Timelordwho wrote:
gbaji wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
A sufficiently advanced economic theory will appear as magic to the uneducated.
Oh, that explains why you believe it then. Good to know.
Whatever helps you sleep at night. You're the one who refuses to believe that it works, despite massive data supporting it. Call it what you want, but the fact is that in most cases, "helping" someone doesn't really help them in the long run.
Show me the massive data.
Nearly 50 years of social spending with no appreciable difference in economic condition for those who receive them which can even remotely be attributed to the spending itself?
The only improvement in the lives of the poor over the last 50 years has been the result of technology improvements (almost all free market driven) which have made available better products and services at a low price. A person on welfare today is no better off than a person in the same economic percentile bracket not receiving welfare 50 years ago (again, speaking purely economically speaking). We had poor back then, but they were working poor. Which meant that over time, many of them would improve their lives. Today, we still have poor. But they are largely
unworking poor. A working poor person tends to not be poor 10 years later. A non-working poor person being provided with the same subsistence living will still be poor 10 years later.
This is not some crazy thing. It's basic economics. The only thing subsistence benefits do is allow people to remain poor indefinitely. That's it. I know that this is hard for those who've been told that this is utterly necessary and if we don't do it, people will die, but that is the true. In the absence of such programs people do find ways to provide for themselves. It may be hard at first, and some of them will never be able to provide for themselves fully, but that's a tiny tiny fraction of the number of people receiving public assistance today. Those who truly can't survive without assistance can easily be handled with private charitable organizations. The mere creation of government programs handing out free lunches ensures a long line of people who will all insist that they need that free lunch or they will starve. Take the free lunch away, and it's amazing how no one actually starves.
And the flip side is the massive economic boom that I mentioned. This is harder to measure concretely, but assuming that wages are always a subset of productive labor value (cause no one's going to pay you more than you generate in profits for them), you take a few hundred billion dollars a year less in transfer payments and shift that into productive employment and the positive economic effect could be pretty huge. It's something that I really think most people just don't get. Money earned is "free" from a macro economic standpoint. Every dollar you earn is matched by an equal or greater amount of increase in total economic production. Labor doesn't cost anything because it pays for itself. Paying for people who aren't working is a double cost, not only because you lose the money you're spending on them but they're also not generating any positive economic production. So shifting money from one to the other has a large effect on the economy.
We just don't notice it because it's a slow and gradual thing. We didn't one day go from no social spending to spending 15% of our GDP on it. But that spending is not only bad for the targets of the spending, but also acting as a boat anchor on our economy. We can't know how much faster, bigger, better we'd all be off if we weren't doing that. It's like a guy who's been running laps while wearing a 50 pound backpack. You take it off, and you'll be amazed how much faster you can run.