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income inequality debate

like 90% of sailor posts

E3mtzukXMAIAOyD
 
One of these billionaires in the report probably makes more in a year than everyone at Wake my senior year made last year combined.
 
sailordeac said:
That does not mean that some were not prevented. Indeed, they almost surely were.
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Perhaps…. but the standard for poverty spending seems to be that it has to eliminate poverty as a concept.
 
ChrisL68 said:
Perhaps…. but the standard for poverty spending seems to be that it has to eliminate poverty as a concept.
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LBJ and Great Society started the War on Poverty.

Reagan and his theory of economics started the War on the Poor.
 
sailordeac said:
Really? Anyone who thinks that poverty can be eliminated is a rather poor thinker. Alleviated yes. Eliminated no. It can, however, be reduced through economic growth.
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Nobody thinks that. People who don't wish to address policy outcomes pretend that the standard is impossible, and therefore failure somehow isn't failure.
 
There are less people in poverty right now in actual numbers than there were in 1959
 
What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor

The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.

Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”

But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil.

As it happened, just as I was watching Republican governors try to immiserate low-wage workers who weren’t yet jumping at the chance to return to poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour, I was sent “A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century,” a plan that seeks to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal, developed by Naomi Zewde, Kyle Strickland, Kelly Capatosto, Ari Glogower and Darrick Hamilton for the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy, would guarantee a $12,500 annual income for every adult and a $4,500 allowance for every child. It’s what wonks call a “negative income tax” plan — unlike a universal basic income, it phases out as households rise into the middle class.

“With poverty, to address it, you just eliminate it,” Hamilton told me. “You give people enough resources so they’re not poor.” Simple, but not cheap. The team estimates that its proposal would cost $876 billion annually. To give a sense of scale, total federal spending in 2019 was about $4.4 trillion, with $1 trillion of that financing Social Security payments and another $1.1 trillion supporting Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Beyond writing that the plan “would require new sources of revenue, additional borrowing or trade-offs with other government funding priorities,” Hamilton and his co-authors don’t say how they’d pay for it, and in our conversation, Hamilton was cagey. “There are many ways in which it can be paid for and deficit spending itself is not bad unless there are certain conditions,” he said. I’m less blasé about financing a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20 percent, but at the same time, it’s clearly possible. Even if the entire thing was funded by taxes, it would only bring America’s tax burden to roughly the average of our peer nations.

I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest. When we spoke, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People can’t reap the returns of their effort without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “If you lack basic necessities with regards to economic well-being, you have no agency. You’re dictated to by others or live in a miserable state.”

But those in the economy with the power to do the dictating profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. “It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, told me.

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.

It is true, of course, that some might use a guaranteed income to play video games or melt into Netflix. But why are they the center of this conversation? We know full well that America is full of hardworking people who are kept poor by very low wages and harsh circumstance. We know many who want a job can’t find one, and many of the jobs people can find are cruel in ways that would appall anyone sitting comfortably behind a desk. We know the absence of child care and affordable housing and decent public transit makes work, to say nothing of advancement, impossible for many. We know people lose jobs they value because of mental illness or physical disability or other factors beyond their control. We are not so naïve as to believe near-poverty and joblessness to be a comfortable condition or an attractive choice.

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the poverty of others, and I don’t think objections to a guaranteed income would manifest as arguments in favor of impoverishment. Instead, we would see much of what we’re seeing now, only magnified: Fears of inflation, lectures about how the government is subsidizing indolence, paeans to the character-building qualities of low-wage labor, worries that the economy will be strangled by taxes or deficits, anger that Uber and Lyft rides have gotten more expensive, sympathy for the struggling employers who can’t fill open roles rather than for the workers who had good reason not to take those jobs. These would reflect not America’s love of poverty but opposition to the inconveniences that would accompany its elimination.

Nor would these costs be merely imagined. Inflation would be a real risk, as prices often rise when wages rise, and some small businesses would shutter if they had to pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power. We’d see more investments in automation and possibly in outsourcing. The truth of our politics lies in the risks we refuse to accept, and it is rising worker power, not continued poverty, that we treat as intolerable. You can see it happening right now, driven by policies far smaller and with effects far more modest than a guaranteed income.

