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somebodyelse
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Welfare in tribal societies
#1664696 - 06/26/03 02:12 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Haven't all pre-industrial societies historically had "welfare"?
That is, haven't the elderly, infirm, and unlucky always lived with or been cared for by their families by and large?
Doesn't modern welfare as we know and love/loathe it arise from our unwillingness to be burdened with this situation on a daily basis, and our collective guilt as a result?
To all those who would slash welfare: will you bring your unemployed brother and sister, your homeless father, your dying-from-cancer-because-she-can't-afford-treatment mother under your wing, put them up in your house, pay for their medical bills?
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Anonymous
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: somebodyelse]
#1664713 - 06/26/03 02:17 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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charity is not welfare.
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somebodyelse
In_Is_Out
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: ]
#1664751 - 06/26/03 02:34 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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You can't tell me that welfare slashers are pro-charity. Just removing the estate tax will drop charitable contributions in this country by 25%.
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Anonymous
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: somebodyelse]
#1664761 - 06/26/03 02:38 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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how do you figure?
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Azmodeus
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: somebodyelse]
#1664872 - 06/26/03 03:16 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Quote:
somebodyelse said: Haven't all pre-industrial societies historically had "welfare"? To all those who would slash welfare: will you bring your unemployed brother and sister, your homeless father, your dying-from-cancer-because-she-can't-afford-treatment mother under your wing, put them up in your house, pay for their medical bills?
Actually yes!..not just me but cousins and siblings as well. See we all help each other because we care for each other...not because we'd have to.
Welfare perpetuates lazy fucks who don't care enough to improve thier situation...and if some teenage girl has three kids to take care of, thats her problem not mine....unless its my sister.
Then you could eliminate all the charity and welfare businesses.
-------------------- "Know your Body - Know your Mind - Know your Substance - Know your Source. Lest we forget. "
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Anonymous
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: somebodyelse]
#1664877 - 06/26/03 03:17 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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if so much of my paycheck wasn't going to taxes, i could afford to give more to charity. i'd rather voluntarily give money to charities that i felt worthy at my discretion than have a beauracracy take it and divvy it up.
i could give 10% of my paycheck to a children's hospital, an inner-city school, or my ailing grandmother. instead, the government does the job for me, against my will, and awards some of that money to alcoholics and career welfare recipients with 7 children.
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Azmodeus
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: ]
#1664883 - 06/26/03 03:19 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Hmm, well i wouldn't even do that!
Never know when your grandma could get sick...
-------------------- "Know your Body - Know your Mind - Know your Substance - Know your Source. Lest we forget. "
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Xlea321
Stranger
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: somebodyelse]
#1665101 - 06/26/03 04:33 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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We have welfare to stop people going into the job market and working for starvation wages which will drive down wages for all of us.
Without welfare our wages would drop through the floor and poverty would explode.
-------------------- Don't worry, B. Caapi
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Anonymous
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: Xlea321]
#1665131 - 06/26/03 04:42 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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and 3+3=4.
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Anonymous
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: Xlea321]
#1665146 - 06/26/03 04:50 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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yo i just came up with an awesome idea!
we pay half the population $40,000 a year to sit at home... that way, the people that do work will get paid more!
no no... better.... 90% of the population... $100,000 a year!
everyone will be rich! poverty is solved!
do you understand economics at all?
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Anonymous
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: Xlea321]
#1665179 - 06/26/03 05:02 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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you're talking about subsidizing poverty. your premise is that by paying people not to work (not to produce wealth) we will have less poverty (more wealth to go around). you're saying that one of the goals of welfare is basically to reduce the labor pool, thereby increasing wages. to keep this going, some of the wages are given to people on welfare, allowing us working people to keep our high paying jobs. sounds like a great system... let's just pay almost everyone not to work, no? the more people we pay to not work, the smaller the labor market will be, and the more wages for the rest of us! awesome! put some thought into what you read. what your citing is typically shortsighted bullshit liberal economics.
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Innvertigo
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: ]
#1665245 - 06/26/03 05:25 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Quote:
do you understand economics at all?
I know the answer to this one.
-------------------- America....FUCK YEAH!!! Words of Wisdom: Individual Rights BEFORE Collective Rights "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
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z@z.com
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: Xlea321]
#1665484 - 06/26/03 07:12 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Care to explain how this works alex?
-------------------- "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson
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shakta
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: z@z.com]
#1665645 - 06/26/03 08:18 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Wow, my head just exploded from Alex's statement and I have found that I can still type for a few more seconds to finish this post. That makes no sense at all!
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Innvertigo
Vote Libertarian!!
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: shakta]
#1665778 - 06/26/03 09:18 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Welcome to Alex Land. Up is Down left is right and if you look in his bag it's full of pixie dust.
