Fight Poverty! Raise taxes?

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Cookiehead said:
I don’t understand how it is MY problem
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It’s not your problem. Just turn the other way, don’t look at what other people are doing.

Then again the government acknowledges a problem, and you pay taxes, so that makes you part of the solution. Sorry.

Welcome to the forum. 🙂
 
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Socrates92 said:
ROI is directly affected by taxation (which directly decreases), as well as the threat of taxation (which increases the risk component, leading to a higher required return).
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While my earlier remarks related primarily to personal tax where impacts on investment are not particularly relevant. But even in corporate taxation, the effects are often overblown. Google (for instance) won’t abandon a country just because a bit more tax is levied.
 
Americans are poorer than their parents because they do not budget, carry debt, live above their means, and do not save money. Investing $50/week for 40 years earning 10% is over $1 million.

It is a behavioral issue and giving people with poor behaviors money will not fix it. Helping them change their behaviors is what is needed. Incentivizing the earning and saving of money might help. Nothing unless you earn some first, have a plan to spend it wisely, and save some for the future.
 
Cookiehead said:
I don’t understand how it is MY problem that people who wantonly breed like livestock without having the wherewithal to support the consequence of their union. It’s sad when children are hungry but whomever brought them into the world should have done so only if they knew they could feed them. If I went to a horse rescue organization and adopted a horse but had no way of feeding it would I be wrong if I expected society to help me feed the animal I had no way of doing?
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Um, a horse does not = a human being. In extenuating circumstances I’d presume there would be no moral issue with euthanizing a horse that the owner couldn’t look after or give away/sell. The same does not apply to a human person. Simply the fact that someone has failed as a parent does not mean that society doesn’t have an obligation to the child/children.
 
I do not understand the rationale for calling taxation a threat, seeing that tax cuts over the past 40 years reaped high deficits, concentration of wealth at the top, stagnation and poverty at the bottom. An unhealthy economic experiment with devastating human results.

Some people who won a Nobel Prize in Economics tested a different idea, an economic model that promotes a wider participation in the economy than the ever narrowing one that exists now.
 
Theo520 said:
Yes, it should be the responsibility of state and local govt, not the Feds.
State and local can also fund their projects.
This might lead to changing zoning requirements that presently make affordable housing un-affordable to build.
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The only reason I would make it a national response is that local governments have voters who are afraid (and not entirely without reason) that if they’re the first to tackle the problem they will attract more of the destitute than they can handle. States with better weather in the winter could expect more than their share of people who have nowhere to spend their time during the day, too.

The thing that makes a solution particularly difficult could be finding a constitutional way to have a social contract that insists that the destitute have duties as well as rights. (That’s a good bit above my pay grade.)
 
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For some, government and governmental power over the citizen is the solution to all human ills. Of course, those same folks just happen to be in government…

The Nobel organization lost all credibility when they awarded the peace prize to a certain former president for the amazing accomplishment of getting elected.
 
Elizabeth3 said:
My problem with the “raise taxes on the rich” idea is that our government has proven itself to be woefully inept at handling other people’s money in any kind of just way or in a way that provides more than a negligible help to those it proposes assist.
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To what are you comparing government? What has proven to be better than government in delivering health care to the poor, for example?
 
LeafByNiggle said:
To what are you comparing government?
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The private sector. Any business that would waste so much money in red tape, inefficiency and running an astounding deficit wouldn’t survive that long. Getting their hands on millions from the super rich to “fight poverty” would be mostly swallowed up in waste or used to fund other parts of the gov’t that are earmarked for something else.
LeafByNiggle said:
What has proven to be better than government in delivering health care to the poor, for example?
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I consider healthcare a national social insurance program (rather than welfare) that most of us pay into and will get benefit from (medicare and social security). So in that sense, the poor do benefit. When it comes to issues of providing basic necessities, I think too much and ever expanding government involvement has drawbacks. It violates the principle of subsidiarity when it essentially takes over the responsibility of those who are closer to the problem and can help more efficiently with particular needs or those who have been blessed with abundance to care for those in their communities or state. It hinders progress in making sure workers are paid a just wage when the gov’t subsidizes these basics. It causes a state of dependency in which it becomes difficult to get out and it causes generational dependency.

Edited to add: I’m not for charity being totally in the hands of the private sector. I think gov’t plays a role but it should be a small one (and more local/state) and not one that heads towards a complete takeover of caring for the poor which will then lead to the slippery slope of becoming a socialized country in which everyone is taken care of.
 
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Crocus said:
I do not understand the rationale for calling taxation a threat, seeing that tax cuts over the past 40 years reaped high deficits, concentration of wealth at the top, stagnation and poverty at the bottom. An unhealthy economic experiment with devastating human results.
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I was discussing tax from the perspective of investment, not for society as a whole. Tax reduces the return on capital, and the possibility of increased taxation on capital gains introduces the threat of lower returns. I’m having trouble understanding why “threat” would be a confusing word choice.
 
found this article in another thread
“Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born,” Ridley writes, referring to the year 1958, a time that some of us can actually remember.

Of course, you may say, the economic progress made since China and India discovered the magic of free markets has helped people over there; but over here, in advanced countries, we’re not growing. We are just gobbling up and wolfing down more of the world’s limited resources, aren’t we?

Not so, replies Ridley. Consumers in advanced countries are actually consuming less stuff (biomass, metals, minerals, or fossil fuels) per capita, even while getting more nutrition and production out of it. Thank technological advancement and, yes, in some cases, government regulations.

We’re also experiencing, as a world and in advanced countries, less violence and more in the way of peace, international and domestic. That’s the argument of Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature . Wars are more infrequent and less deadly than in the past.

So too has violent crime abated in the U.S. and other advanced nations. It used to be taken as given that disadvantaged young males, especially those minorities discriminated against, were hugely likely to commit violent crimes. Now, thanks to improved policing and changed attitudes, far fewer do so.
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We’re living in (almost) the best of times​

 
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Theo520 said:
We’re living in (almost) the best of times
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Best of Times?

With all the Suffering, Increases in more HD warfaring and Abortion (murder) going down?

What we do know is that ‘things’ shall continue to get Worse…

_
 
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