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You can reduce poverty by giving people money. You can reduce homelessness by giving people housing. You can reduce abortions by giving people IUDs and contra

• commandlinefan 6y ago
  > You can reduce poverty by giving people money ... until you run out.
  • bioinformatics 6y ago
    When everything is free, nothing is. Some people have no understanding that infinite money doesn't mean infinite problems in the end. At some point in time, someone will pay the bill.
    • shakezula 6y ago
      Yeah but no one is saying to give people infinite money? Poverty is expensive, and it’s cheaper in the medium term to house homeless for free and get them on track to paying taxes again than to let them run up hospital bills for preventable injuries or illnesses.
      • AnHonestComment 6y ago
        Is there good evidence for this? My experience with “housing first” programs is the buildings end up destroyed and we pay indefinitely to rebuild them while almost none of the population recovers — a negative ROI. That’s setting aside the morality of working construction workers to the point their bodies are broken to subsidies the idle lifestyle of another group.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    A central bank with the authority over a reserve currency never runs out. We (the US Fed, specifically) incinerated $3 trillion in USD value in response to COVID. We've borrowed and continue to service trillions in debt for useless decades+ wars. We can afford it (because it's cheaper to pay for these things upfront, before they're more expensive down the road), and those who say we can't use that as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable conversation about why they don't want to pay for it. Providing the homeless with housing reduces social service and ER costs [1]. Paying for IUDs and other forms of long term birth control reduces unwanted pregnancies [2]. These are just two examples, but the thesis is sound: spend now, get ahead of the curve, and have less spend need in the future. Instead of technical debt, this is policy debt, which leads to actual debt. [1] https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni... [2] https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/information/national-state-data/national https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/information/national-st...
    • RHSeeger 6y ago
      Assuming you just print unlimited amounts of money because it convenient, how do you deal with the inflation that comes with that?
      • jcranmer 6y ago
        At some point, the inflation does become a problem. But notice how it hasn't yet? Take a look at Japan, which has printed an awful lot of money and yet inflation is still hard to come by.
        • freedomben 6y ago
          FYI to people trying to follow, this is MMT, Modern Monetary Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
        • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
          > notice how it hasn't yet? We've been pumping new money into financial channels. A UBI would pump it into real channels. That said, this article is about a municipal program. Cities don't print money. They transfer it from some groups to others.
  • retrac 6y ago
    That's assuming there's no return on the investment, of course. One of the strongest arguments for heavy foreign aid and development in my opinion is the squandered human potential. The man or woman who could be the next Einstein may well be tending a cassava field right now. That's our loss as well as theirs.
    • RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
      > The man or woman who could be the next Einstein may well be tending a cassava field right now. Probably not. Einstein was not a solitary genius. He lived in a culture and society that placed high value on learning and especially math. He was also in communication with some very gifted people such as Emmy Noether who actually discovered the mathematical foundation for much of his work. Srinivasan Ramanujan on the other hand is a much better example of finding someone who had super human abilities in an unexpected place.
      • nitrogen 6y ago
        He lived in a culture and society that placed high value on learning and especially math. Thus the aid, to attempt to create that society.
    • DINKDINK 6y ago
      >That's assuming there's no return on the investment, of course. Was there an assertion that there isn't a return on investment? Asserting that the inevitable outcome of rampant income redistribution is systemic collapse is compatible with "investment in personnel has returns" Forcing the most productive workers to subsidize the consumption of unprofitable workers always leads to failure. "How am I to eat when I only grow 10kg of wheat a year but need to eat 11kg? We should use the state's violence to take 1kg from the farmer who grows 20kg and eats 12kg, Now I can grow 13kg of wheat for every 12kg I eat! A net gain in production!" It's a misallocation of capital, simultaneously (the apparent) investing in the more profitable producer would have been better and (the non apparent) that deluding the worker into believing farming 13kg of wheat for every 12kg increases the price of the input goods and input labor for other industries. Marxist Communism's argument is essentially: "While capitalism's losses are privatized, the fact that the profits are also privatized causes everyone to suffer. Instead of allow bricolage economics, the state's central planners will be to sole source of investment and sole consumer. Profits will be nationalized but losses will also be nationalized." Having that state be the sole investor in an economic -- a monopoly on entrepreneurship -- dooms it to failure. It does not mean "investments [even centrally planned ones] don't returns"
  • vsareto 6y ago
    >... until you run out. Hm, maybe we should chill on these COVID bailouts then
  • LargeWu 6y ago
    Let's look at this a different way. How many people dealing drugs are doing so because they feel they don't have better prospects. How much does drug abuse cost society? If society took the money they put towards policing, treatment, etc., and prevented that problem in the first place by just giving cash handouts, could it save both money and suffering? I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure just reflexively looking at top-line costs isn't the way to improve society.
    • nitrogen 6y ago
      The only ex-dealer I've met was doing it because he could make $800 in an hour in semirural southern California. It's hard to convince someone making easy, risky money to switch to making less, hard, but sure money
      • dsr_ 6y ago
        A government can make it harder, increase the risk, or lower the profitability. For example, if you register heroin addicts and supply them with clean heroin on a regular basis, you destroy the market for heroin. If you legalize and regulate cocaine like tobacco, you can destroy billions of dollars worth of criminal activity.
        • phone8675309 6y ago
          The for-profit prison industry, who use incarcerated people as labor for pennies an hour, has enough political sway in this country that I have reluctantly accepted that these reforms are essentially never going to happen in my lifetime.
          • asdff 6y ago
            In places like Alabama prisoners aren't always paid. Slavery still exists as a punishment in this country.
  • gonzo41 6y ago
    Well if you're American. You've got this big military costing you heaps that could probably have some fat trimmed of it. 1 less JSF would feed and cloth and house a lot of homeless.
    • 0xffff2 6y ago
      If you're the American Federal government, you don't need to trim military spending. You can just print more money. We've been doing it for quite a while now with hardly any ill effect.
      • gonzo41 6y ago
        Oh I totally agree, money's only really 'real' on the small scale. When you're able to wield the authority and sovereignty to make you're own central bank. That's when money becomes a policy tool. Hence why central bankers hate bitcoin.
      • kyuudou 6y ago
        > hardly any ill effect. Surely you're being sarcastic? There's this minor issue of inflation which results in constantly paying more $ for the same goods.
        • 0xffff2 6y ago
          We've been printing money hand over fist since 2008. Inflation has been been normal. Classical economics no longer correctly models reality.
          • noworriesnate 6y ago
            No it's still accurate. The idea of classical economics here is that when the money supply in circulation increases and the total goods for sale stay the same, prices increase as well. What we're seeing is that because the USD is the world's exchange currency, it is a good way for foreigners to store wealth. So all these dollars end up locked away overseas which means that the money supply in circulation doesn't expand. Of course, the US can only play this game so long before we devalue our currency enough that it's worth it for the world to switch to another currency. And when that happens, the USD will no longer be a good store of value, which means all those dollars will come flooding back. And we'll experience decades of inflation in a very short period of time, with disastrous consequences.
  • nicoffeine 6y ago
    This is a tired line that needs to die. It was popularized by Thatcher in 1976. Take a look at Norway's finances from that date until today.[1] Norway decided that the profits from natural resources belonged to every citizen of Norway, not just the companies that landed the leases. The profits were invested in infrastructure, including education, and conservatively invested in external markets as a hedge to internal economic crises. The results speak for themselves.[2] America has more natural resources, more workers, more opportunities to make sensible economic decisions that provide for the well being of everyone. Instead we have an oligarchy that write laws to benefit themselves. The claims that it won't work here because market socialism "doesn't work", or because America is "too different" are pure bullshit. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NOR/norway/gdp-per-capita https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NOR/norway/gdp-per-cap... [2] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/norway/ http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/norway/
  • Apocryphon 6y ago
    The Fed disagrees.
• stolenmerch 6y ago
  These bromides need to be qualified to be of much use. How much reduction? How much money and what kind of housing? What are interesting, meaningful activities that can be prescribed by some central authority in these circumstances? Those are the difficult public policies that need to be worked on. For example, I'm not so sure that giving folks a small welfare check and putting them in highly subsidized public housing projects is the best solution. I'm sure it does reduce poverty and homelessness with some, but does it also increase unemployment and alcoholism? I don't claim to know the answer, but it's worth exploring. Perhaps a UBI is the answer? Just giving away condoms seems less effective than also creating educational programs. There are plenty of alcoholics with interesting things to do, maybe there is more than just lack of resources at play?
  • sosuke 6y ago
    Learned a new word thanks! I thought it was some amalgamation of bro-this or bro-that. Bromides: a trite and unoriginal idea or remark, typically intended to soothe or placate. "feel-good bromides create the illusion of problem solving"
    • dsr_ 6y ago
      They aren't bromides if there's evidence that they work.
