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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Oh the ‘throw money at it’ solution to the problem that everyone online loves so much.
These solutions never work, btw. But let’s keep ‘experimenting’
Source?
Welfare was supposed to do this already. What welfare has turned into is a perpetual poverty situation for millions of people.
To the point where people are disincentivized to work, and perpetually stay on welfare.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/19/what-the-data-says-about-food-stamps-in-the-u-s/
That link argues against your claim.
We all know how this works out in reality. 40+ million people are on food stamps and the graduation rate is much lower than the 80-100% that everyone expects from programs like this
LOL. You present evidence, someone quickly reads the citation and shows you it proves the obvious. So you throw your own evidence under the bus for an "everyone knows" argument. How pathetically transparent.
I’m not going to convince you that throwing money at things doesn’t solve any of the problems it promises to. That’s a journey you’ll make on your own as you grow up and start realizing this as you get into adulthood
Reagan's racist ghost, is that you? I haven't heard a good "welfare queens" argument in a while.
You must be hanging out in the wrong places then
The problems you mentioned are created by the welfare system itself.
Welfare cliffs are what disincentivizes work. It’s not that “having welfare disincentivizes work”, its “getting a few more hours, or accepting a small promotion, makes them ineligible for thousands of dollars of benefits”.
It’s ‘throwing money at the problem’ doesn’t work. It never does.
Democrats only ever have one solution “throw money at it until it goes away”
Did you miss up above where I asked you for a source for this?
This whole interaction is hilarious.
Honestly, I would be 100% open to it if you made some kind of argument for why some specific social program is actually making things worse when you study it, because I do think that happens. But, just falling back on thought-terminating cliches like "Welfare never works" and "Democrats only ever have one solution" and refusing to examine them further is not going to bring you any better ability to understand the world, and now you're over here trying to export those malfunctioning thought patterns to other people, and surprise surprise, they're not being friendly to your efforts.
What solutions do democrats have that don’t end up just as funding?
Nice deflection to a different topic. This whole story is about Canada, nothing about the US Democratic party. If for some reason you do want to talk about the effectiveness of "Democratic" fiscal policy versus "Republican" fiscal policy, I'm happy to do that.
Like I said, I'm actually fine having a good-faith discussion about either one of these topics if you're into that, but if you're just interested in tossing little one-sentence quips at me and ignoring relevant things I'm saying or questions that I'm asking, then IDK what the point would be. Surely you can see that, right?
Maybe I’m confusing replies, but didn’t the person I’m responding to ask ‘how did the US go wrong’?
Here's the isolated thread.
This lemmy app doesn’t even take me to the right part of the thread the comments are in half the time.
It’s an absolute mess.
The core issue isn't complicated. No advanced Lemmy required. Giving money to people who have none, as a way to make the world better, either (a) works always, or (b) works when done some ways but not others, or (c ) never works. I say the answer is (b) and I'm happy to show sources and studies; to get to the truth of the matter you have to be open to looking at how things play out and examining evidence.
If you're planning on saying over and over again that it's (c ), then you've done that! Mission accomplished. If you want to dig a little into the reasons why someone would say one thing or the other, and examining evidence from the real world which might or might not agree with you, we can do that too.
Edit: (c ) not (c)
I've read at least 8 of your posts on this topic. Not one time have you put out any ideas that you think would work. You keep saying that throwing money at it doesn't work (without any citations) and that democrats are bad. Not once have you put out a different idea or said anything that WOULD help.
I can tell you from very personal experience that the welfare system does help people and makes lives better. You aren't interested in that, though. You just have an agenda and will dismiss any story as an anecdote and will dismiss any study as biased or incomplete. You won't actually link to anything that supports your position or even state a position outside of "welfare bad."
What kind of source do you need? Welfare was created to get people on their feet and off of welfare, not for a quasi-UBI program that it’s turned into.
If welfare was working, you’d see less and less people receiving it. That’s not what’s happening though. There are more people on welfare now than there was 50 years ago.
The war on poverty has been a failure. Time for a new approach
Why would I put more than the minimal amount of effort into any post on lemmy, knowing that 100 communist teenagers are just going to reply “lol wrong, you fascist” and downvote?
If you want to debate me, I’d rather do that in real time on another program like discord. But lemmy is just a left wing commie shithole
Hey, substantive statements! Okay, I can rock with this.
"Welfare" is a very broad term. It can refer to anything from unemployment benefits, to SNAP, to this story about one-time aid specifically for homeless people in Canada (which is very far removed from anything resembling "welfare" as it's commonly implemented in the US), to section 8 housing or housing assistance, and lots more. There are so many goals and implementation details with varying levels of success that I don't think it makes sense to apply any kind of blanket logic to the whole collection, let along to apply the logic of "this one-time homeless benefit is welfare -> welfare never works -> end of discussion."
Yeah, I 100% agree with this, having been on the receiving end of it myself plenty of times. I don't think I'm doing that to you in any regard, but I do get the frustration with the overall state of discourse here (including from "the left") and reluctance to start any kind of real discussion. All I can say is if that bothers you, you gotta be part of the solution instead of starting to do the same thing yourself.
Lol not interested. You're on Lemmy, and you said specific things on Lemmy, and I replied. If you're suddenly not interested in having a discussion on Lemmy, then I won't try to force you into it I guess.
No, I love talking to you. I wish there were more people around here like you.
I appreciate this discussion. You’ve been a bright spot on lemmy for me, thank you
Can you guys do a comparison between personal welfare and corporate welfare?
