5 ms·

I agree with your main points, but did your closing sentence need to get racist?

smoyer 15y ago
That statement may have a bit of racial stereotyping as we can be sure that not all (100%) Asian immigrants were so frugal but I don't see any malicious intent ... I get the impression that the statement is positive. I know I've been impressed by the work ethic of many immigrants I know (Asian and otherwise) compared to those who sit and wait for their government welfare checks. I understand welfare for those who are truly needy, but there needs to be a way to lift them up so that it's not permanent (with perhaps the exception of those with disabilities that prevent it).
- _delirium 15y ago
  I guess I don't mind providing people the bare minimum to live without strings attached. I'd actually agree with Hayek and Friedman that we should attach fewer strings and just make them cash payments, because that's less distorting; all the book-keeping and social engineering to try to get people off welfare, and to not "waste" the welfare money when they're on it (Section 8 housing, food stamps, etc.) costs more and distorts the economy more than just paying them would. I don't think great things in civilization get done solely out of people needing to work the bare minimum to survive anyway; if that's all they were going to work, just paying them $10k subsistence is not a huge loss to society, and even pretty cheap by the standards of the other stuff we spend money on. Actually it'd be a pretty sad commentary on civilization if it were only the threat of literally being homeless/starving that inspired people to work; that's what it was like in subsistence-farming days, but surely a wealthy country can move beyond that, and make the baseline something higher, even if only "ramen + crappy apartment"? Plus, I think we'd make it back in how much it'd increase entrepreneurship if people felt more confident in a safety net being there if they failed (people from lower-class backgrounds w/o a family safety net, in particular, are very afraid to leave steady jobs if they have one).
  - smoyer 15y ago
    Well said ... plus, it would only cost half as much because we could get rid of the highly-paid bureaucrats administering the system (assuming they were capable of keeping a job elsewhere versus going on welfare themselves).
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    Lets assume that ten percent of Americans choose to take the ten grand/year you suggest. Thats 30 million times ten times one thousand. Thats 300 billion dollars. That is ten times the cost for the war in Iraq back in 2001 and 2002 (both years). How on earth do you think the US could pay that considering that it has a deep deficit in the first place?
    - _delirium 15y ago
      Well, in the first place, that's 8% of the federal budget, which seems like a pretty small price to pay for ensuring that everyone has a basic existence (minimal food/shelter). There are certainly stupider things we spend 8% of the federal budget on. And in any case, one purpose is to be a replacement for the current piecemeal programs we have, which aren't cheap to begin with. Food stamps + Section 8 + EITC currently costs about $150 billion per year, plus some additional amount in bureaucracy and litigation due to complex rules, plus some additional economic damage caused by market distortion due to the fact that food stamps + section 8 aren't normal cash (EITC is better for that). That leaves maybe $100-150b, some of which is probably also redundant with existing welfare programs (I just picked three big ones), or about 3-4% of the federal budget. If you want to keep it budget-neutral, how about an across-the-board 3-4% cut to all other budget categories in return? Or, we could just, as you point out, remove the temporary "overseas contingency operations" (Iraq/Afghanistan wars) supplement to the regular DoD budget, which is $125b in 2012, returning the DoD to its baseline budget. If I had a line-item veto pen I could pretty easily come up with another few hundred billion in savings if you'd like (cut agriculture subsidies, cut Medicare Part D, transition TSA/air-traffic-control to being fully user-fee-funded, do another round of domestic military-base closures through a BRAC-like process, etc., etc.). :)
    - lurker19 15y ago
- eru 15y ago
  > I get the impression that the statement is positive. I know I've been impressed by the work ethic of many immigrants I know (Asian and otherwise) compared to those who sit and wait for their government welfare checks. That's partly because being an immigrant in itself filters out the people to lazy to leave their home country.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    The U.S.'s immigration policies also take a highly biased sample of Asian immigrants, generally the highly educated, and those who already have enough money to do things like pay out of pocket for a U.S. masters degree (which gets you a student visa, which makes it easier, though still tricky, to end up with other kinds of visas). Geography alone gives us different socio-economic cross-sections of Asian versus Mexican immigrants, for example. In cases where that isn't true, Asian immigrants aren't generally any more successful than other immigrants. For example, the Hmong population in the U.S., who mainly came as refugees from the Southeast Asian wars, has a very high poverty rate even 35 years later (around 30%, versus a U.S. national average of 10%).
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
eru 15y ago
What's racist about that sentence?
badclient 15y ago
Racist? LOL, I'm Asian and I did not find it offensive--in fact, quite the opposite. I totally agree with him.
- lurker19 15y ago
  Racist in the other direction.
bdunbar 15y ago
I didn't see racism there. There are a whole lot of white folks embedded in their own failed culture in the U.S. Edit: never mind - I read the wrong post.
hugh3 15y ago
It's not racist at all. Quite the opposite. It's culture-ist. It suggests that the success of Asian immigrants is not due to their race at all, it's due to their culture. And that this culture can be emulated by people of other races to achieve similar success. That's the exact opposite of the racist view, which would be that Asians are richer than black people because Asians are better than black people.
- zasz 15y ago
  I think the culture argument is bullshit. I assure you, there are a lot of dumb and lazy Asians out there. The US has been good at importing the grad students, the hardworking creme de la creme, that's all.

That statement may have a bit of racial stereotyping as we can be sure that not all (100%) Asian immigrants were so frugal but I don't see any malicious intent ... I get the impression that the statement is positive. I know I've been impressed by the work ethic of many immigrants I know (Asian and otherwise) compared to those who sit and wait for their government welfare checks. I understand welfare for those who are truly needy, but there needs to be a way to lift them up so that it's not permanent (with perhaps the exception of those with disabilities that prevent it).

_delirium 15y ago
I guess I don't mind providing people the bare minimum to live without strings attached. I'd actually agree with Hayek and Friedman that we should attach fewer strings and just make them cash payments, because that's less distorting; all the book-keeping and social engineering to try to get people off welfare, and to not "waste" the welfare money when they're on it (Section 8 housing, food stamps, etc.) costs more and distorts the economy more than just paying them would. I don't think great things in civilization get done solely out of people needing to work the bare minimum to survive anyway; if that's all they were going to work, just paying them $10k subsistence is not a huge loss to society, and even pretty cheap by the standards of the other stuff we spend money on. Actually it'd be a pretty sad commentary on civilization if it were only the threat of literally being homeless/starving that inspired people to work; that's what it was like in subsistence-farming days, but surely a wealthy country can move beyond that, and make the baseline something higher, even if only "ramen + crappy apartment"? Plus, I think we'd make it back in how much it'd increase entrepreneurship if people felt more confident in a safety net being there if they failed (people from lower-class backgrounds w/o a family safety net, in particular, are very afraid to leave steady jobs if they have one).
- smoyer 15y ago
  Well said ... plus, it would only cost half as much because we could get rid of the highly-paid bureaucrats administering the system (assuming they were capable of keeping a job elsewhere versus going on welfare themselves).
- tomjen3 15y ago
  Lets assume that ten percent of Americans choose to take the ten grand/year you suggest. Thats 30 million times ten times one thousand. Thats 300 billion dollars. That is ten times the cost for the war in Iraq back in 2001 and 2002 (both years). How on earth do you think the US could pay that considering that it has a deep deficit in the first place?
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Well, in the first place, that's 8% of the federal budget, which seems like a pretty small price to pay for ensuring that everyone has a basic existence (minimal food/shelter). There are certainly stupider things we spend 8% of the federal budget on. And in any case, one purpose is to be a replacement for the current piecemeal programs we have, which aren't cheap to begin with. Food stamps + Section 8 + EITC currently costs about $150 billion per year, plus some additional amount in bureaucracy and litigation due to complex rules, plus some additional economic damage caused by market distortion due to the fact that food stamps + section 8 aren't normal cash (EITC is better for that). That leaves maybe $100-150b, some of which is probably also redundant with existing welfare programs (I just picked three big ones), or about 3-4% of the federal budget. If you want to keep it budget-neutral, how about an across-the-board 3-4% cut to all other budget categories in return? Or, we could just, as you point out, remove the temporary "overseas contingency operations" (Iraq/Afghanistan wars) supplement to the regular DoD budget, which is $125b in 2012, returning the DoD to its baseline budget. If I had a line-item veto pen I could pretty easily come up with another few hundred billion in savings if you'd like (cut agriculture subsidies, cut Medicare Part D, transition TSA/air-traffic-control to being fully user-fee-funded, do another round of domestic military-base closures through a BRAC-like process, etc., etc.). :)
  - lurker19 15y ago
eru 15y ago
> I get the impression that the statement is positive. I know I've been impressed by the work ethic of many immigrants I know (Asian and otherwise) compared to those who sit and wait for their government welfare checks. That's partly because being an immigrant in itself filters out the people to lazy to leave their home country.
- _delirium 15y ago
  The U.S.'s immigration policies also take a highly biased sample of Asian immigrants, generally the highly educated, and those who already have enough money to do things like pay out of pocket for a U.S. masters degree (which gets you a student visa, which makes it easier, though still tricky, to end up with other kinds of visas). Geography alone gives us different socio-economic cross-sections of Asian versus Mexican immigrants, for example. In cases where that isn't true, Asian immigrants aren't generally any more successful than other immigrants. For example, the Hmong population in the U.S., who mainly came as refugees from the Southeast Asian wars, has a very high poverty rate even 35 years later (around 30%, versus a U.S. national average of 10%).
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

eru 15y ago

What's racist about that sentence?

badclient 15y ago

Racist? LOL, I'm Asian and I did not find it offensive--in fact, quite the opposite. I totally agree with him.

lurker19 15y ago
Racist in the other direction.

bdunbar 15y ago

I didn't see racism there. There are a whole lot of white folks embedded in their own failed culture in the U.S. Edit: never mind - I read the wrong post.

hugh3 15y ago

It's not racist at all. Quite the opposite. It's culture-ist. It suggests that the success of Asian immigrants is not due to their race at all, it's due to their culture. And that this culture can be emulated by people of other races to achieve similar success. That's the exact opposite of the racist view, which would be that Asians are richer than black people because Asians are better than black people.

zasz 15y ago
I think the culture argument is bullshit. I assure you, there are a lot of dumb and lazy Asians out there. The US has been good at importing the grad students, the hardworking creme de la creme, that's all.