Hamilton, to his credit, was honest about these trade-offs. “Progressives don’t like to talk about this,” he told me. “They want this kumbaya moment. They want to say equity is great for everyone when it’s not. We need to shift our values. The capitalist class stands to lose from this policy, that’s unambiguous. They will have better resourced workers they can’t exploit through wages. Their consumer products and services would be more expensive.”

For the most part, America finds the money to pay for the things it values. In recent decades, and despite deep gridlock in Washington, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East and tax cuts for the wealthy. We have also spent trillions of dollars on health insurance subsidies and coronavirus relief. It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.

“Ultimately, it’s about us as a society saying these privileges and luxuries and comforts that folks in the middle class — or however we describe these economic classes — have, how much are they worth to us?” Jamila Michener, co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, told me. “And are they worth certain levels of deprivation or suffering or even just inequality among people who are living often very different lives from us? That’s a question we often don’t even ask ourselves.”

But we should.
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Fair discussion, IMO.

But politically a non-starter.

I think decoupling health insurance from employers, ensuring an affordable insurance mechanism for comprehensive universal healthcare, creating decent public transportation, ensuring available/affordable childcare (also not tied to specific employer), and a decent minimum wage would all be more politically possible….??
 
Dems don’t want or won’t fight for those things either though
 
Sociologist Herbert Gans figured this out back in 1972 in his seminal work, "The Positive Functions of Poverty." It's always interesting to see mainstream thinkers stumble upon new ideas that are just old sociology.

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Mertonian functional analysis is applied to explain the persistence of poverty, and fifteen functions which poverty and the poor perform for the rest of American society, particularly the affluent, are identified and described. Functional alternatives which would substitute for these functions and make poverty unnecessary are suggested, but the most important alternatives are themselves dysfunctional for the affluent, since they require some redistribution of income and power. A functional analysis of poverty thus comes to many of the same conclusions as radical sociological analysis, demonstrating anew Merton's assertion that functionalism need not be conservative in ideological outlook or implication.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2776496
 
ConnorEl said:
What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor




Fair discussion, IMO.

But politically a non-starter.

I think decoupling health insurance from employers, ensuring an affordable insurance mechanism for comprehensive universal healthcare, creating decent public transportation, ensuring available/affordable childcare (also not tied to specific employer), and a decent minimum wage would all be more politically possible….??
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There are a wide range of policy responses that could be leveled at improving the lives of the working poor, but first some significant part of the population of this country would have to agree that it's even a problem. Seems like most Americans who are not poor either don't realize or won't admit that millions of their fellow Americans have to cobble together several crappy part time jobs without benefits to make ends meet, and even then need government assistance to eke above the poverty line.
 
PhDeac said:
Sociologist Herbert Gans figured this out back in 1972 in his seminal work, "The Positive Functions of Poverty." It's always interesting to see mainstream thinkers stumble upon new ideas that are just old sociology.

----
Mertonian functional analysis is applied to explain the persistence of poverty, and fifteen functions which poverty and the poor perform for the rest of American society, particularly the affluent, are identified and described. Functional alternatives which would substitute for these functions and make poverty unnecessary are suggested, but the most important alternatives are themselves dysfunctional for the affluent, since they require some redistribution of income and power. A functional analysis of poverty thus comes to many of the same conclusions as radical sociological analysis, demonstrating anew Merton's assertion that functionalism need not be conservative in ideological outlook or implication.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2776496
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lol

sociologists in the 70's weren't the first to figure out that some people and societies benefitted from an underclass
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
lol

sociologists in the 70's weren't the first to figure out that some people and societies benefitted from an underclass
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No shit. Didn’t say he was the first. But he outlined those specific functions and wrote pretty much the same thing as Klein. Klein considers him to be a top scholar and didn’t even cite it.
 
Deacon923 said:
There are a wide range of policy responses that could be leveled at improving the lives of the working poor, but first some significant part of the population of this country would have to agree that it's even a problem. Seems like most Americans who are not poor either don't realize or won't admit that millions of their fellow Americans have to cobble together several crappy part time jobs without benefits to make ends meet, and even then need government assistance to eke above the poverty line.
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If they do admit it, then it's the stupid poor's fault for not buying more money.
 
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