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Everything that is wrong with the way most of the political class pretends to fight poverty can be traced back to one principle: Divide and Conquer Solving a p
by atoav 3y ago
Everything that is wrong with the way most of the political class pretends to fight poverty can be traced back to one principle: Divide and Conquer
Solving a problem is a very stupid idea if:
- your wealth depends on not solving it
- people keep voting for you to solve it
Not to get too political, but this equally applies to politicans who have chosen "foreigners" as their issue. A former friend of mine who turned neo nazi once asked me in a discussion to give him one reason not to vote for $horrible_xenophobic_party. My reason was that they won't solve his problem with foreigners. The last time they had been in government the migration was higher than during the social democratic government before and after. If they would have solved it, they would have taken away the number one topic for which people keep voting them. They are interested in power, corruption and neoliberal economics, the foreigner schtick is just a vehicle to get there.
With poverty it is very similar. Many political parties take poverty as a decoy to explain why the policy they wanted to do anyways will solve it. E.g. cutting social security or ramping up police funding. Actual policies that help have to do with taxing the rich more, giving poor people the access to education and solving basic needs so they can actually make use of that access etc.
But yeah. Trickle down. Any minute now.
- shuntress 3y agoThis is not directly related to your comment but the funny thing about the "trickle down" metaphor is that it actually makes a very strong case against Reaganomics. "Water", in the metaphor, is obviously money and as we all know water (for the most part) "trickles down" from places where there is less of it to places where there is more of it. The rich get richer. The poor stay poorer. Without regular and constant application of outside force in the form of regulation, taxation, redistribution of wealth, monopoly breakups, etc (in the metaphor, this is represented by the Sun) all wealth eventually pools in the few oceans and everywhere else is barren.
- pandaman 3y agoIt's funny because the "trickle down" metaphor has been made up by a Democrat humorist [1]. On the same note, why would you think it was made up for Republicans? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
- godelski 3y agoI think there's some more important factors to add. Many of these problems are exceptionally complex and have no universal solution due to the chaotic nature (i.e. perturbations in initial conditions cause large variations). Often politicians are presenting simple solutions and the voters also are asking for simple solutions. So politicians consider what can be done within an election cycle and voters are not considering the effects of policy often have delayed onsets and the effects will not honestly be known for several election cycles. This is especially interesting to see as many people choose the president based on the current state of the economy. This is conditioned on several bad premises: 1) the president is the major driver of the economy, 2) policies have immediate effects (or at least short term onsets), 3) the economy is predominantly politically driven. These are all examples of short term thinking but there are more complex interactions at play as well. We haven't even talked about congress. Some of these things aren't even true under dictatorships. I'm not sure why we frame them this way but I think it is a destructive feedback loop.