-------------------- America....FUCK YEAH!!! Words of Wisdom: Individual Rights BEFORE Collective Rights "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
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Xlea321
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: z@z.com]
#1666033 - 06/26/03 11:21 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Care to explain how this works alex? Sure, no problem. http://www.nathannewman.org/other/howwelfarehelpsus.html HOW WELFARE HELPS "THE REST OF US" -- Nathan Newman, newman@socrates.berkeley.edu The current debate on welfare is stale, tired and, ultimately, missing the economic point. Let's be clear what welfare is and is not. Welfare is not charity. Welfare is a system of payments made to the poor not to take any job if its pay is so low that it underbids wages for those who have jobs. When linked to other policies like the minimum wage, welfare is (and should be seen as) an economic tool by society to keep wages high. Progressives need to stop appealing just to the compassion of the public in defending welfare and start playing on their self-interest. The economic reality is that decent wages for "the rest of us" depend on having a decent welfare system. Without that welfare system, all wages go down under a flood of workers desperate to take jobs at any wage in order to keep their families from starving. Conservatives try to argue that even if kicking people off welfare causes some erosion in wages, it's cheaper than increasing the taxes needed to pay people on welfare. The obvious response is to point out how small a portion of the federal budget is taken up by programs like AFDC and other payments to the non-working poor. Out of a $1.6 trillion federal budget, only $19 billion goes to AFDC, just over 1% of every federal dollar spent. But that's a defensive argument and progressives have to get off the defense and on the offense. We have to sketch exactly how supporting the welfare system, even expanding it, can be used to reverse the wage erosion workers have faced in the last two decades. Let's start with the minimum wage. Conservatives use the fear of unemployment to oppose it. In the recent debate on the minimum wage, opponents of raising the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15 per hour have argued that employers would lay off hundreds of thousands of workers (roughly 1-2% of minimum wage workers in their estimates) if forced to raise wages for the rest. Now, a number of solid economic studies, most recently by economists David Card and Alan Krueger, have shown that modest raises in the minimum wage actually have no effect on employment. But, for the sake of argument, let's ignore those economic studies and target our economic program at those who might buy conservative arguments that 1-2% of minimum wage jobs will be lost if the minimum wage is raised. Even with that assumption, if we create a strong welfare system, everyone, including the taxpayer, gains from the increase in the minimum wage. Follow the math on this and you'll have the strongest argument in countering conservatives attacks on both welfare and the minimum wage. Buying the conservatives' assumptions of 2% unemployment, it means that for every 100 minimum wage workers initially making $4.25 per hour, we will end up with 98 workers making the new minimum wage of $5.15 per hour and 2 workers unemployed. Breaking that down by hour, week and year, for every 100 workers who initially make $4.25 per hour ($170 per 40-hr week, $8840 per year), the total combined wages of all 98 workers who stay employed initially equals: $866,320 per year ($8840 per year x 98 workers). After the raise in the minimum wage to $5.15 per hour ($206 per week, $10,712 per year), total wages will increase to $1,049,776 per year ($10,712 per year x 98 workers). Those 98 workers will see an individual gain of $1872 per year in wages and an com bined gain of $165,776 in wages. If the two newly unemployed people are supported with welfare payments equal to their previous yearly wage of $8840 (much more generous than present welfare systems), the total cost will be $17,680--far less than the $165,776 net gain in wages for the other 98 workers. In fact, that $17,680 is far less than what the federal government would receive in increased income and payroll taxes on those increased wages. So even using the conservatives' own estimates of job loss, the minimum wage with a strong welfare system can be used to increase wages while protecting the incomes of those left unemployed. To translate this into the slightly messier real numbers of the overall US economy, there are 12.3 million workers who make less than the proposed new minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. They make an average of $4.67 per hour, so if 98% of those workers have their wages increased to the new minimum wage, the aggregate increase in wages will be $12 billion yearly. This is far more than any welfare costs that might be needed for income and training funds if any workers are left unemployed. These numbers have all assumed the rather miserly increase in the minimum wage proposed by Clinton. If instead of $5.15 per hour, we increased the minimum wage another dollar to $6.15 per hour (about the inflation-adjusted level back in 1969), we can see even more dramatic effects. There are 20.8 million Americans making less than $6.15 per hour. If all of these workers (with an average wage of $5.10 per hour) had their wages increased to a $6.15 per hour minimum wage, the net increase in wages would be $45.6 billion annually. Even if we assumed a worst-case assumption of 10% of those workers were left unemployed, this would still leave a potential $40 billion for welfare and retraining funds--an amount DOUBLE the entire present AFDC budget. In fact, all these numbers understate the overall gains in wages, since it ignores the effect of the minimum wage on higher wage workers. But the reality is that the mass of workers making a bit more than any new minimum wage are able to demand a wage increase to maintain a "spread" between them and less skilled workers now making what they used to make. So where are these increased wages coming from? Some of it comes from increased growth due to higher consumer demand, some from increased costs passed onto consumers, but in the end, in highly competitive markets employing minimum wage workers, the largest chunk come out of the profits and executive compensation of corporate stockholders. And there's the reason why both welfare payments and the minimum wage are opposed so vociferously by corporations and their legislative allies. It's no coincidence that conservatives support both eliminating welfare payments and lowering the minimum wage. Moving people from welfare into the workplace drives down wages, and the last thing conservatives (supported massively by low-wage employers) want is to have the government prevent wages from falling. And by keeping welfare payments low or non-existent, they can create fear of unemployment from raising the minimum wage or supporting other policies to raise wages. Of course, there are ways to improve welfare, including providing work instead of income payments, but that work has to be at a living wage that, instead of driving down wages, helps to bolster wages in society while delivering services that the market fails to provide. Look at the debate over Wisconsin's proposed welfare plan, a plan to end welfare for everyone in the state and replace it with work requirements. Where is the headline-grabbing debate over the fact that this flood of new additions to the workforce will be making less than minimum wage and even replacing workers who previously made much higher wages? The enthusiasm for welfare "reform" would chill significantly if people recognized that shredding the safety net also meant shredding their own wages. If the Wisconsin-style plan was extended nationally, the effects would trash wages across the coun try. Even as welfare payments have declined in the last two decades, average hourly wages have dropped by over 10% and wages for less-skilled job have fallen even more. Imagine all four million plus adult recipients of AFDC being dumped in the labor market tomorrow on top of present unemployment, or even gradually over a year or two. The key thing for progressives to argue is that unless the policy is to spend MORE to provide real jobs for all, it's cheaper for working families to pay people not to work than to force them to work at wages that drive down pay for all of us.
