Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor.
Now, for some reason, people tend to be averse to outright cash transfers, because they think that pre-tax income has a special significance in that it is somehow "natural". Matt Bruenig explains this better than I could, e.g. here: http://mattbruenig.com/2013/07/21/tm-scanlon-is-wrong-about-...
The essence is that pre-tax income is not in any way "natural", but also results from more or less conscious decisions made by society. So the reason that you think solving poverty is hard is that you assign a specific significance to the difference between pre-tax and post-tax income.
For a while at least. In many cases, they just spend that money and go back to being poor. It's not universal though.
Let's say you give a poor man enough money to start a business. Starting a successful business requires some basic business/economics knowledge and insights, a market and a lot of work to make it succeed. In addition, they might have to struggle with local corruption and bureaucracy. Because of all these difficulties, you have no guarantee they'll actually break out of poverty. Also, they might just take the money and spend it on leisure (buy a car, TV, clothes).
I think what helps people is education about economics and legal systems. If you have a free society in place with rule of law, people break out of poverty on their own.
> For a while at least. In many cases, they just spend that money and go back to being poor. It's not universal though.
You missed the point, though I have to admit that it is a subtle one and not well known. So let me continue playing devil's advocate.
The not-poor are only not-poor because they receive money through some already existing mechanism of distribution. If that mechanism ceases to operate, they will likely become poor by spending all their money.
So, yes, if you make the currently poor not-poor by changing the existing mechanisms of distributions, and then change those same mechanisms back to how they are today, then quite likely many of them will revert to being poor.
That is not an interesting point, yet somehow people think it is. Why?
Probably they think so because they have an unconscious and implicit belief that the currently existing mechanisms of distribution are somehow "natural". Frankly, that is a bizarre proposition.
Just consider how many laws affect the distribution of wealth in society, many of them largely arbitrary. This holds for laws of commerce, laws governing corporations, it holds for a lot of regulation, it certainly holds for things like patent law and copyright law.
> Probably they think so because they have an unconscious and implicit belief that the currently existing mechanisms of distribution are somehow "natural". Frankly, that is a bizarre proposition.
That strikes me as an un-natural way of looking at things. If a farmer grows potatoes and sells them for money, he's not "receiving" money, he's trading for it (he's receiving money as much as the other guy is "receiving" potatoes"). That seems very natural to me (you give something, you get something). Even in situations where this trade is illegal, it still happens; for example, drug dealers. They sell you heroin/cocaine/marijuana, you give them money. That transaction is highly illegal, yet it still happens because addicts want drugs and dealers want money (that they then use to buy other stuff with). On the other side of the spectrum, you have the completely legal and moral transactions, like the potato example I gave. Laws have some impact on the basic natural tendency of people to trade for what they need, but they can't make trade go away (look at alcohol prohibition for another example).
I think the main cause of poverty is that poor people don't have much to trade (skills, labor, resources, even ideas or art). In other situations, trade is simply made difficult (for example, if you live in a warzone, it's pretty hard to be a hairdresser or grow potatoes).
There's poverty where you grow up on one box of macaroni and cheese per day and your parents are never home but you have a roof over your head and at least free school lunches. You're not actually dying or being exploited into human impotence. You just lack avenues to grow into a full and complete person who can escape poverty.
And then there's poverty once that same child grows up and the welfare system has been dismantled and there's no more public housing, so he/she is working two or three jobs just to afford a roof over their head, real food of any kind is unheard-of, and you'd kill for a good night's sleep or just one Sabbath meal -- if you had the energy to kill.
The latter kind, you can solve just by giving people money. At the very least, it raises them up to the former kind, and from there, all you might need to really improve their life might be a decent library or a community center or a good source of stable jobs.
There's no excuse for not contributing.
My effective income tax rate is 50%, and then there is an additional 25% VAT on everything I buy. How much more of my income does the all-knowing Eli Gottlieb suggest I "contribute"? Perhaps I should give away the remaining 25% and go live on the streets as a declaration of solidarity?
You can only pay VAT on the 50% of your income that you keep (and that is presuming you spend all of it). So you have 50% * 75% = 37.5% of your income left to give to charity.
I also find it a bit interesting that you are OK (presumably) with giving away 63% of your income to the government, where you have hardly any say in how it is spent, but offended at the idea that you should give anything else away when you can choose where it goes.
Guess what? This story isn't about you.