Must concede to gbajiFollow

No. The math says that if you provide a safety net, people will engage in the activity you've shielded them from the consequences of more often. In the case of government welfare programs the activity you're protecting is them choosing to *not* pursue a career and not to advance economically. The consequences of that normally are that you don't earn enough to support yourself and a family. By shielding people from those consequences, they increase the likelihood of people making that choice.

And that's a bad thing.



Except that in all of those cases, there is presumed pressure from the parents for their child to be successful in some way and always the innate concern by the recipient that mommy and daddy might cut them off at some point. So they'll give them lots of chances, as long as they're trying to succeed at something. But the government doesn't place such restrictions on welfare (well, not if the left has its way). The government is like the worse case wealthy parents who just give their kids trust funds and let them live off that money for their entire lives without expecting anything of them. That's not a safety net that encourages risk at all. It's just one that creates laziness.

Those are the rich kids we dislike, right? Yet, that's exactly what you think the government should do for everyone. That's insane.

Edited, Apr 17th 2015 2:35pm by gbaji

Is that what the rabid gerbil who lives in you head told you?

I stated my position. If you're incapable of comparing them then... umm... get a handler? There's no "games" here, I linked right to my thoughts on the matter. What you want to do with that is up to you and I guess you're choosing "whine".

Yes, you did. And I directly responded by arguing that the issue was the choice between available opportunities (even poor available opportunities) and welfare benefits, and that the existence of the latter increases the chance that one will not choose the former when they present themselves. I spent a couple pages talking about this. Then you responded with the argument that since you were unwilling to leave your high paying job to go on welfare that no one would choose to stay on welfare rather than pursue a job that might eventually lift them economically out of that condition.

That was an absurd argument then, and it's still an absurd argument now. As I said then, those are not the same choices. You'd be choosing between an existing high paying job and a combination of low paying job and benefits that would be a net loss for you, while the other person is choosing between something that is easy and grants him "enough" to get by on, versus something that requires quite a bit more effort, but grants him little or nothing more in the short term. My argument has always been about effort versus reward. Humans always attempt to gain the most reward for the least effort. Welfare shallows that reward to effort curve (and at some income ranges actually reverses it).

When I presented this, you countered by arguing that you didn't always have a high paying job, yet you chose to get an education and work hard to gain a better life for yourself. I then countered that you likely weren't raised in a household where welfare was an acceptable way to live and that this influenced your choices. And that's when you just looped back around to the same argument you'd made that started that particular part of the discussion, repeating your assertion that it must be some external environmental factors and not choices that create the difference.

I get that. I just plain disagree with the weight you are placing on things. And at the end of the day, it's kind of irrelevant. Regardless of what degree "job availability" limits things in a given area, "availability of welfare benefits" will have that negative employment effect I mentioned earlier. We could even argue that in areas with worse job advancement opportunities, the effect of welfare on upward mobility is worse. The benefit versus reward of pursuing a career is lower (steeper curve), making just doing some minimum and making up the rest in welfare benefits an even more attractive choice. The deck is stacked against people growing up in those poor environments three times. Once because the base employment condition is worse, twice because this makes welfare seem like a better choice, and thrice because they are less likely to attach stigma to being on welfare.

And this is before considering that the effect of housing benefits actually compresses welfare recipients into high density poverty areas geographically, thus contributing directly to the "not many good job opportunities in the area" problem in the first place. The negative effects of these programs just keep on rolling in. It's just shocking to me that so many people refuse to even consider the possibility that these programs may be causing much more harm than good.

You're the one who dredged up a year old post of us disagreeing, so you tell me.

So if you quote yourself it's a reliable source?






It's true!!

Could be, but weren't in the days before welfare. Welfare started up for a reason, to answer a need. Like unions, and environmental protection laws.

It's interesting to see gbaji argue that, given the opportunity to get away with it, poor people would willingly stay poor on welfare, but won't acknowledge that, given the opportunity to get away with it, employers would willingly pay slave wages. Not surprising, really, since corporate personhood trumps human personhood in the conservative world, but interesting to watch the blind contortionism.

Edited, Apr 18th 2015 5:23pm by Jophiel

History in general seems to be a major Achilles Heel.

What the **** are you smoking?

Pancakes.

Are you asking me? I'm just commenting on Gbaji's starry-eyed notions about how wages work or the balance between willingness to work vs opportunity vs social safety nets.

A look at our (well, my) nation's history gives an overview of how capitalism works until the government takes action to rein it in: From slavery and indentured servitude to poverty level wages and violent fights to prevent unionization, from horrific safety and health conditions to using child labor overseas when you can't hire them domestically any longer to even today where you have companies trying to force their welfare-wage employees into using unregulated "payroll" cards loaded with fees because the bank gives the business a discount for that over cutting a paycheck. These things don't change because "Oh, well people will just go to the next business to work/shop so the first one will change!". Or the delightful fantasy abroad where all the Bolivians in a village will just go work at another mine if the remaining adults don't get raises when the mine hires child labor on the cheap.

Likewise, people didn't triumphantly rise like immigrant phoenix in the times before state/federal welfare programs -- they largely stayed impoverished and worked themselves hard to even stay that way. To claim that the working welfare class would be better without the welfare portion is to ignore this nation's labor history and how people fared then.

Edit: This doesn't mean that government always acts in people's best interests either, of course.

Edited, Apr 20th 2015 3:08pm by Jophiel