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> Taxes are not handouts Taxes fund welfare/entitlements, which are literally handouts. Your beef is with the mechanism by which the welfare is funded. > Ultr

by bhupy 6y ago

> Taxes are not handouts Taxes fund welfare/entitlements, which are literally handouts. Your beef is with the mechanism by which the welfare is funded. > Ultra rich people can change tax laws to benefit them so that they can throw some money on a charity. Why do you think that is good option? I'm not making a value judgement, I'm showing you the current result of it. You took issue with the observation that consumption metrics include "handouts", implying a hypothetical that such handouts might cease to exist. I rebutted that hypotheticals are impossible to falsify, and that the real world results speak for themselves. > Not sure why a random blog post is data point. It's not a "random blog post", it's data published by Indeed's labor market research lab. In any case, the idea that the collective standard of living typically improves with bull markets, and that the last 10 years have been a bull market...isn't controversial. > What cultural differences make Americans do more drugs and be more obese? Great question, we don't know! But it's a phenomenon that we observe empirically: Americans on average consume more sugar, eat less healthy, and abuse more opioids. Evidence in the link I shared shows that simply changing that culture can bring the average life expectancy to parity with OECD peer nations (modulo car crashes and gun homicides). > And yet US is behind among the developed world. Again, you're using a metric that internally compares income, and using that to somehow make external comparisons between cohorts. "Inequality adjusted HDI" does not tell us what the absolute standard of living is, and it does not tell us how the poor in the US fare compared to poor people in other countries — it just tells us how unequal the US is. The poorest people in America could be richer than even the median earners of every other country, and the inequality-adjusted HDI wouldn't change all that much as long as there are ultra-rich billionaires like Bezos, Gates, et al. The GP comment claimed: "Isnt the US poor people in worse conditions than the poor in other developed countries?". Inequality-adjusted HDI is ill-equipped to answer that question. The specific answer to that question is "No", based on the specific, directly related metric that compares the standard of living of the bottom 20% of the US with their counterparts in other comparable OECD countries. Even median earners in the US are better off than their counterparts in most other comparable rich countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c... You wouldn't know that by looking at the inequality-adjusted HDI, because what it measures is completely unrelated. To remind you again: Internally relative comparisons compared across countries (like inequality-adjusted HDI and poverty rate) tell us close to nothing about how well off (or not) the poor are. To suggest otherwise is just poor data science. The important metric as it relates to the GP commenter here are those that directly compare standards of living across countries, by income level (apples to apples) — and that's typically done by measuring PPP adjusted income and/or consumption by quintile, and then comparing those across countries.

sumedh 6y ago
> Your beef is with the mechanism by which the welfare is funded. I still dont understand why do you think it better to depend on scraps thrown by rich people just because they are better at manipulation laws for their benefit? >. I rebutted that hypotheticals are impossible to falsify, and that the real world results speak for themselves. Maybe I missed that part where did you do that? > it's data published by Indeed's labor market research lab. So its just indeed's data which may not reflect the actual state of the market? > Evidence in the link I shared shows that simply changing that culture can bring the average life expectancy to parity with OECD peer nations Hypothetically everything is possible but in reality its not. > The poorest people in America could be richer than even the median earners of every other country Since you dont like the data, lets look at some actual use cases. How much would a poor mother in US spend on pregnancy in a hospital, atleast in Australian Govt hospitals its zero dollars, is that the same in US?
- bhupy 6y ago
  > I still dont understand why do you think it better to depend on scraps thrown by rich people just because they are better at manipulation laws for their benefit? I never said I think that, I never made any value judgements about charity. All I said was that: 1) it isn't some forgone conclusion that charity is inherently bad, or something we inherently have to replace entirely with government welfare, and 2) you have to look at the outcome of the system as it exists today, and per the OECD data, the poorest 20% of the US are richer than the average person in Canada, Greece, the UK, Sweden, Australia, etc — once you account for all forms of income, transfers, in kind benefits, charity, etc. When analyzing the standard of living for the bottom 20% in the US, it's a misrepresentation of reality to ignore charity because the US happens to be the most charitable nation on the planet: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generous-country-but-americans-say-debt-is-keeping-them-from-giving-more-to-charity-2019-10-18 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generou... I also think it's a mischaracterization of the status quo to consider charity "scraps thrown by rich people". In general, you should try to articulate the best version of your opponents point of view before trying to defeat it. I'll do it for you: in the US, charity accounts for $427B per year — hardly "scraps": https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2019-americans-gave-427-71-billion-to-charity-in-2018-amid-complex-year-for-charitable-giving/ https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2019-americans-gave-427-71-.... > Maybe I missed that part where did you do that? By showing you the OECD rankings of per-person consumption, including the average consumption of the bottom 20% of US persons. > So its just indeed's data which may not reflect the actual state of the market? It's a compelling data point because Indeed is one of the largest job boards on the market today, and has income and employment data. In any case, because you don't like the data, I've found another source that corroborates Indeed's findings: the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-wage-workers-are-getting-bigger-raises-than-bosses/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-wage-workers-are-getting-bi... > Hypothetically everything is possible but in reality its not. Just declaring it doesn't make it so. Per the actual data that I showed you, the majority of the variance in US's average life expectancy is attributable to lifestyle choices and cultural factors (obesity rate, opioid deaths, car travel, homicide rate). That data isn't a hypothetical. It stands to reason that changing this culture will provably bring the US's average life expectancy close to parity with OECD nations. It is also a demonstration of the folly of "averages" in general. When Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average wealth of everyone in the bar increases many-fold. Likewise, when an opioid addict walks into a bar, the average life expectancy of everyone in the bar falls. > Since you dont like the data, lets look at some actual use cases. No, I never said I "don't like the data", I pointed out that the data that you cited is completely unrelated to the question at hand: how do the poor in the US compare to the poor in other first world countries. "Inequality adjusted HDI" doesn't answer that question; it's totally unrelated. It would be like me citing the average SAT score among high school students in the world when answering the question: "which country has the best universities?" > How much would a poor mother in US spend on pregnancy in a hospital, atleast in Australian Govt hospitals its zero dollars, is that the same in US? A mother in the bottom 20% in the US would spend close to nothing on pregnancy in a hospital because they would be covered by Medicaid, in addition to receiving the Child Tax Credit for every child the mother already has (which was doubled in 2017). If the mother in the US was employed, they would also receive cash in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit. If the mother was unemployed, they would qualify for unemployment insurance, and during the pandemic that's actually higher than the median wage. In fact, one of the bigger problems with the US's healthcare system is that it's fragmented: https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1234510323425652737 https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1234510323425652737 — 60% of Americans have some of the best healthcare in the world, and that includes Medicaid recipients, all of whom are in the bottom 20% in the US. This is also why you need to look at total PPP adjusted consumption AFTER transfers and in-kind benefits, which is what the OECD data does.

