The American Welfare State How We Spend Nearly $1 Trillion a Year Fighting Poverty—and Fail

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TheTrueCentrist said:
Not all federal spending on social programs is meant to end poverty. If it were, then we could indeed claim that they are failing. Soup kitchens, for example, don’t fail because the people they feed go home still poor.
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Did you read it?
 
buffalo said:
Did you read it?
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I did and its nonsense.

It makes two fundamental mistakes, first it equates “welfare” programs designed to alleviate the effects of poverty with anti-poverty programs designed to actually reduce poverty.

Programs that feed people, or provide them with shelter or medical care, aren’t designed to 'rehabilitate them" into being productive members of society, they are strictly a “band-aid” to keep them from starving or freezing to death. To advocate the elimination of those programs in favor of programs designed to 'rehabilitate" without providing for physical needs is ludicrous. Kind of like telling the Titanic survivors in the water, “No, no, we can’t give you life jackets or send a lifeboat, that would just leave you in the middle of the ocean without really addressing the problem! Just tread water and try not to freeze to death, while we raise and repair the ship, then we can continue our journey to New York!!”

Think about it. WHY have foodstamps and SNAP mushroomed over the last 4 years so that more people are receiving them than ever before?

(Pick one)

a) Because Obama is a Socialist who wants to give all the money to poor people so they will vote for him.

OR

b) Because there are 13 MILLION unemployed people, more than at any time since the Great Depression.

Second, it doesn’t account for the effects of the welfare programs in considering poverty. That is, their actual level of poverty which they claim hasn’t gone down appreciably since the 1960s, is greatly reduced when the benefits are factored in.

This is the worst kind of partisan drivel, but I would expect nothing less from the Cato Institute.
 
buffalo said:
Did you read it?
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Yes, and the whole thing relies on willful ignorance. For example, note that right off the bat they claim
Welfare spending increased significantly under President George W. Bush and has exploded under President Barack Obama. In fact, since President Obama took office, federal welfare spending has increased by 41 percent, more than $193 billion per year. Despite this government largess, more than 46 million Americans continue to live in poverty. Despite nearly $15 trillion in total welfare spending since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964, the poverty rate is perilously close to where we began more than 40 years ago. Clearly we are doing something wrong.
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The implication is that the amount spent on social programs has increased due to new policies. However, they completely ignore the fact that the economic downturn is the primary driver of new costs. In other words, social programs became more expensive because they suddenly had to cover more people. This, of course, spoils their point. If the programs they are discussing were about preventing poverty, then their costs would stay roughly the same. However, they are not, they provide a safety net; what has happened recently is that more people have fallen into the net. This does not constitute a failure of the safety net, but rather of whatever economic policies caused them to fall into the net.
 
TheTrueCentrist said:
If the programs they are discussing were about preventing poverty, then their costs would stay roughly the same. However, they are not, they provide a safety net; what has happened recently is that more people have fallen into the net. This does not constitute a failure of the safety net, but rather of whatever economic policies caused them to fall into the net.
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To be fair, you must admit that you and the previous poster just said that the government has made a however many trillion dollar band-aid that is not even addressing the core problem.

Not that the band-aid isn’t important, but the argument I’m reading is “Of course our anti-poverty programs aren’t fixing anything. They aren’t supposed to actually fix any problems, just to make them slightly less ugly.”

Again, I’m not saying that alleviating symptoms isn’t important. It is. Extremely so.

But to use the boat analogy - we can’t say “no we won’t stop the boat from sinking, we’re too busy getting ready to handle all the people that will be in the water,” either.

Clearly, both tactics are needed. And, if I understand the article correctly, only the band-aid part can be in any way called successful. Which means the other part is failing. Which means that there is a rather big failure going on.
 
Iron_Donkey said:
But to use the boat analogy - we can’t say “no we won’t stop the boat from sinking, we’re too busy getting ready to handle all the people that will be in the water,” either.

Clearly, both tactics are needed. And, if I understand the article correctly, only the band-aid part can be in any way called successful. Which means the other part is failing. Which means that there is a rather big failure going on.
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But the boat has in fact sunk and the people are in the water. That is the status quo that the Cato folks are complaining about. Would it have been better to make sure the ship didn’t sink in the first place? Of course it would have! But it did. So we can either throw a line to the folks in the water, or we can wag our fingers at them telling them how stupid they were when they decided not to learn how to swim while we design bigger and better ships.
 