-------------------- Don't worry, B. Caapi
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Xlea321
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: ]
#1666048 - 06/26/03 11:27 PM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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put some thought into what you read. Try and think about what you are saying. With an army of desperate people to exploit why would Nike etc site their slave labour camps in south east asia? They'd build them here in the west. And pay people 10 cents an hour. Eventually children would be forced out to work by desperate starving families and education for all would finish. People would be reduced to living in tin shacks and sending their 10 year olds out to slave in the factories. Child prostitution would explode just as it has in South east asia. That may be the kind of society you'd like but it's not for me.
-------------------- Don't worry, B. Caapi
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Anonymous
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: Xlea321]
#1666150 - 06/27/03 12:00 AM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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that article almost puts me to sleep every time i read it. the idea that paying people to not work is good for the people that do work is absurd. his argument really centers around a defense of minimum wage laws, which he extends to include welfare. as many a liberal economist has, he neglects to consider the lateral and long-term effects of his position. you see, in the market, everything is interrelated. price supports for labor have further reaching consequences than simply better wages and living conditions for the poor. it's not so simple as, "what, people aren't making enough money? ok, let's write a law that says people have to get paid more. problem solved". minimum wages, price supports, welfare... none of these actually create more wealth for anyone, nor do they in the long run get anyone out of poverty. they are always counterbalanced by increased costs for housing, utilities, and inflation in general. there are ramifications and corollaries to consider, but it boils down to this: in a market system, wealth is generated and distributed. paying people to not work does not increase the amount of wealth that is generated; it reduces it, and causes it to be more thinly and unfairly distributed. to the small extent that it may help the poor man, it certainly does no good for the man who earns his way.
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somebodyelse
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: ]
#1666576 - 06/27/03 03:21 AM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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Quote:
minimum wages, price supports, welfare... none of these actually create more wealth for anyone, nor do they in the long run get anyone out of poverty.
Cold hearted right logic. Of course a minimum wage creates more wealth for the lowest rung . In addition it prevents exploitation. Would you let the market decide wages? Every recession your pay would dip like a stone.
Sure, a minimum wage may reduce overall profits for a company - but when a CEO earns 500 times more than his lowest paid employees, so the fuck what?
And BS increased costs for housing, utilities - housing prices are decided on an open market. IF the market can stand it, the costs will rise. Housing costs are a function of density; a market can only stand inflated house prices if demand (through density) is high. Even then, overpriced housing is a sticky sell.
And re: your charity q:
In 1995, tax-filing estates gave almost three-quarters as much to charity as they paid in federal estate taxes. Even more striking, for estates worth more than $20 million, charities got almost double the federal tax take.
Although only 300 estates reported gross assets of more than $20 million in 1995 and only 146 of them left any money to charity, these estates were responsible for about 40% of all reported charitable bequests. In the previous year, the 280 estates worth more than $20 million were responsible for more than half of all reported charitable bequests.
Absent the estate tax, bequests to charity would probably be lot lower. A 1998 paper by Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis surveyed the economic literature and found that "There is overwhelming evidence that estate taxes stimulate charitable bequests." After all, a $10 million bequest to charity generates the full $10 million in gratitude and recognition, while the same $10 million will leave heirs with as little as $4.5 million (after federal and state taxes).
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Phred
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Re: Welfare in tribal societies [Re: somebodyelse]
#1666702 - 06/27/03 05:33 AM (20 years, 8 months ago) |
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somebodyelse writes:
Cold hearted right logic.
Logic is logic. It is neither cold-hearted nor warm-hearted.
Of course a minimum wage creates more wealth for the lowest rung .
Incorrect. Minimum wage laws "create" no wealth. And in fact minimum wage laws increase the number of inhabitants of "the lowest rung", because a raise in the minimum wage is accompanied by a raise in unemployment. In other words, minimum wage laws create unemployment, not wealth.
In addition it prevents exploitation.
What it prevents is employment.
pinky
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