Trickle down economics

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JanSobieskiIII said:
I don’t disagree.

Where our disagreement stems from is whether it’s a personal obligation or government obligation.

I tend to lean more towards personal/Church obligation vs government.
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It is not a government obligation, but it is a government option, if the government so chooses.
 
Life’s not fair unfortunately. More resources means more opportunity. That’s just the way the world is. Utopia will never exist here on earth, and most attempts to create end very, very poorly.
 
JanSobieskiIII said:
Life’s not fair unfortunately. More resources means more opportunity. That’s just the way the world is. Utopia will never exist here on earth, and most attempts to create end very, very poorly.
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So that is why the Church teaches we have no obligation to the poor?
 
We have an obligation, no one is disputing that. That obligation does not entail getting everyone into Harvard.
 
Crocus said:
When the government gets it right, everyone makes a living wage. Not seeing it yet.
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I disagree with this assumption. When I was 16 I had no experience and was still learning what a work ethic really entailed. The purpose of the job for me was to gain experience, earn some spending money and save some money for college. The work I did making sandwiches all summer didn’t merit a living wage, and I didn’t expect to be paid one. Some jobs don’t require enough from the worker to merit the full cost of living.

As an adult, I made more than a living wage for a number of years, but at a certain point, my wife and I decided it would be better for one of us to work from home, tending to the kids and making a little less money than the other. That someone was me – I didn’t make a full “living wage,” but I made some money and was home to raise the kids. Should I not have been allowed to do that part-time work since it didn’t pay what you feel I should have been making?

Another problem is the idea of the “government getting it right.” The government can’t artificially boost the cost of something without lowering demand. Then low-skill, low-experience workers are priced out of the job market and aren’t able to earn their way to living-wage status. Then, of course, there’s the problem that a living wage is a moving target. And the fact that whatever the low-wage workers are producing becomes more expensive when the workers are paid more to produce it, meaning inflation, meaning a higher cost of living, meaning that a so-called living wage no longer is one.

It seems to me that a better solution, if government is to be involved, would be to have the government increase the availability of training programs for various in-demand professions. This could help the workers actually earn a living wage instead of just being paid one, or not being paid anything when they become too expensive to hire.
 
Except you get skill inflation issues and you end up with highly trained workers working low-skill, low-experience jobs. Training isn’t a magic bullet unless you can somehow come up with an economy that functions almost entirely on skilled workers. So you just get, now more people have training, which means instead of that training being enough to get a job you need the training that’s provided plus something else to get that same job.
 
What’s inherently wrong with disproportionately benefiting the wealthy? Would a policy of equal benefit to the non-wealthy, which differed only in that the “wealthy” received no benefit - and hence less than others - be better in your mind? Why must we measure the effects based on purely on who benefits “more” (even this is an iffy term that needs to be better defined, as the poor and wealthy demographics are likely to view benefits differently). To me, this just sounds like envy.

This is coming from a “poor” individual who currently makes ~20K/yr (irrelevant to the argument, but I like pre-emptively destroy ad hominems to save time)
 
I take issue with the lumping together of “benefits” (what type of benefits are we talking about, exactly?) and tax breaks. Personally, I don’t consider having to fork over less of my money than before as being a handout. I’m sure I would feel even more strongly if I paid the excessive amounts of tax that the wealthy paid.
 
Cimachol said:
It seems to me that a better solution, if government is to be involved, would be to have the government increase the availability of training programs for various in-demand professions.
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I think that’s more-or-less the goal of public universities.
 
Spyridon said:
Nobody on Earth is truly “independent”.

In our society in America we are all dependent on each other to a greater or lesser degree. Which is why it’s of the utmost importance to ensure that large segments of our population don’t get neglected, because it will eventually take a negative toll on the population as a whole.
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Yes, being dependent on others, to a large extent, is a fact of human nature. The question to ask is not whether we should be dependent, but on whom should we be dependent? Socialism assumes that the answer to that is the government. This is perverse, because it is dependence with no responsibility. At the same time, it undermines the perceived dependence we have on our fellow men, in order to place it on the disembodied entity of the state. I emphasise “perceived” because we are not actually made any less dependent on each other, the independence is just made more complicated, wasteful, bureaucratic, and less human. You mentioned dependence on God; socialism, and the Communism it tends towards, are inherently humanistic and atheistic, so that is undermined as well.
 
DarkLight said:
The trouble is a lot of programs “encourage independence” primarily by providing a stick to punish people who don’t make it fast enough.
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What is an example of this punishing stick of which you speak?
 
Socrates92 said:
What’s inherently wrong with disproportionately benefiting the wealthy?
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  1. As they’re wealthy, they don’t need your help
  2. One could argue that it’s anti-democratic and that the goal of all policy should be “the greater good”.
Then again, these are value judgements, right? 😀
This is coming from a “poor” individual who currently makes ~20K/yr (irrelevant to the argument, but I like pre-emptively destroy ad hominems to save time)
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Perhaps the wage slave has developed Stockholm Syndrome? Forgive me; merely a suggestion.
Socrates92 said:
Personally, I don’t consider having to fork over less of my money than before as being a handout. I’m sure I would feel even more strongly if I paid the excessive amounts of tax that the wealthy paid.
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As a percentage of your income, you probably already pay more.
 
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