    • jrumbut 6y ago
      We need a companion word to bromides for cheap cynicism or "feel-bad bromides"
  • bavell 6y ago
    I've taken a liking to UBI lately but I think you hit the nail on the head. It's easy to assert all the benefits or problems with UBI at face value and argue over them but it's much more difficult to judge the relative scale of each and tease out all the interwoven systems that are affected by such a sweeping program. I'd like to see more experiments, trials and studies but ultimately they'll all fall flat because they're not the real deal (still useful, just not 100% accurate). The 'Universal' part is what makes it so interesting to me and also happens to be impossible to test without actually implementing it at a massive scale. Any data gathered from not-truly-universal sources will always be fundamentally flawed from the perspective of what the impacts actually would be in the real economy. There are lots of open questions around UBI but IMO that just means it needs further debate and discourse.
• snarf21 6y ago
  Exactly, these problems have solutions. It is about political will.
  • unstatusthequo 6y ago
    It’s also about who pays for it. Do you want another $5,000 of your salary involuntarily taken to support just one of these?
    • dsr_ 6y ago
      That's an interesting phrasing. Obviously, if they wants that, it's not involuntary. You strawmanned a figure out of thin air. And you didn't ask if they likes their taxes going to existing corporate subsidies, or F35s, or Presidential golf vacations. All of those could be traded as well.
• rriepe 6y ago
  You can feed a man by giving him a fish.
• x87678r 6y ago
  You can bankrupt a nation by giving everyone what they want.
  • tenuousemphasis 6y ago
    We're already going bankrupt with military spending and bailing out corporations and billionaires.
    • pixelpoet 6y ago
      I find it kind of tragic that you're getting downvoted for saying that. Maybe the people doing the downvoting have never heard of the F-35, or were born after 2008.
  • boomboomsubban 6y ago
    If a nation's production is not enough to guarantee these things to their citizens, it should already be bankrupt.
• rjkennedy98 6y ago
  > You can reduce alcoholism and drug use by giving people interesting and useful things to do. My personal experience makes me doubt this is the case. To give an example, my grandpa was an alcoholic and had a family of 7 and was the lead accountant at a major pharma company. Did he lack things to do? I think the main cause of drug use is availability of drugs. That's one reason why doctors tend to be addicts more than the general population. My anecdotal experience is that the people that used drugs were not people that lacked "interesting and useful things to do", they were rich (and accomplished) kids with money to blow and drugs were always just a phone call away. I'm not against people living motivated and interesting lives, but I just think you are vastly oversimplifying a major public health problem.
  • adewinter 6y ago
    There's a fairly substantial body of research that shows that substance abuse is reduced when individuals are given the opportunity to do things that they find interesting and stimulating. Maybe your grandpa was depressed and was self medicating? One anecdote doesn't really prove that full blown many year research studies are wrong.
• tengbretson 6y ago
  I think you are overestimating people's desire to be treated like pets.
• Spooky23 6y ago
  You can. Reality is different. All of this stuff sounds great from an academic perspective, but life is not simple. There are people who given a couple of thousand dollars a month, will throw a bag of potato chips and beef jerky at their kids and buy some booze and a Mustang on a 7 year, 18% APR payment plan. You cannot make an alcoholic stop drinking. They need to make that decisions. You cannot give people money and assume they will get out of poverty. Money is a tool to solve problems, but it doesn't solve them, many people in poverty who end up on the dole need social and other supports.
  • zach_garwood 6y ago
    The percentage of parents who are negligent parents is small and not relaged to the poor. The percentage of drinkers who are alcoholics is small and not relagated to the poor. Refusing to help anyone because a small percentage of them act in ways that richer Americans get a pass for is unethical.
    • Spooky23 6y ago
      The problem is the you will damage public perception and lose support for a program when you hand out cash to addicts and alcoholics.
• darth_avocado 6y ago
  You can reduce poverty by teaching people employable skills. You can reduce homelessness by making more housing available for purchase. You can reduce abortions by educating people about sex life. You can reduce health care expenses by teaching people to live a healthier life. Except the last two, you're just treating the symptoms and not addressing the actual problems. There are legitimate problems with giving things away for free. A few would realize the full value but for the majority would still remain in the same situation they were before.
• unstatusthequo 6y ago
  Someone has to pay for that. My guess is if you think it’s “free,” you’re not one of the people getting the bill.