Smasharoo wrote:
You're kidding right? That can't work. It will never work.
Yeah, it does. It's not some ideology I'm advocating. The data exists.
That shows that giving people money helps them become middle class? Hell. That it even helps them get out of poverty? I think there's tons of people saying that this is what we should do, or even that this is what works, but not a whole lot of actual data showing that the results are what those people predict. It's like you've skipped everything past "create a hypothesis" in the scientific method and went right to assuming your hypothesis is correct. But when we actually test it? It doesn't work.
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Motivation is the primary factor in anything that requires effort. People make choices Smash. Free money affects the choices people make about employment. This is not laughable, and it's not offensive. It's true.
Based on what? Seriously, what possible evidence do you have of this?
That people have to have a motivation to expend effort? Um... Common sense? Laws of nature? Basic psychology? Pick one Smash. To parrot you, this isn't exactly debatable. If I tell you that you can earn a reward if you climb that mountain over there *or* I'll give you the same reward if you just stand around doing nothing, how likely are you to climb that mountain? Close to zero, right?
The same principle applies with regard to relative rewards versus effort as well. It's more or less the basis of most parts of economic theory. People will trade their labor for something else based on a relative valuation of those two things. If the labor isn't worth the reward, they wont do it. Government handouts act as an opportunity cost for employment because the more you work and the more you earn via employment, the less free stuff you get from the government. This acts as a barrier to advancement because in order to even start on a career path, the poor person has to choose to make a series of choices that require additional effort, but at least in the short term do not result in any increased reward.
To suggest that this has no effect on people's choices and the result is like saying that fire being hot has no impact on people's choices to stick their hands in it. Do we really need data to show this? Or can we simply realize that this is basic human nature?
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Because, guess what, evidence that welfare state works is pretty much all that exists in the literature.
Works at what? Providing the poor person with a better standard of living than otherwise? I'm not arguing that. What I am arguing is that at the same time it reduces the odds of that poor person getting out of poverty. Because you've reduced the discomfort of their situation, while decreasing the reward of taking any steps to get out of it. Of course that's going to influence people's decisions. It can't not do so.
The welfare state is really really good at maintaining the welfare state.
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Nations with strong welfare states have the largest middle classes. States with stronger welfare states have larger middle classes.
Correlation is not causation though, right? Nations with lots of large single family dwellings tend to have larger middle classes as well. But one would be an idiot to think that building larger houses makes the middle class grow. Kinda the other way around, right? You can't create a middle class by first creating a welfare state. You can, however, create a welfare state once you have a strong middle class.
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I'm not going to litigate this unitl you find something, *anything* that indicates that something other than giving poor people money is more effective in elevating them out of poverty. A Heritage Foundation or AEI study, even. A Fox News article. ANYTHING
Er? Well, if you're asking for partisan sources, how about
this?. Or
this?. Hell, even
Bill Clinton believes that when you make it harder to choose to stay on welfare rather than work, people will work.
I could probably list a hundred links saying the same thing. While it didn't go far enough IMO, the welfare reform of 1996 did make it harder for people to just sit on welfare forever. And despite screaming from the left that people would starve to death and their lives be ruined, the fact is that the opposite happened. It turned out that conservative were right, and that the very existence of welfare benefits affected people's employment choices negatively. The oft quoted claim of the left that people on welfare just can't possibly provide for themselves and would suffer horribly without assistance turned out to be completely false. When it became harder to stay on welfare, people did exactly what conservatives said they would do: They went out and got jobs. And, because they got jobs instead of handouts, as time went by they became more employable, their labor value increased, and their standard of living increased beyond that which they could have ever had on welfare.
You talk about evidence, but don't provide any. All evidence strongly supports the idea that the existence of welfare programs affects people's employment choices and that when you take away the "free money" an amazing percentage of those who insisted they just could not possibly find a job manage to do so. Necessity and all of that, right?
This is not novel. It's not shocking. It only requires that one not adopt a fanciful set of assumptions that fly completely in the face of common sense and human nature. People will *always* seek to gain the best reward for the least effort. It's what makes us human. It's why we build tools. It's why we grow crops and herd animals instead of hunting and gathering. To suggest that welfare benefits don't affect people's choices about how much or how hard to work is to deny human nature. And no, this is not offensive. Not unless you're being incredibly dishonest about what human nature really is.
Edited, Sep 17th 2013 4:30pm by gbaji