218
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
218 points (94.7% liked)
News
23281 readers
4242 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.