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Yeah, you lost me here. Do you measuring the success of a country by the number of "poor" people they have? Do you think all of those countries are "better" than we are because they have less income disparity or a lower crime rate, etc?
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Is the cheapest form of defense for the haves to keep the have nots from rising up and taking what they need to survive.
Yup. I'm glad someone understood what i was talking about.
It's NEVER going to be enough. It's almost like extortion. You give them X amount now, pretty soon you'll have too give them X + 2, and +3 and +4 and so on and so forth in fear of them rioting. And that pool of "idle" (or whatever you want to call them) will continue to grow, not shrink.
Marx (or maybe it was Engle) warned that the proletariat shouldn't allow you bourgeois to throw them crumbs in order to postpone the revolution!
What's awesome is that almost everyone in this thread who supports the BIG wouldn't benefit from it at all. Look back to the Y23-Fucla debates if you think he's a rabble-rousing liberal.
Did my post imply someone was a rabble rousing liberal? I was just responding with my disagreement with that strategy. I wasn't accusing anyone of anything.
Where in there did I say that those countries are 'better'? And what does that even mean?
It's been enough for years. We haven't had class warfare in this country.
This post is so wrong-headed that I'm not quite sure even where to start.
I generally agree with your take on this, but I will add that giving the, for lack of a better word, 'parasitical' class handouts to keep them from rioting without also attaching population control conditions (you take this money you agree to be sterilized after 1 or 2 kids) is delaying the inevitable. The parasitical class will keep growing and eventually the system collapses and then we get the rioting we were trying to prevent in the first place.
You are correct that we're never going to turn a fully blind eye towards kids who are in trouble, and it would be a social and moral disaster in a country of our means if that were to happen. That said there are millions of kids living without a primary home at any given time, and many million more homeless adults. Our threshold for having selective attention towards human misery here is higher than you probably think.
I'm pretty sure asking them to be sterilized is going to be getting people closer and closer to a rioting conditions.
Yep.
And this is the reason why BIG will never happen, despite the fact that so many smart people seem to like the idea. Because no matter how much the details are explained to them, the public will inevitably see it in the same simple terms that Jayrod has expressed here, and reject it.
Well, that and the government will never roll back any of the other social / welfare programs that are currently in place (let alone hundreds of them) in order to pay for something like this.
I haven't seen many numbers - but how much money is currently being allocated in total to those "hundreds" of social/welfare programs that would theoretically be replaced? I assume the biggest current ones that would be replaced are unemployment, food stamps, Medicaid, SSI,......what do they all total?
So you agree that Timmy will win his bet and the ACA isn't going anywhere?
As best that I can tell from this: http://nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/?utm_expid=84498401-5.1T2lB6d5SEmMcoN-3M_tZA.0&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q%3D%26esrc%3Ds%26source%3Dweb%26cd%3D2%26ved%3D0CEsQFjAB%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnationalpriorities.org%252Fbudget-basics%252Ffederal-budget-101%252Fspending%252F%26ei%3DHYxOU-rnKMmSyATjtIKoCg%26usg%3DAFQjCNFo2uHXjalldNHSZDUQwak2Lke6DA%26bvm%3Dbv.64764171%2Cd.b2I
This has happened in the last 20 years, with Aid for Families with Dependent Children. The primary low income security program for most of the 20th century.
I would think not. The I in "BIG" stands for income, and should only be there during someone's "income producing years" - SS is there to provide a benefit after someone's income generating years. So it would stay for those folks (SS retirement benefits I mean). So the BIG would be payable to those between ~18 (if not claimed as a dependent) and age 65. Right? How many people would that be?
The biggest one is the same trillion dollars that ever reformer of government starts with whether this, the FairTax people, the Medicare for All (which means only one can really use it to balance the books) and that is tax expenditures. Things that are deducted and/or exempted and/or credited during taxation. After that there is typically only $400 billion or so depending on what you count - usually health care (Medicaid here) is excluded from these proposals. (I'm being generic here rather than addressing a specific version) Depending on proposal (and there are lots of them) Social Security usually remains either untouched but you don't receive both or is turned into a "senior" supplement above the base amount. Again Medicare is usually carved out. Depending on structure the goal is usually between $2 and $3 trillion dollars so about half comes out of existing programs and the rest out of changes to taxation. (BIGs as large as being suggested in this thread of course would require more, but they are also replacing SS, Medicare, and Medicaid spending to help pay for it.)
Where did I say you did? Hence, the "you lost me" and multiple ?'s in my post. I'm not sure why you're bringing up those other countries, but it's obvious that you've left out all of the positives that come with our "society" to try and make some point.
This probably lumps under cost, but I think the biggest concern is the potential for it to become highly inflationary. Increased purchasing power in the lower quartiles where the MPC is basically 1:1 drives inflation, which in turn increases the BIG, which leads to more inflation, and so on. Essentially a classic wage/price spiral. It's why I think this would need to be accompanied by rolling back minimum wage laws to partially offset that.
Along the same lines, how many of these seemed possible even ten years prior. You just plug away with good ideas and wait for the indifferent, change averse masses to lose enough of their fears.
Because this is a much more dramatic change which would require politico's to give up enormous amounts of power for starters (or should I say, makes it a nonstarter).
BINGO.
The conversation was a discussion of how our poorest got that way and society's role in it. I'm not trying to lay out the state of the entire nation and balance the positives with the negatives. How other countries handle the issue of poverty is entirely relevant to the discussion and I don't think it's very controversial to say that they do a better job of minimizing it.
I agree with rolling back minimum wage laws, but we can't assume the Fed would not act to control inflation here. It is their job to do so. It is not the job of the fiscal function to write policy to control it.
Sure they would act, but whatever actions they take would have broader economic implications. The textbook response would be to raise interest rates and tighten the monetary supply, which would constrain economic growth. I don't think the inflation risk is a deal killer, it's just something that would need to be thought through. I also don't think, let the Fed worry about it, is a particularly good answer.
Yes, I saw where you attributed it 100% to our society/environment, which is a joke. In any event, my point is that you're only looking at those aspects in a vacuum. Sure, perhaps those countries handle poverty "better" than we do, but there are negative trade-offs to that as well. You also left out several other factors that contribute to those metrics you've cited.
Enlighten me. I'm willing to listen. All I have seen in responses is people citing laziness, entitlement mentality, etc. No links, no numbers, no facts.
How does a change from current social safety net policies to a BIG require anyone to give up their personal power/choice?
I bolded where you attributed it 100% to society (twice in the same post). I was going to edit my post since pretty much everything can be considered "society" or "environment", but I assumed you're talking about government policy, safety nets, etc. I know you're speaking about the difference between us and other countries, but that's not all due to "society" either.
I would say it's more than almost. The problem with this country is that everyone in it seems to think we are great. We are not. This flag-waving, american dream, land of the free stuff just isnt true. Everyone believes it because its been pounded into their heads from the time they come out of the womb.
When did you go to school, the 50's?
So there is no confusion:
