage jobs, or be disabled to the point of not being able to work. There will always be people without savings or who get “broken” by adversity rather than rising above it. If you give people money unconditionally I guarantee you it will always help some people stabilize and lift them up to the point of not needing it, but there will always be at least some people that just spend it all on extra consumption.

That’s what makes poverty a real challenge. Some poverty spending on individuals will be wasted, which no taxpayer wants, but in preventing that we introduce other kinds of waste like bureaucracy and welfare cliffs, and introduce low limits on how much you can receive which then limits how much poverty programs can assist people. And no matter how much we spend, there will be some people who remain “poor” in the sense of being completely reliant on the spending with nothing to fall back on.

> We should build enough normal houses in areas people want to live such that 90%+ can afford them, make owning and operating a car affordable, and make raising a family affordable.

That hasn’t really worked anywhere: popular places attract so many people that you literally can’t put supply into synch with demand. San Francisco is already a dense city, would it be as cheap as Manhattan if it had Manhattan like density? Maybe, but Manhattan isn’t cheap.

It might be better to focus more on better intercity and intracity transport like they do in Japan, or allow for smaller cheaper places to live like they do in Tokyo (incidentally, aggressively deprecating the value of structures like they do in Japan might help as well).

Indeed. The only levers government has is to subsidize demand and restrict supply, both of which have the effect of increasing prices and making life less affordable.

I think one of the problems is we keep searching for a "miracle cure" rather than getting our hands dirty and putting in the work to fix these problems. Rather than thinking of each as a distinct issue, we should think about these as a complicated web of problems: fixing one may make another worse temporarily, but if we work on several at once, we can make a meaningful difference for a lot of people.

Let's take home values, for example. Homeowners are typically against changes that can decrease their property value because of how important home ownership is for generational wealth here. We've made the assumption that house prices will increase YoY forever, which just isn't feasible - especially considering homes will age and encounter more and more issues as they age.

Naturally, you have NIMBYs who don't want their home values to decrease – honestly, I can't blame them. I think making housing affordable for everyone (or at least _most_ of everyone) will require a significant shift about how we think about home ownership.

There's also the hidden cost of suburban developments to cities[0] which results in chronic underfunding of city services, not to mention the added cost of car ownership typically required to live in a single-family home. I drive rather little, but typically spend ~$150/mo on insurance and gas alone in a given month.

It's a hard problem that will require many people smarter than me to figure out how to get us out of this web. But I think that it can happen if we acknowledge that our cities have problems and actually invest time and money into fixing it.

[0]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/5/7/the-more-we-bui...

Yes. It allows everyone of high education to lean into the fallacy that all our problems would be solved "if we just taxed the billionaires more".

In reality, the sheer number of middle/upper middle/upper income and the tax revenue needed for a EU style social welfare would require an increase across a much broader tax base.

So tax the billionaires more too, but we aren't getting a lot more government service from that alone.

> The real meaningful wealth gap in our society is between the HN poster income bracket and the poor, not the one between HN poster income bracket and the billionaires.

This is billionaire propaganda[1] to get the middle class to fight thier class war - it is a class war against the poor and middle class . The tax rate of the ultra-rich are at an all time low

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM shows the gap between people (like you) think the wealth distribution is vs the reality. It was made 10 years ago and has gotten further skewed since then. Start from to 2:40 if you're in a hurry.

I think it’s because people like offloading blame to an out group, so in this case, the middle and upper class blame the ultra-rich.

My afar observation is that most Americans that supposedly support an European-style welfare state are not ready to pay the required taxes to fund it. For some reason, they want a strong welfare state with their current tax burden, ala, hypocrisy.

Note: This does not mean the ultra-rich won’t pay high taxes too, but taxing them alone won’t fund a strong welfare state.

I think you have the right facts, wrong (or at least unsubstantiated) conclusion.

Much of California's problems lie in regulatory capture. Housing can't be built because homeowners have experienced great wealth gain and don't want it to be touched (at the detriment of livability for all generations after -- or folks attempting to climb to socioeconomic ladder).

Then you could make a similar argument for social spending on homelessness, which at least from the Bay Area seems wasteful in that it doesn't attack root problems (drug rehab and housing).

Top 1% of earners != Top 1% of wealth.

The top 1% of earners (doctors, lawyers, dentists) usually get shafted with income taxes while the top 1% rentiers get taxed very little - especially in California (which has very low property taxes).

The rentiers usually try to rhetorically conflate the two - primarily because the 1% of earners are taxed a lot and there is an obvious societal downside to taxing (e.g. dentists) more (we need their skills) but especially because the only societal downside to taxing a rentier more is by incorrectly identifying/taxing rentier behavior.

To think that California is Socialist and Communist (that's an oxymoron btw) one most be so deluded by propaganda.

That’s a nice sentiment, but it’s not very actionable.

> the rich will just go somewhere else

I view that as a net win considering wealth doesn't actually "trickle down" from the wealthy: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-50-years-no-trick...

Who said anything about making it hard to be rich?

This description always amuses me because it leaves out all these minor details, like the fact that most rich people still need pilots and planes to “just go somewhere else,” and that pilots aren’t all rich, and planes require whole fleets of not rich people to maintain them.

This is not financial advice and I am not a financial advisor.

>> If you make it hard to be rich, the rich will just go somewhere else, not abide by your rules.

Yes and no. Rich people don't want to live in California simply because of their tax treatment. Rich people don't want to live in London because of the privileges given to bankers. People don't want to live in Vancouver simply because of the real estate market. Rich people want to live in these places because these places are great places in which to live. Weather, politics, safe streets, your wealthy kids not being kidnapped for ransom money, access to ambulance services, clear air/water, not having legions of poor people at your gate every morning, being able to go for a morning jog without bodyguards, not having to bribe the cops every other day ... Rich people care about things beyond lower taxes. Those things are basically the same as everyone else.

Rich people want their bank account to live in offshore tax havens. They don't want to raise children in such places. There is a reason why every Chinese billionaire has property in Vancouver, why every mega celebrity has an apartment in New York and a house in London.

Explain to me exactly how you imagine this going down. You've got, say, a billion dollars, not cash, and you've decided to flee from your tax obligations because you think it will be cheaper.

Quoting Noam Chomsky: “Make rich people happy and frighten the rest.” You are so wrong.