by bhupy 6y ago

sumedh 6y ago

> Your beef is with the mechanism by which the welfare is funded. I still dont understand why do you think it better to depend on scraps thrown by rich people just because they are better at manipulation laws for their benefit? >. I rebutted that hypotheticals are impossible to falsify, and that the real world results speak for themselves. Maybe I missed that part where did you do that? > it's data published by Indeed's labor market research lab. So its just indeed's data which may not reflect the actual state of the market? > Evidence in the link I shared shows that simply changing that culture can bring the average life expectancy to parity with OECD peer nations Hypothetically everything is possible but in reality its not. > The poorest people in America could be richer than even the median earners of every other country Since you dont like the data, lets look at some actual use cases. How much would a poor mother in US spend on pregnancy in a hospital, atleast in Australian Govt hospitals its zero dollars, is that the same in US?

bhupy 6y ago
> I still dont understand why do you think it better to depend on scraps thrown by rich people just because they are better at manipulation laws for their benefit? I never said I think that, I never made any value judgements about charity. All I said was that: 1) it isn't some forgone conclusion that charity is inherently bad, or something we inherently have to replace entirely with government welfare, and 2) you have to look at the outcome of the system as it exists today, and per the OECD data, the poorest 20% of the US are richer than the average person in Canada, Greece, the UK, Sweden, Australia, etc — once you account for all forms of income, transfers, in kind benefits, charity, etc. When analyzing the standard of living for the bottom 20% in the US, it's a misrepresentation of reality to ignore charity because the US happens to be the most charitable nation on the planet: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generous-country-but-americans-say-debt-is-keeping-them-from-giving-more-to-charity-2019-10-18 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generou... I also think it's a mischaracterization of the status quo to consider charity "scraps thrown by rich people". In general, you should try to articulate the best version of your opponents point of view before trying to defeat it. I'll do it for you: in the US, charity accounts for $427B per year — hardly "scraps": https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2019-americans-gave-427-71-billion-to-charity-in-2018-amid-complex-year-for-charitable-giving/ https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2019-americans-gave-427-71-.... > Maybe I missed that part where did you do that? By showing you the OECD rankings of per-person consumption, including the average consumption of the bottom 20% of US persons. > So its just indeed's data which may not reflect the actual state of the market? It's a compelling data point because Indeed is one of the largest job boards on the market today, and has income and employment data. In any case, because you don't like the data, I've found another source that corroborates Indeed's findings: the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-wage-workers-are-getting-bigger-raises-than-bosses/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-wage-workers-are-getting-bi... > Hypothetically everything is possible but in reality its not. Just declaring it doesn't make it so. Per the actual data that I showed you, the majority of the variance in US's average life expectancy is attributable to lifestyle choices and cultural factors (obesity rate, opioid deaths, car travel, homicide rate). That data isn't a hypothetical. It stands to reason that changing this culture will provably bring the US's average life expectancy close to parity with OECD nations. It is also a demonstration of the folly of "averages" in general. When Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average wealth of everyone in the bar increases many-fold. Likewise, when an opioid addict walks into a bar, the average life expectancy of everyone in the bar falls. > Since you dont like the data, lets look at some actual use cases. No, I never said I "don't like the data", I pointed out that the data that you cited is completely unrelated to the question at hand: how do the poor in the US compare to the poor in other first world countries. "Inequality adjusted HDI" doesn't answer that question; it's totally unrelated. It would be like me citing the average SAT score among high school students in the world when answering the question: "which country has the best universities?" > How much would a poor mother in US spend on pregnancy in a hospital, atleast in Australian Govt hospitals its zero dollars, is that the same in US? A mother in the bottom 20% in the US would spend close to nothing on pregnancy in a hospital because they would be covered by Medicaid, in addition to receiving the Child Tax Credit for every child the mother already has (which was doubled in 2017). If the mother in the US was employed, they would also receive cash in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit. If the mother was unemployed, they would qualify for unemployment insurance, and during the pandemic that's actually higher than the median wage. In fact, one of the bigger problems with the US's healthcare system is that it's fragmented: https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1234510323425652737 https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1234510323425652737 — 60% of Americans have some of the best healthcare in the world, and that includes Medicaid recipients, all of whom are in the bottom 20% in the US. This is also why you need to look at total PPP adjusted consumption AFTER transfers and in-kind benefits, which is what the OECD data does.