BillP said:
But the boat has in fact sunk and the people are in the water. That is the status quo that the Cato folks are complaining about. Would it have been better to make sure the ship didn’t sink in the first place? Of course it would have! But it did. So we can either throw a line to the folks in the water, or we can wag our fingers at them telling them how stupid they were when they decided not to learn how to swim while we design bigger and better ships.
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I think it would be better to say that the boat is perpetually sinking (at least in some areas, even if it is perpetually repairing itself in other areas). But in any case, yes we must alleviate suffering and no that is not enough. You do throw a life jacket to someone in the water, but you don’t then say that is somehow enough. Now, true enough, you might not be able to do more than that for many people and you must at least throw the lifejacket. The current state of affairs appears to be that of a lot of people are floating around in the water wearing life jackets waiting for rescue boats that are not in fact coming. Which is bad. Better than a bunch of people drowning, yes. But still bad.

I am not in any way saying that I necessarily agree with the people who wrote the article 100%. I’m just trying to say that we probably need to take a little more nuanced approach than “it’s all good” or “it’s all bad.”
 
Iron_Donkey said:
I think it would be better to say that the boat is perpetually sinking (at least in some areas, even if it is perpetually repairing itself in other areas). But in any case, yes we must alleviate suffering and no that is not enough. You do throw a life jacket to someone in the water, but you don’t then say that is somehow enough. Now, true enough, you might not be able to do more than that for many people and you must at least throw the lifejacket. The current state of affairs appears to be that of a lot of people are floating around in the water wearing life jackets waiting for rescue boats that are not in fact coming. Which is bad. Better than a bunch of people drowning, yes. But still bad.

I am not in any way saying that I necessarily agree with the people who wrote the article 100%. I’m just trying to say that we probably need to take a little more nuanced approach than “it’s all good” or “it’s all bad.”
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I think we’re in violent agreement here! 🙂

Yes, we absolutely need to fix the problem but that will, I am afraid require yet more money (and a different set of governmental priorities!) which could well make the heads of those folks over at the Cato Institute explode…
 
TheTrueCentrist said:
Yes, and the whole thing relies on willful ignorance. For example, note that right off the bat they claim

The implication is that the amount spent on social programs has increased due to new policies. However, they completely ignore the fact that the economic downturn is the primary driver of new costs. In other words, social programs became more expensive because they suddenly had to cover more people. This, of course, spoils their point. If the programs they are discussing were about preventing poverty, then their costs would stay roughly the same. However, they are not, they provide a safety net; what has happened recently is that more people have fallen into the net. This does not constitute a failure of the safety net, but rather of whatever economic policies caused them to fall into the net.
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They do not ignore it and reference it in the article. Did you miss it?

The point is though that all this money spent has not alleviated poverty and has captured many people in a trap.
 
BillP said:
But the boat has in fact sunk and the people are in the water. That is the status quo that the Cato folks are complaining about. Would it have been better to make sure the ship didn’t sink in the first place? Of course it would have! But it did. So we can either throw a line to the folks in the water, or we can wag our fingers at them telling them how stupid they were when they decided not to learn how to swim while we design bigger and better ships.
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When did the ship start sinking?
 
Can we please stop talking about the stupid ship and boat? You people are focusing too much on a metaphorical abstraction rather than the actual issue being debated, purely for the sake of argument.
 
I will admit that I did not read the entire article, but the first few pages which I read kept talking about how much money the government was spending without discussing how much actually got into the pockets of the poor.

So if the government budgets $10M for the Section 8 housing program, what does that mean? Does that mean that $10M (a number I totally made up, I have no idea how much is budgeted for this) actually goes to pay people’s rent? Or does some portion of that actually go to pay people’s rent while the rest is consumed by administrative costs?

And yet they talked about what people receive… so it was very tricky to figure out all the numbers from that.

Also, one of their charts seemed to have the wrong dates on it.
 
Texas recently passed a law which allows people to sell good made in their very own home kitchens and make up to $50K/year doing so, as long as it is clearly marked as truly homemade.

We should have laws like this everywhere, and not only related to food. This law will allow people in Texas to start a business without the huge hurdle of having to start big in order to handle the increased overhead required by having a commercial kitchen.

I remember many years ago going to a restaurant which was in a house. There were only about 6 tables, so the whole thing was very small, but it was a part-time job for all the members of a family which added a good amount of income to the family.

When people talk about alleviating poverty or eradicating poverty, they never seem to think about what real people in the real world need.
 
Poverty doesn’t end with a welfare state. A welfare state disrespects subsidiarity (depending upon what you mean by a welfare state). What ends poverty is EMPLOYMENT with DECENT WAGES. It is the private sector that creates jobs, not the government. So it makes sense the War on Poverty is a fail.
 
Swiss_Guy said:
Poverty doesn’t end with a welfare state. A welfare state disrespects subsidiarity (depending upon what you mean by a welfare state). What ends poverty is EMPLOYMENT with DECENT WAGES. It is the private sector that creates jobs, not the government. So it makes sense the War on Poverty is a fail.
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👍 That is what is so hard to get across.

Government should end its adversarial ways and encourage business success.

How about people actually having to work for their assistance. Ween them off mother governments breast by productive work. There are so many things that could be done.
 
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