Specifically how Corporations are people, yet the welfare they receive is substantially disproportionate to that given to personal welfare (state/federal programs).
I'm interested to see the discussion when it comes to throwing money at companies to fix the problems of underpaid workers and profit-driven inflation.
Also how corporations intentionally have policies that make the taxpayers subsidize the workers? When you start at Walmart, the first thing they do is tell you how to apply for food stamps. There are a ton of places that arrange things so that you're never a full-time employee who therefore gets benefits - permanent use of "temps" from "temp agencies", repeatedly extending "initial probation periods", setting impossible goals then downgrading hours when they're not met, simply refusing to ever give 34 hours a week.
I don’t agree with that either
We have very few homeless people in Germany and we do have welfare. Where do you think the US failed?
Voting democrat, mostly
The actual answer is having a corrupt, monotone bipartisan system.
Thanks for your qualified and thoughtful insight /s
Huh, I looked through your article. It didn't mention anything about people staying on food stamps in order to not work. Given that grocery costs have sky rocketed in recent years, I hardly think that the $300 some odd makes people want to not work, especially coupled with the fact that non-disabled people are required to take any reasonable job and work 30 hours a week. Interesting source for your comment.
When has welfare ever made people richer?
I forgot the point of welfare was to make people rich as opposed to being a last resort safety fence.
I agree, and I would also add that depending on how it's done, it can actually benefit the economy ("make people richer") quite a lot. I thought about replying to them with this whole typed out explanation of how the social safety net of the New Deal, over the next few decades, transformed the US economy from one in which a handful of people kept all the money and everyone else was starving into a hugely more powerful economy where the people involved in running the whole operation were invested in the whole operation's success and permitted to share (a little bit) in the fruits of that success. I'd call that, in the specific way that it was done, a pretty defining success that impacted the whole arc of the 20th century.
Honestly the devil is in the details, and it's also possible erect what was supposed to be a social safety net which actually makes things worse, and if someone wanted to make a coherent argument for why this or any other specific thing was an instance of that, I'd be fine to talk about that. But I've been progressively learning on Lemmy that when someone gives a one-sentence non sequitur partisan response, taking it at face value and trying to be detailed and factual in your response is a mug's game. The number of people who would genuinely be interested in that conversation seems pretty upsettingly small.
I don’t disagree that building a system that creates dependence and de-incentivises personal responsibility and opportunity can be a bad thing, however, I do feel that raising the floor can only be a good thing. I read some study a few years ago about how simply providing childcare and healthcare for people in a bad situation immediately changes their entire situation- suddenly they can work a normal job, not pay out the ass for childcare, and begin to actually better their lives and start saving money. People can then begin to be real contributing members of the economy instead of being trapped in endless “never enough to pay the bills” cycles.
A family member of mine had to quit a job because of harassment years ago and found herself ineligible for any kind of unemployment or welfare benefits because she received $50 a month in child support from an ex husband- the paltry amount of social service she would have received would have been just enough to pay rent and food for her two kids, but nope, that $50 meant she could get nothing. I can’t imagine how stressful that must have been trying to borrow money from family and wondering how she was going to eat and ever get a job to pay it back.
It worked out in the end because family helped out, but what if she was like many and had no one to lean on like that? She could have been homeless.
Yes, agreed. The current system in the US is so far from economic justice that it's hard to even talk about particular details of how to improve it, because the whole thing is such a gilded-age disaster.
I sorta sympathize with this dude who's railing against "welfare," because there is a good point there. I don't think the goal should be just giving money whenever they seem like they need it. However, your point is equally well-taken; if someone's just fucked, then turning them out on the street maybe along with their family definitely isn't the answer. I keep bringing up the New Deal because I feel like that's pretty close to the answer. You can have a job if you want to work. The government is going to out-and-out create a whole bunch of jobs doing stuff that really badly needs doing, and if you want one of them, let's fuckin' get to work. Having a system where the majority of "jobs" are pretty low paying, miserable on a day to day level, and not doing much of anything for anybody involved, is the problem. Then on top of that, if something outside your control changes, you might get turned out on the street, or maybe we give you this minimal handout. Doing that handout seems, to me, better than not, but the problem goes a lot deeper.
There's a bunch of work to be done. We need to improve education in this country, we should be trying to mitigate the apocalyptic damage that climate change is going to cause, we badly need to fix the roads and bridges and electrical infrastructure, stuff like that. There's no shortage of real problems to work on. The problem is that the system doesn't do anything to match up the huge population that wants to have a worthwhile job, with the massive piles of resources (wages) our technological efficiency makes available, with the massive amount of work to be done. It seems like we want everyone to just keep going to their office admin or retail jobs or whatever making $11/hr until we all sink into the boiling sea.
Since it allowed the single mom of a very close friend of mine to feed her kids, one of whom was able to study and get into college, who got a great job and is now rich.
Are you calling what's being done in this story welfare? Because if so, I can cite this time.
Since always. Teaching man to fish is cheaper than providing fish for him every day or whatever they say.
Have you heard about this place called Europe? Look it up. And while you're at it, look up how they handle policies related to financial equality while keeping high productivity and very prosperous societies.
They do work.
We just prefer to give welfare to big oil and banks than to individuals.
Flips page... alright the next experiment for a potential solution is whipping anyone that misses a rent or mortgage payment, but also installing outdoor hot-tubs on streets.
Hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahah