Bernie Madoff criminals are unrelated to the conversation. I guarantee you that Bernie Madoff is not deciding whether to commit crimes based on whether he can get Section 8 housing or not.
But you assume that master criminals aren't smart or don't start out in poor families. The truth of the matter is the majority of criminals get involved with crime because of financial desperation. A man makes a woman pregnant, now hes responsible for children and resorts to crime as alternative income. On the other hand the man who does not want children has less incentive to resort to crime.
It's situations that make people criminals or not, and it's desperation. It's not simply a matter of it being easy. It's easy to rob a bank, it's not easy to get away with it. It's easy to rob a celebrities house, it's not easy to get away with it. A lot of crimes are easy to get into and hard to get out of. Any smart person will know that being a criminal has risks and usually those risks outweigh the rewards but not always.
If someone has a drug habit, or a family then the risks may not outweigh the rewards anymore. Also if the reward is really huge like in Madoffs case the risk definition doesn't outweigh the reward. Madoff got to live like a billionaire for a lot of his life, his family was taken care of, the money he stole already has been consumed and even if society kills him he still made out like a bandit.
On the other hand you have some people who get arrested selling crack. This person might have a gun in their car and $500 worth of crack. Now they go to prison for 10 years, maybe 20 years, over $500 worth of crack? A smart criminal would never risk 20 years in prison over $500 or $500,000, they'd risk 20 years in prison for $500 million.
Once again it's almost always about money. Welfare allows a person to have enough money to survive so that they don't have to apply their genius intellect toward being a criminal mastermind. To assume that there aren't smart poor people is naive and stereotypical. The fact is some people are poor and brilliant at the same time, but not likely to risk going to prison for sake of maintaining whatever benefits they have or keeping whatever they've earned. As long as people have something to lose there is incentive for them not to be criminal but if $8000 a year or $800 a month cannot be had by legit means, they'll find means which aren't legit and get x1000 that amount.
$800 a month on welfare or $800 a month as a drug dealer? Either way they'll get the money, only as a drug dealer theres a lot more risk in getting it as they'd have to risk decades in prison. That is the only difference.
I am talking about the security of your assets, not your person. Managing a large sum of money takes effort (and usually money). You can't just stuff a bunch of millions under a mattress. You could buy gold, and even then it is not a perfectly safe investment, but that won't maximize your income. Then there's also figuring out where to keep that gold.
You can buy property, you can buy gold, you can buy construction companies, or invest in NGO's. There are ways to and places to put your money if you have it so that it's safe, if that is your agenda. Unfortunately most of us will never have enough money to have to worry about that problem.
Sure it's a problem but when you have that kind of money you can quit whatever you are doing and focus all your effort into solving that problem.
Having "some" people (some being a value that should be as close to zero as possible) on the government dole is fine and unavoidable, unless you live in anarchy I guess. The number on the dole seems to increase as the federal government gets more and more power. There is a trend towards more and more people being on the dole for more and more reasons. It's gone from being a system with the purpose of helping folks out temporarily to get through a tough time period, or helping a segment of the population that is unable to care for itself, to being a blanket safety net for anything that might ever possibly go wrong in a person's life, and without regard to whether or not that person is in the situation they are in because of circumstances out of their control or because they made stupid decisions. Even if it was out of control, why is the default viewpoint "everyone else must be forced to take care of them?"
Fundamentally I just disagree that the role of (federal) government should have anything to do with providing social services in any form whatsoever. It should be left up to the states to decide how they should handle it.
Whats wrong with having a blanket safety-net? Yes it costs money but it's still cheaper than all other alternatives. If someone does not want to work or can't work, $8000 a year is not a lot of money at all. In my opinion the negative income tax should be in effect and everybody who does not have a job should be given a mandatory income of whatever people currently get from the dole. It's no different than having a minimum wage or social security, or medicare or financial aid or any other program. These sorts of spending if done right actually increase demand and improve local economies so it's necessary.
Also we just don't need as many workers anymore. The amount of work to do is less, but we still keep creating a lot of people. The solution is to reduce the dole for people who have kids so that the incentive of the dole is given to people who don't want kids. This way the population of people on the dole does not increase. Currently welfare is tailored for families and mothers and the more babies they have the more money they get. This provides incentive to create the octomom effect which is the crux of the problem.
I agree with you that the federal government was never designed for this role, this is why I said a negative income tax would be the libertarian solution. It increases liberty for the have nots, giving them the choice to use their income to buy whatever they want rather than to have small businesses or even worse big businesses competing for government contracts you'd have local businesses competing for consumers which means they'd have to hire marketing firms and compete with each other which creates even more economic activity.
Also it's better that consumers have choices. They should receive enough money to live, if they are smart they'll use it to pay their rent and bills, buy what they need, if they aren't so smart they'll gamble it sway. The government should not pick winners and losers in the market, the consumers and competition should pick the winners and losers. The problem we have right now is that there are far more people than jobs, jobs are being shipped overseas so either people are on unemployment, welfare, disability, food stamps or something but this is just the nature of the economic environment.
If we removed unemployment, welfare, all these different benefits then there would be no stimulus effect. The stimulus basically amounts to giving money back to consumers so they can increase demand. The problem is they didn't give enough money. Giving everyone the dole would have a positive effect long term but the Republicans are too ideological to focus on results. And of course you don't just give out money to everybody equally, you give more money to people who better themselves and who work hard.
If we don't do this what is going to happen is in 50 years most of the jobs that exist now wont exist an
What I just don't understand is why, if crime rates have been going steadily down for some decades now, do they feel like they need to be more invasive and offensive in their fight against crime
Because they see it as why settle for a low crime rate when they can (in bad logical theory) turn it into a no crime rate.
Only the crime rate includes victimless crimes. It's not like you or I decide what is or isn't a crime. It's not like crimes and laws are decided based on reason or logic or game theory, no thats decided based upon the morality of Christian churches and other moralists who think they know whats best for us, and by elites who want to protect their wealth and turf.
As far as I'm concerned everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And we have too many crimes, not too many criminals. When you make everything that people like to do or have to do illegal you create excuses for surveillance.
So they get caught and they go to prison. They get an attorney, a free room, and three squares a day (all paid for by you-know-who) for a few years until its time to go back out into the real world. Not only that, but in the meantime they can make new contacts, gain street cred, and receive instruction in the finer points of criminality from their peers while incarcerated.
Again my tax dollars used to foster and foment criminality.
The problem is still lack of realistic options. If the best options a person has is prison, then they'll prepare themselves to go to prison as it will seem like an unavoidable consequence of living in society. The only way to have less criminals is to give a significant amount of money to a significant amount of people who wish to use that money to better themselves.
Take 5 people living on welfare in 2010, make them sign a contract which says they'll go to college, get educated, and then start a business. If they fulfill their end of the contract college is free and $50,000 is set aside for them to start a business.
Then you can say hard work is better than being lazy because hard work would actually lead to realistic options. The current system is set up so that hard work doesn't lead anywhere. You can work hard, you can get educated, you still aren't guaranteed a job. You can't start a business because you have bad credit, and you have bad credit because you worked hard and still got laid off and couldn't pay your bills on time.
The working poor actually have less options than the people living on welfare. They receive no help whatsoever but receive the majority of the punishments which are either prison time or bad credit or lack of healthcare.
There is no way to solve the problem by simply demanding harder work. On a concentration camp hard work might set you free but in the real world hard work often leads to even deeper slavery, with crappy wages, no benefits from the federal government or from the private sector.
My solution is to give everybody the $8000 who does not have a job. If you can't find a job, if you are disabled, or whatever the reason, you should receive the $8000. If you want to work hard you should be able to sign a contract to agree to work hard and be guaranteed a reward if you do work hard. Hard work has to equal guaranteed consistent rewards to have a positive reinforcement effect.
You cannot modify behavior if you tell people to work harder and longer for less pay, which is basically punishing them for hard work, but then say how much you value hard work. The USA does not value hard work. Hard work often only leads to harder work in the future. The hardest working people, people who are serving food or doing retail or standing on their feet for 12 hours a day, if they are lucky they'll be doing that 10 years from now, only their money wont take them as far as the cost of living will increase, healthcare costs will increase, their body will have aged and will have started to break down from the hard work, and they'll have nothing to show for it.
The single mother who works two jobs, she's the hardest worker in America. She dies in her 50s and on her tombstone it says she worked hard. Unfortunately she did not have the money for healthcare, she did not have the money to retire because she never made enough money to save, her children did not have the money to go to college and they did not believe in accepting financial aid because they did not want to leech from society, so they work two jobs doing the same their their mother did.
Do you see how pointless hard work is in this context? Hard work has to lead to big rewards and those rewards have to be guaranteed. It has to lead to a better job, a better life, otherwise the entire system is broken. If people believe their hard work and effort is better invested doing criminal work, they'll do that.
So it's not that people don't work hard, it's not even that a lot of people are on SSI or Welfare, it's that any reasonable pe
No, it's not any more complicated than that at all. For the cases where someone is physically or mentally incapable of providing for themselves, we have programs and such for those people. For everyone else, you get off your ass and you work. You work two jobs if you have to, you learn to live without things. If you have food, water, and shelter, you can live. It is not my responsibility to be forced to subsidize your life, no matter how downtrodden it might be. People lived and prospered without health insurance and they will continue to do so until the end of time.
The real problem is people have come to expect too much to be handed to them, or that they are entitled to have certain things. If they don't have them, then by God it's the government's responsibility to make sure they do. How does the government do that? By forcing someone else to give up some of their property so it can be redistributed to those "in need."
Just as people expect a job to be handed to them? The only solution is to let people start their own businesses and provide jobs for themselves and their families. McDonalds, Walmart, Starbucks, these big businesses don't care about American families.
Your solution is to tell people to work harder, hard work in a desperate environment can lead to jail. I was specific in my example because to assume you'll always be able to get a job is having an unrealistic expectation, so if you cannot get a job, getting a job is no longer an option, what alternatives do you create in instances where getting a job isn't an option?
The government could spend half of the money spent on the prison and crime system on funding small businesses. Would you feel better about your tax dollars if everyone on the dole could be given free money to start a business? any kind of business? Or would you want to regulate what kind of business they can run? Or would you say that giving money to start businesses is a waste of tax dollars?
If you don't want criminals, and you don't want people living on the dole, then you have to give the money to small businesses but either way you cannot have a society or a functioning economy unless everybody has money to spend. You cannot create demand unless you have the dole, or unless your tax dollars are basically used to give people money to buy whatever you are selling.
Basically if you cut everyone off the dole then you have less demand for your products and services and you make the economy even worse. What you don't realize is that by giving people a minimum income it guarantees a minimum demand, which is good for the small businesses who supply these demands.
A minimum income is necessary to have a society, unless you want to bring back slavery.
You are assuming income and/or funds are linearly related to security under some definition of it. This is not necessarily true. It is correct that having more money gives you more ability to deal with potential threats to your security. In this way increasing money leads to increasing security. However, greater funds tend to attract greater threats and take more substantial effort to protect and maintain. This is why rich people do not lead completely stress free lives. There are more stressful and less stressful ways to make money, but I would suspect that if risk is proportional to income then it is impossible to eliminate some degree of stress from the act of increasing income.
It is possible that the particulars of the relations are such that up to a point, security benefits from extra money outweigh the cost incurred by having to manage those additional assets, after which increasing your money does not increase your happiness (limit of the difference is +0) or decreases it (e.g. happiness goes up with x^2 and stress cost with x^3). If so, it is possible that this point is $75k.
That suggests the question of boundless economical growth is at all possible, for example with corporations. Although huge, profitable corporations do exist, I think it is true that ultimately any market is finite- same as and because of the people on the planet, and the resources on it are finite, hence there is a diminishing returns acting on the agent. But is it possible that the diminishing returns become comprised largely of the security expenditures? Or, what about countries? Is there a fundamental limit to how large a state can becomes before it fails to maintain its own integrity, leading to eventual collapse?
If you are a celebrity your security expenses will be greater than an ordinary person. If you are exceptionally rich and in a poor neighborhood your security expenses will be greater than an ordinary person.
But for the most part when you have money you are better off than when you don't have money. You can't even get a good lawyer when you don't have money. And you can forget about body guards, a gated community, or anything like that.
What other alternatives exist? List some. Walmart is minimum wage so it's not an alternative. Mc Donalds is minimum wage so it's not an alternative.
There are other employers in the U.S. besides Walmart and McDonalds. Presumably, the vast majority of/. work for those others.
There are tons of opportunities out there for people who bother to look for them.
So then all the people without jobs have to think of their problem like this, "How I get uniquename fired so that I may take his place?", this could be as easy as sending an anonymous phonecall or spoofing an email so it looks like it's from you, or building a smear site about you.
The point I'm making is when you have something that people want and you remove every alternative to competing with or confronting you to take what you have, eventually those people are going to spend all their energy and free time figuring out how to take what you have.
You cannot earn a job unless a lot of people get fired to create job openings. If all social programs were removed there would still be jobs, the new industry would be paying people to get people they don't like fired, paying people to get people they liked hired.
It's really not that many people, and doesn't account for much of the budget. In an advanced society I think this is exactly what we need, and where we should aim to head. Right now, if you are happy living of 10 grand or so, you don't have to work. Sure it sucks, and surprisingly people still choose to. Hopefully we will steadily increase how much you get for not working, 20 grand, 30 grand, with more and more people not working. The future promises good lives for everyone, with machines doing more and more work.
What's sad is that there are still poor and homeless people, while others know the system and live happily without working.
What you are talking about is a negative income tax, which I support. If someone does not want to work they should take the $8,000 and live like that. Society will say "But these people are leeching off us", in reality it's actually going to cost more to pay for just about any other path they take. If you give universal healthcare to all thats going to cost, if you put them in prison thats going to cost, the point is that every individual born into society costs society.
Society has to figure out how to become efficient enough to make use of the individuals it has or it should work to decrease the birth rate so that there wont be a need for as many prisons or welfare receivers etc, or the final alternative is the libertarian alternative where every sort of activity which is victimless is legalized and let the people work for themselves, this way you don't have to tell them to "get a job" they can just create a job to fill a need. Whether this is drug dealer, prostitute, bodyguard, housekeeper, or whatever.
Part of the reason theres more people on welfare is because the legit work is made increasingly harder to get, while the illegal work is made increasingly illegal. It's really no different than undocumented workers, employers want cheap labor but you can't have cheap labor without expanding the social services or paying for prisons and mental hospitals. Ultimately there is no way to become efficient without actually becoming efficient.
Of the criminals I have known in life, they have been criminals because it was easy at the moment. They did not look at the long term. The criminal behavior was also financial compatible with continuing to receive SSI, SDI, and Section 8. It is as likely as not that these programs increase crime as it is that they decrease it.
Thats because you haven't known any successful criminals. Most successful criminals commit crimes after having well thought out plans, and they commit crimes for financial gain. Think Bernie Madoff. Unsuccessful criminals rob a bank physically.
The reason we have drug lords, gangs and cabals is precisely because theres way more people than jobs and either the people who hate social programs will hire the people without jobs, or the crime lord will.
People who are anti-social programs have to stop worrying about crime. You cannot be both anti crime and against the social programs which exist to give people alternatives to being criminals. Not everybody will find a job, it's just the numbers that for every job offer there are 5 other people competing for the same job. In this environment the crime lord will offer the same person a job in which there is nobody competing for it, and from which no taxes have to be paid, all the money is in cash.
SSI gives people a choice to take $8000 a year of welfare money, or be a criminal and earn slightly more money than this but then cost society $30,000 a year or perhaps more.
Face it, until there is a job that everybody can do, there will be inefficiency.
People on SSI are still well below the article's threshold of $75K, so the motivation to find happiness throuigh increased income is still there. However, if they get a regular wage earning job they will lose their SSI benefits. Thus, any "off the books" dollars they earn can be kept right along with their gubermint check. Therefore, legimate employment is not as attractive to them as employment as a prostitute, illicit drug merchant, thief, burgular, etc.
So the way I see it, my tax dollars go toward making more criminals.
Only if they get arrested then they get cut off SSI and lose their benefits so the risk of loss of benefits is what would keep them from becoming a criminal. If they don't receive any benefits then they have absolutely nothing to lose.
Mathematical news flash: 10% unemployment means 90% employment. Yes, unemployment is high. Comparative to the average, IT workers are running ~6% unemployment - they're doing much better than the average. Given that we are not seeing millions of people graduating college and then immediately going on welfare, your argument fails.
People ARE finding a job, and not every company that wants to hire a senator's daughter is going to find one. I am in the job market right now, and it seems as robust as it's ever really been. I also see plenty of new hires coming on board right out of college - based primarily on their skills, not on who they know. I'm not aware of any senators' daughters in the group, but I am aware of several kids who impressed me as being awfully bright and motivated during our interviews.
Is it "easier" to get a job with connections to a particular company? Sure. But most people don't have connections to a senator, and most (remember - 90% employment!) people are still finding a job, despite your unsubstantiated claims.
Employment is at 90% because most people already have jobs, not because new jobs are being created or fresh out of college individuals are finding entry level jobs. There is a huge difference between keeping your job and starting at entry level.
Lucky for us there are millions of companies out there hiring Americans with skills, too! Millions of people who have successfully entered the workforce and landed a job have experiences that differ with your bold assertion.
If you don't have the skills someone is looking for, why would you presume they owe you a job? If you DO have the skills someone is looking for, why do you need some sort of "connection" to get a job? Maybe you won't get a job at Company X - lucky for you, Companies R through Z are also hiring people with your skill. Go apply there.
Millions of companies hiring people? What bizzaro world do you live in? Are you not aware of the recession? The double digit unemployment? This is the worst environment for skilled workers since the great depression.
Say you have a degree and skills with computers. Why should the company hire you to work for them when they can hire the Senators daughter and benefit from all sorts of tax breaks and government contracts?
Maybe they only have enough money to hire one person for this entry level position. Maybe you and the Senators daughter have equal skills or maybe you are more skilled but she'd be able to bring more business to the company long term. In situations such as these you wont get hired. Now magnify this by x1000 and every position you apply for at least one very important person will also be applying for that exact same position.
Yes you can get lucky and apply to the right place at the right time, but if you were in the job market right now you would know that unless yuo have 5 years experience, a degree, with exceptional skills, you won't get hired. And even with experience you might be passed up for someone with connections to government or other corporations.
Can we agree that ridiculous oversimplifications certainly don't determine worth, either?
Your argument that "connections" are the determinant of worth falls down in the face of recruiting sites like Monster.com. Want a better job? Learn the skills required listed as a requirement of some of those jobs, and start applying.
I didn't know a single person at my current company, I sent them my resume, passed the interviews, and got a job offer.
I make well over 75k now.
How does that happen, in your world where only connections determine worth?
In a not so competitive environment then your skills can get you a job. When everyone has the same skills as you then only connections get you a job. We aren't an underdeveloped underskilled country. Millions of Americans have degrees with skills. So just having skills won't get you an entry level job.
The argument that the only choices are crime or SSI is possibly the most stupid one that's ever been made on the internet.
What other choices exist? Be logical about it. If there is no job for you which will pay for your cost of living, you become a criminal and now you have ability to pay for your cost of living, but you risk jail. If there is SSI then the government essentially pays you not to become a criminal and you don't have to risk jail.
What other alternatives exist? List some. Walmart is minimum wage so it's not an alternative. Mc Donalds is minimum wage so it's not an alternative. Neither provide healthcare.
"Income is the main reason for poverty" Ok, but I still disagree that income in the main reason for poverty, I am am talking about standard of living poverty, not poverty as a statistic in where if you make under a certain amount you are living in poverty. It is true I do not know many specifics about the US this might only hold in Canada.
I did not think it was so bad in the US. especially the money for lawyers, are you saying that even if you do not do anything stupid or illegal you still have a good chance of having to spend lots of money to prevent going to jail?
If it is so bad in the US why live their? their are many places you could likely go that your freedom and health would not be dependent on making over 2 times the national average.
Don't you watch the news? Notice a lot of poor individuals in the USA going to jail but not a lot of rich individuals?
You're happy? Great... you're a leech. You're part of the "entitlement" and "free hand-outs" crowd.. you're useless and borderline worthless. You live off the government tit and contribute nothing of value to anyone. You're part of the reason why tax payers like myself have a public debt of around $140,000 per citizen. Some bleeding-heart liberal douchebag politician promised to bring some of the loot confiscated from working Americans to his district in exchange for your vote. And he promised he would use that loot to subsidize your "lifestyle" if you can even call it that.
Have some self-respect and get a job.
It's a lot more complicated than that and you know it. If telling people to get a job would solve all problems, why not tell that to everybody who doesn't have a job anywhere in the world? "Get a job". Unfortunately most jobs don't provide healthcare, or pay enough money to survive, but if it's just about working to keep busy I guess your solution would solve that problem.
The real problem is that there are too many people and not enough jobs which would give more benefits than SSI would give. The other part of the problem is that a lot of jobs which would give people "worth" to society on one level are "illegal" or "Immoral" on another level. So you'll have to decide if its worth it to have prostitution legalized as then a lot more people could get jobs, or if drugs should be legalized because then even more people could get jobs, or if everything should be legalized and then anybody could get a job.
It's not as simple as just telling people to get jobs, you have to offer jobs and those jobs have to be better "on a rational level" than SSI. Else you'll still be paying for the person and you might actually end up paying more in the long term.
The grandparent is not the problem. He is simply taking what is offered. If he didn't take the government assistance offered to help there would still be millions of others that did. The problem is that the assistance is available with no regard for priority or limits.
If the options are limited to "work at Walmart with no healthcare for minimum age" or "accept SSI and get healthcare", 99% of people are going to take SSI as this would be the smartest option among bad options.
If the Walmart job does not exist then the options are limited to "Become a criminal and buy healthcare and risk prison." or "take SSI, receive healthcare and don't risk prison."
Once again for most people taking SSI is the best option but now the weight of each option is based on factors such as the probability of getting caught as a criminal, the amount of prison time they'd be facing, the amount of money they'd make from the crime, and the quality of life for those in prison as compared to the quality of life for those on SSI.
So in the 1920s it was probably smarter to be a criminal because there wasn't surveillance everywhere and vice cops patrolling everywhere. Today theres vice cops patrolling craigslist to catch the escorts, so what happens to these escorts who have to quit out of fear of being arrested by the craigslist vice cop? They are the ones who will be going on SSI taking the dole, and probably their pimps along with them, and their drug dealer and an entire eco-system of would be criminals.
Why is that? Because it's less risk and greater benefit to be on SSI than to do most kinds of crime, especially now when society wants to on one level crack down hard on non-violent crime but on the other hand complain about the cost of paying people not to become criminals. SSI basically pays people to not become a criminal. For $8000 a year a person can be paid not to be a criminal while if we get rid of SSI and all social programs like it tomorrow, the cost of housing someone in prison is $30,000 a year.
So you see it actually costs less money to pay for SSI than it does to pay for prison. So the question taxpayers should be asking is why it's okay to spend all this money on prisons, vice cops, and surveillance, which probably costs way more than $30,000 a year to house the prisoner but also the cost of hiring the cop or cops to do the craigslist sting operation, or the cost of the war on drugs, or the cost of any of these programs which don't really reduce poverty. SSI is just the cheapest solution among bad solutions and with 9-10% unemployment I think you can expect the number of people on SSI to increase, and you can also expect the number of people in prison to increase.
There is really no way around it until we legalize a whole bunch of ways that people can make money.
Are you disabled? Is there anything legitimately keeping you from getting a job? If not, what makes you think you have the right to live off of everyone's taxes?
It's simple. Say he does get a job selling drugs or as a prostitute, your tax dollars would then pay the vice cop who would arrest him, the judge who would handle the trial, his lawyer, the prosecutor, and then you the juror would have to waste your time hearing the case and making a decision.
It seems cheaper to just pay for SSI, the alternatives if we want there to be an alternative is to have full employment and how would you want to guarantee that everyone who wants a job can have one? It's not as simple of a problem of "But my tax dollars pay for these people to live for free!", in reality your tax dollars go to waste on a lot more unimportant stuff than this, and the tax dollars you spend on this lowers the crime rate and actually saves you money long term, unless you want the alternative where we legalize all the stuff that is currently illegal for cosmetic concerns, like drugs, prostitution, gambling and stuff of this sort.
I disagree that income is the mean reason for ghettos.
and I know growing up within a mid sized family with an income far far less then that and never wanting for anything, and still in my opinion a significant portion of the money being spent on things that we could easily do without.
If you are greedy and materialistic you will never have enough, if you are not then you could never even come up with ways to spend nearly 75K.
And I will try to debunk some of those other examples you mentioned.
Quality education: I now attend the university of Waterloo, considered by many to be the best university in Canada, and significantly more expensive then others in this country. With some good planning my family managed to send me here, and I would estimate the whole thing (3 years now) has actually make us money even without factoring in the small amount of paid work I have done here and only minimal scholarships. So for me, education is not free, it is a net gain.
Retirement: My parents, still quite young, have considered retiring soon. and after some though it become clear they could easily live on a few thousand a year that they could easily make doing nothing.
Marriage: I agree, but who does not have a few hundred dollars. My sister just got married, and I would doubt that more then $300 was spend by the family on the occasion.
It all depends on intelligence and your level of materialism, personally I probably only spend about $80 dollars a year above food.
Healthcare: In Canada it mostly is, not that I ever go to doctors anyways.
Safe Neighborhoods: My entire family lives in very very safe neighbourhoods. and for example my place nets a pretty good profit.
Income is the main reason for poverty, not the main reason for ghettos. Ghettos are a result of lack of social programs, too many archaic laws, too many prisons, too high of a cost of living, and general risk exportation to certain neighborhoods (like predatory lending, and liquor stores).
1. You are Canadian, I'm American. The environment is very different in my country and my examples apply to my country.
2. In my country retirement isn't even an option for a majority of families specifically because the cost of living and tax burden are so high that the retirement age keeps getting pushed back.
3. You don't have to be a greedy materialist to figure out that money is security/freedom. People who have it don't have to worry about jail because they can afford a lawyer. If they or someone they care about gets sick they can afford to stay at the hospital or have the best treatment. If their kids want to become something they have the money to guarantee that with hard work it's possible.
If you do not have enough money you cannot guarantee any of this in the USA. Canada is a different story, college education in Canada is relatively cheap if not free like it is in Europe so it's not to be compared to the $50k-100k Bachelors degree and another $50-100k for a Masters in the USA.
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Bernie Madoff criminals are unrelated to the conversation. I guarantee you that Bernie Madoff is not deciding whether to commit crimes based on whether he can get Section 8 housing or not.
But you assume that master criminals aren't smart or don't start out in poor families. The truth of the matter is the majority of criminals get involved with crime because of financial desperation. A man makes a woman pregnant, now hes responsible for children and resorts to crime as alternative income. On the other hand the man who does not want children has less incentive to resort to crime.
It's situations that make people criminals or not, and it's desperation. It's not simply a matter of it being easy. It's easy to rob a bank, it's not easy to get away with it. It's easy to rob a celebrities house, it's not easy to get away with it. A lot of crimes are easy to get into and hard to get out of. Any smart person will know that being a criminal has risks and usually those risks outweigh the rewards but not always.
If someone has a drug habit, or a family then the risks may not outweigh the rewards anymore. Also if the reward is really huge like in Madoffs case the risk definition doesn't outweigh the reward. Madoff got to live like a billionaire for a lot of his life, his family was taken care of, the money he stole already has been consumed and even if society kills him he still made out like a bandit.
On the other hand you have some people who get arrested selling crack. This person might have a gun in their car and $500 worth of crack. Now they go to prison for 10 years, maybe 20 years, over $500 worth of crack? A smart criminal would never risk 20 years in prison over $500 or $500,000, they'd risk 20 years in prison for $500 million.
Once again it's almost always about money. Welfare allows a person to have enough money to survive so that they don't have to apply their genius intellect toward being a criminal mastermind. To assume that there aren't smart poor people is naive and stereotypical. The fact is some people are poor and brilliant at the same time, but not likely to risk going to prison for sake of maintaining whatever benefits they have or keeping whatever they've earned. As long as people have something to lose there is incentive for them not to be criminal but if $8000 a year or $800 a month cannot be had by legit means, they'll find means which aren't legit and get x1000 that amount.
$800 a month on welfare or $800 a month as a drug dealer? Either way they'll get the money, only as a drug dealer theres a lot more risk in getting it as they'd have to risk decades in prison. That is the only difference.
I am talking about the security of your assets, not your person. Managing a large sum of money takes effort (and usually money). You can't just stuff a bunch of millions under a mattress. You could buy gold, and even then it is not a perfectly safe investment, but that won't maximize your income. Then there's also figuring out where to keep that gold.
You can buy property, you can buy gold, you can buy construction companies, or invest in NGO's. There are ways to and places to put your money if you have it so that it's safe, if that is your agenda. Unfortunately most of us will never have enough money to have to worry about that problem.
Sure it's a problem but when you have that kind of money you can quit whatever you are doing and focus all your effort into solving that problem.
Having "some" people (some being a value that should be as close to zero as possible) on the government dole is fine and unavoidable, unless you live in anarchy I guess. The number on the dole seems to increase as the federal government gets more and more power. There is a trend towards more and more people being on the dole for more and more reasons. It's gone from being a system with the purpose of helping folks out temporarily to get through a tough time period, or helping a segment of the population that is unable to care for itself, to being a blanket safety net for anything that might ever possibly go wrong in a person's life, and without regard to whether or not that person is in the situation they are in because of circumstances out of their control or because they made stupid decisions. Even if it was out of control, why is the default viewpoint "everyone else must be forced to take care of them?"
Fundamentally I just disagree that the role of (federal) government should have anything to do with providing social services in any form whatsoever. It should be left up to the states to decide how they should handle it.
Whats wrong with having a blanket safety-net? Yes it costs money but it's still cheaper than all other alternatives. If someone does not want to work or can't work, $8000 a year is not a lot of money at all. In my opinion the negative income tax should be in effect and everybody who does not have a job should be given a mandatory income of whatever people currently get from the dole. It's no different than having a minimum wage or social security, or medicare or financial aid or any other program. These sorts of spending if done right actually increase demand and improve local economies so it's necessary.
Also we just don't need as many workers anymore. The amount of work to do is less, but we still keep creating a lot of people. The solution is to reduce the dole for people who have kids so that the incentive of the dole is given to people who don't want kids. This way the population of people on the dole does not increase. Currently welfare is tailored for families and mothers and the more babies they have the more money they get. This provides incentive to create the octomom effect which is the crux of the problem.
I agree with you that the federal government was never designed for this role, this is why I said a negative income tax would be the libertarian solution. It increases liberty for the have nots, giving them the choice to use their income to buy whatever they want rather than to have small businesses or even worse big businesses competing for government contracts you'd have local businesses competing for consumers which means they'd have to hire marketing firms and compete with each other which creates even more economic activity.
Also it's better that consumers have choices. They should receive enough money to live, if they are smart they'll use it to pay their rent and bills, buy what they need, if they aren't so smart they'll gamble it sway. The government should not pick winners and losers in the market, the consumers and competition should pick the winners and losers. The problem we have right now is that there are far more people than jobs, jobs are being shipped overseas so either people are on unemployment, welfare, disability, food stamps or something but this is just the nature of the economic environment.
If we removed unemployment, welfare, all these different benefits then there would be no stimulus effect. The stimulus basically amounts to giving money back to consumers so they can increase demand. The problem is they didn't give enough money. Giving everyone the dole would have a positive effect long term but the Republicans are too ideological to focus on results. And of course you don't just give out money to everybody equally, you give more money to people who better themselves and who work hard.
If we don't do this what is going to happen is in 50 years most of the jobs that exist now wont exist an
What I just don't understand is why, if crime rates have been going steadily down for some decades now, do they feel like they need to be more invasive and offensive in their fight against crime
Because they see it as why settle for a low crime rate when they can (in bad logical theory) turn it into a no crime rate.
Only the crime rate includes victimless crimes. It's not like you or I decide what is or isn't a crime. It's not like crimes and laws are decided based on reason or logic or game theory, no thats decided based upon the morality of Christian churches and other moralists who think they know whats best for us, and by elites who want to protect their wealth and turf.
As far as I'm concerned everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And we have too many crimes, not too many criminals. When you make everything that people like to do or have to do illegal you create excuses for surveillance.
Surveillance is fine if theres World War 3 or a Cold War, but this level of surveillance to fight crime will make us all into criminals soon enough.
So they get caught and they go to prison. They get an attorney, a free room, and three squares a day (all paid for by you-know-who) for a few years until its time to go back out into the real world. Not only that, but in the meantime they can make new contacts, gain street cred, and receive instruction in the finer points of criminality from their peers while incarcerated.
Again my tax dollars used to foster and foment criminality.
The problem is still lack of realistic options. If the best options a person has is prison, then they'll prepare themselves to go to prison as it will seem like an unavoidable consequence of living in society. The only way to have less criminals is to give a significant amount of money to a significant amount of people who wish to use that money to better themselves.
Take 5 people living on welfare in 2010, make them sign a contract which says they'll go to college, get educated, and then start a business. If they fulfill their end of the contract college is free and $50,000 is set aside for them to start a business.
Then you can say hard work is better than being lazy because hard work would actually lead to realistic options. The current system is set up so that hard work doesn't lead anywhere. You can work hard, you can get educated, you still aren't guaranteed a job. You can't start a business because you have bad credit, and you have bad credit because you worked hard and still got laid off and couldn't pay your bills on time.
The working poor actually have less options than the people living on welfare. They receive no help whatsoever but receive the majority of the punishments which are either prison time or bad credit or lack of healthcare.
There is no way to solve the problem by simply demanding harder work. On a concentration camp hard work might set you free but in the real world hard work often leads to even deeper slavery, with crappy wages, no benefits from the federal government or from the private sector.
My solution is to give everybody the $8000 who does not have a job. If you can't find a job, if you are disabled, or whatever the reason, you should receive the $8000. If you want to work hard you should be able to sign a contract to agree to work hard and be guaranteed a reward if you do work hard. Hard work has to equal guaranteed consistent rewards to have a positive reinforcement effect.
You cannot modify behavior if you tell people to work harder and longer for less pay, which is basically punishing them for hard work, but then say how much you value hard work. The USA does not value hard work. Hard work often only leads to harder work in the future. The hardest working people, people who are serving food or doing retail or standing on their feet for 12 hours a day, if they are lucky they'll be doing that 10 years from now, only their money wont take them as far as the cost of living will increase, healthcare costs will increase, their body will have aged and will have started to break down from the hard work, and they'll have nothing to show for it.
The single mother who works two jobs, she's the hardest worker in America. She dies in her 50s and on her tombstone it says she worked hard. Unfortunately she did not have the money for healthcare, she did not have the money to retire because she never made enough money to save, her children did not have the money to go to college and they did not believe in accepting financial aid because they did not want to leech from society, so they work two jobs doing the same their their mother did.
Do you see how pointless hard work is in this context? Hard work has to lead to big rewards and those rewards have to be guaranteed. It has to lead to a better job, a better life, otherwise the entire system is broken. If people believe their hard work and effort is better invested doing criminal work, they'll do that.
So it's not that people don't work hard, it's not even that a lot of people are on SSI or Welfare, it's that any reasonable pe
No, it's not any more complicated than that at all. For the cases where someone is physically or mentally incapable of providing for themselves, we have programs and such for those people. For everyone else, you get off your ass and you work. You work two jobs if you have to, you learn to live without things. If you have food, water, and shelter, you can live. It is not my responsibility to be forced to subsidize your life, no matter how downtrodden it might be. People lived and prospered without health insurance and they will continue to do so until the end of time.
The real problem is people have come to expect too much to be handed to them, or that they are entitled to have certain things. If they don't have them, then by God it's the government's responsibility to make sure they do. How does the government do that? By forcing someone else to give up some of their property so it can be redistributed to those "in need."
Just as people expect a job to be handed to them? The only solution is to let people start their own businesses and provide jobs for themselves and their families. McDonalds, Walmart, Starbucks, these big businesses don't care about American families.
Your solution is to tell people to work harder, hard work in a desperate environment can lead to jail. I was specific in my example because to assume you'll always be able to get a job is having an unrealistic expectation, so if you cannot get a job, getting a job is no longer an option, what alternatives do you create in instances where getting a job isn't an option?
The government could spend half of the money spent on the prison and crime system on funding small businesses. Would you feel better about your tax dollars if everyone on the dole could be given free money to start a business? any kind of business? Or would you want to regulate what kind of business they can run? Or would you say that giving money to start businesses is a waste of tax dollars?
If you don't want criminals, and you don't want people living on the dole, then you have to give the money to small businesses but either way you cannot have a society or a functioning economy unless everybody has money to spend. You cannot create demand unless you have the dole, or unless your tax dollars are basically used to give people money to buy whatever you are selling.
Basically if you cut everyone off the dole then you have less demand for your products and services and you make the economy even worse. What you don't realize is that by giving people a minimum income it guarantees a minimum demand, which is good for the small businesses who supply these demands.
A minimum income is necessary to have a society, unless you want to bring back slavery.
You are assuming income and/or funds are linearly related to security under some definition of it. This is not necessarily true. It is correct that having more money gives you more ability to deal with potential threats to your security. In this way increasing money leads to increasing security. However, greater funds tend to attract greater threats and take more substantial effort to protect and maintain. This is why rich people do not lead completely stress free lives. There are more stressful and less stressful ways to make money, but I would suspect that if risk is proportional to income then it is impossible to eliminate some degree of stress from the act of increasing income.
It is possible that the particulars of the relations are such that up to a point, security benefits from extra money outweigh the cost incurred by having to manage those additional assets, after which increasing your money does not increase your happiness (limit of the difference is +0) or decreases it (e.g. happiness goes up with x^2 and stress cost with x^3). If so, it is possible that this point is $75k.
That suggests the question of boundless economical growth is at all possible, for example with corporations. Although huge, profitable corporations do exist, I think it is true that ultimately any market is finite- same as and because of the people on the planet, and the resources on it are finite, hence there is a diminishing returns acting on the agent. But is it possible that the diminishing returns become comprised largely of the security expenditures? Or, what about countries? Is there a fundamental limit to how large a state can becomes before it fails to maintain its own integrity, leading to eventual collapse?
If you are a celebrity your security expenses will be greater than an ordinary person. If you are exceptionally rich and in a poor neighborhood your security expenses will be greater than an ordinary person.
But for the most part when you have money you are better off than when you don't have money. You can't even get a good lawyer when you don't have money. And you can forget about body guards, a gated community, or anything like that.
What other alternatives exist? List some. Walmart is minimum wage so it's not an alternative. Mc Donalds is minimum wage so it's not an alternative.
There are other employers in the U.S. besides Walmart and McDonalds. Presumably, the vast majority of /. work for those others.
There are tons of opportunities out there for people who bother to look for them.
So then all the people without jobs have to think of their problem like this, "How I get uniquename fired so that I may take his place?", this could be as easy as sending an anonymous phonecall or spoofing an email so it looks like it's from you, or building a smear site about you.
The point I'm making is when you have something that people want and you remove every alternative to competing with or confronting you to take what you have, eventually those people are going to spend all their energy and free time figuring out how to take what you have.
You cannot earn a job unless a lot of people get fired to create job openings. If all social programs were removed there would still be jobs, the new industry would be paying people to get people they don't like fired, paying people to get people they liked hired.
Never underestimate desperate people.
It's really not that many people, and doesn't account for much of the budget. In an advanced society I think this is exactly what we need, and where we should aim to head. Right now, if you are happy living of 10 grand or so, you don't have to work. Sure it sucks, and surprisingly people still choose to. Hopefully we will steadily increase how much you get for not working, 20 grand, 30 grand, with more and more people not working. The future promises good lives for everyone, with machines doing more and more work.
What's sad is that there are still poor and homeless people, while others know the system and live happily without working.
What you are talking about is a negative income tax, which I support. If someone does not want to work they should take the $8,000 and live like that. Society will say "But these people are leeching off us", in reality it's actually going to cost more to pay for just about any other path they take. If you give universal healthcare to all thats going to cost, if you put them in prison thats going to cost, the point is that every individual born into society costs society.
Society has to figure out how to become efficient enough to make use of the individuals it has or it should work to decrease the birth rate so that there wont be a need for as many prisons or welfare receivers etc, or the final alternative is the libertarian alternative where every sort of activity which is victimless is legalized and let the people work for themselves, this way you don't have to tell them to "get a job" they can just create a job to fill a need. Whether this is drug dealer, prostitute, bodyguard, housekeeper, or whatever.
Part of the reason theres more people on welfare is because the legit work is made increasingly harder to get, while the illegal work is made increasingly illegal. It's really no different than undocumented workers, employers want cheap labor but you can't have cheap labor without expanding the social services or paying for prisons and mental hospitals. Ultimately there is no way to become efficient without actually becoming efficient.
Of the criminals I have known in life, they have been criminals because it was easy at the moment. They did not look at the long term. The criminal behavior was also financial compatible with continuing to receive SSI, SDI, and Section 8. It is as likely as not that these programs increase crime as it is that they decrease it.
Thats because you haven't known any successful criminals. Most successful criminals commit crimes after having well thought out plans, and they commit crimes for financial gain. Think Bernie Madoff. Unsuccessful criminals rob a bank physically.
The reason we have drug lords, gangs and cabals is precisely because theres way more people than jobs and either the people who hate social programs will hire the people without jobs, or the crime lord will.
People who are anti-social programs have to stop worrying about crime. You cannot be both anti crime and against the social programs which exist to give people alternatives to being criminals. Not everybody will find a job, it's just the numbers that for every job offer there are 5 other people competing for the same job. In this environment the crime lord will offer the same person a job in which there is nobody competing for it, and from which no taxes have to be paid, all the money is in cash.
SSI gives people a choice to take $8000 a year of welfare money, or be a criminal and earn slightly more money than this but then cost society $30,000 a year or perhaps more.
Face it, until there is a job that everybody can do, there will be inefficiency.
People on SSI are still well below the article's threshold of $75K, so the motivation to find happiness throuigh increased income is still there. However, if they get a regular wage earning job they will lose their SSI benefits. Thus, any "off the books" dollars they earn can be kept right along with their gubermint check. Therefore, legimate employment is not as attractive to them as employment as a prostitute, illicit drug merchant, thief, burgular, etc.
So the way I see it, my tax dollars go toward making more criminals.
Only if they get arrested then they get cut off SSI and lose their benefits so the risk of loss of benefits is what would keep them from becoming a criminal. If they don't receive any benefits then they have absolutely nothing to lose.
Mathematical news flash: 10% unemployment means 90% employment. Yes, unemployment is high. Comparative to the average, IT workers are running ~6% unemployment - they're doing much better than the average. Given that we are not seeing millions of people graduating college and then immediately going on welfare, your argument fails.
People ARE finding a job, and not every company that wants to hire a senator's daughter is going to find one. I am in the job market right now, and it seems as robust as it's ever really been. I also see plenty of new hires coming on board right out of college - based primarily on their skills, not on who they know. I'm not aware of any senators' daughters in the group, but I am aware of several kids who impressed me as being awfully bright and motivated during our interviews.
Is it "easier" to get a job with connections to a particular company? Sure. But most people don't have connections to a senator, and most (remember - 90% employment!) people are still finding a job, despite your unsubstantiated claims.
Employment is at 90% because most people already have jobs, not because new jobs are being created or fresh out of college individuals are finding entry level jobs. There is a huge difference between keeping your job and starting at entry level.
Lucky for us there are millions of companies out there hiring Americans with skills, too! Millions of people who have successfully entered the workforce and landed a job have experiences that differ with your bold assertion.
If you don't have the skills someone is looking for, why would you presume they owe you a job? If you DO have the skills someone is looking for, why do you need some sort of "connection" to get a job? Maybe you won't get a job at Company X - lucky for you, Companies R through Z are also hiring people with your skill. Go apply there.
Millions of companies hiring people?
What bizzaro world do you live in? Are you not aware of the recession? The double digit unemployment? This is the worst environment for skilled workers since the great depression.
Say you have a degree and skills with computers. Why should the company hire you to work for them when they can hire the Senators daughter and benefit from all sorts of tax breaks and government contracts?
Maybe they only have enough money to hire one person for this entry level position. Maybe you and the Senators daughter have equal skills or maybe you are more skilled but she'd be able to bring more business to the company long term. In situations such as these you wont get hired. Now magnify this by x1000 and every position you apply for at least one very important person will also be applying for that exact same position.
Yes you can get lucky and apply to the right place at the right time, but if you were in the job market right now you would know that unless yuo have 5 years experience, a degree, with exceptional skills, you won't get hired. And even with experience you might be passed up for someone with connections to government or other corporations.
Can we agree that ridiculous oversimplifications certainly don't determine worth, either?
Your argument that "connections" are the determinant of worth falls down in the face of recruiting sites like Monster.com. Want a better job? Learn the skills required listed as a requirement of some of those jobs, and start applying.
I didn't know a single person at my current company, I sent them my resume, passed the interviews, and got a job offer.
I make well over 75k now.
How does that happen, in your world where only connections determine worth?
In a not so competitive environment then your skills can get you a job. When everyone has the same skills as you then only connections get you a job. We aren't an underdeveloped underskilled country. Millions of Americans have degrees with skills. So just having skills won't get you an entry level job.
The argument that the only choices are crime or SSI is possibly the most stupid one that's ever been made on the internet.
What other choices exist? Be logical about it.
If there is no job for you which will pay for your cost of living, you become a criminal and now you have ability to pay for your cost of living, but you risk jail. If there is SSI then the government essentially pays you not to become a criminal and you don't have to risk jail.
What other alternatives exist? List some. Walmart is minimum wage so it's not an alternative. Mc Donalds is minimum wage so it's not an alternative. Neither provide healthcare.
Connections determine worth.
"Income is the main reason for poverty"
Ok, but I still disagree that income in the main reason for poverty, I am am talking about standard of living poverty, not poverty as a statistic in where if you make under a certain amount you are living in poverty.
It is true I do not know many specifics about the US this might only hold in Canada.
I did not think it was so bad in the US.
especially the money for lawyers, are you saying that even if you do not do anything stupid or illegal you still have a good chance of having to spend lots of money to prevent going to jail?
If it is so bad in the US why live their? their are many places you could likely go that your freedom and health would not be dependent on making over 2 times the national average.
Don't you watch the news? Notice a lot of poor individuals in the USA going to jail but not a lot of rich individuals?
You're happy? Great... you're a leech. You're part of the "entitlement" and "free hand-outs" crowd.. you're useless and borderline worthless. You live off the government tit and contribute nothing of value to anyone. You're part of the reason why tax payers like myself have a public debt of around $140,000 per citizen. Some bleeding-heart liberal douchebag politician promised to bring some of the loot confiscated from working Americans to his district in exchange for your vote. And he promised he would use that loot to subsidize your "lifestyle" if you can even call it that.
Have some self-respect and get a job.
It's a lot more complicated than that and you know it. If telling people to get a job would solve all problems, why not tell that to everybody who doesn't have a job anywhere in the world? "Get a job". Unfortunately most jobs don't provide healthcare, or pay enough money to survive, but if it's just about working to keep busy I guess your solution would solve that problem.
The real problem is that there are too many people and not enough jobs which would give more benefits than SSI would give. The other part of the problem is that a lot of jobs which would give people "worth" to society on one level are "illegal" or "Immoral" on another level. So you'll have to decide if its worth it to have prostitution legalized as then a lot more people could get jobs, or if drugs should be legalized because then even more people could get jobs, or if everything should be legalized and then anybody could get a job.
It's not as simple as just telling people to get jobs, you have to offer jobs and those jobs have to be better "on a rational level" than SSI. Else you'll still be paying for the person and you might actually end up paying more in the long term.
The grandparent is not the problem. He is simply taking what is offered. If he didn't take the government assistance offered to help there would still be millions of others that did. The problem is that the assistance is available with no regard for priority or limits.
If the options are limited to "work at Walmart with no healthcare for minimum age" or "accept SSI and get healthcare", 99% of people are going to take SSI as this would be the smartest option among bad options.
If the Walmart job does not exist then the options are limited to "Become a criminal and buy healthcare and risk prison." or "take SSI, receive healthcare and don't risk prison."
Once again for most people taking SSI is the best option but now the weight of each option is based on factors such as the probability of getting caught as a criminal, the amount of prison time they'd be facing, the amount of money they'd make from the crime, and the quality of life for those in prison as compared to the quality of life for those on SSI.
So in the 1920s it was probably smarter to be a criminal because there wasn't surveillance everywhere and vice cops patrolling everywhere. Today theres vice cops patrolling craigslist to catch the escorts, so what happens to these escorts who have to quit out of fear of being arrested by the craigslist vice cop? They are the ones who will be going on SSI taking the dole, and probably their pimps along with them, and their drug dealer and an entire eco-system of would be criminals.
Why is that? Because it's less risk and greater benefit to be on SSI than to do most kinds of crime, especially now when society wants to on one level crack down hard on non-violent crime but on the other hand complain about the cost of paying people not to become criminals. SSI basically pays people to not become a criminal. For $8000 a year a person can be paid not to be a criminal while if we get rid of SSI and all social programs like it tomorrow, the cost of housing someone in prison is $30,000 a year.
So you see it actually costs less money to pay for SSI than it does to pay for prison. So the question taxpayers should be asking is why it's okay to spend all this money on prisons, vice cops, and surveillance, which probably costs way more than $30,000 a year to house the prisoner but also the cost of hiring the cop or cops to do the craigslist sting operation, or the cost of the war on drugs, or the cost of any of these programs which don't really reduce poverty. SSI is just the cheapest solution among bad solutions and with 9-10% unemployment I think you can expect the number of people on SSI to increase, and you can also expect the number of people in prison to increase.
There is really no way around it until we legalize a whole bunch of ways that people can make money.
Are you disabled? Is there anything legitimately keeping you from getting a job? If not, what makes you think you have the right to live off of everyone's taxes?
It's simple. Say he does get a job selling drugs or as a prostitute, your tax dollars would then pay the vice cop who would arrest him, the judge who would handle the trial, his lawyer, the prosecutor, and then you the juror would have to waste your time hearing the case and making a decision.
It seems cheaper to just pay for SSI, the alternatives if we want there to be an alternative is to have full employment and how would you want to guarantee that everyone who wants a job can have one? It's not as simple of a problem of "But my tax dollars pay for these people to live for free!", in reality your tax dollars go to waste on a lot more unimportant stuff than this, and the tax dollars you spend on this lowers the crime rate and actually saves you money long term, unless you want the alternative where we legalize all the stuff that is currently illegal for cosmetic concerns, like drugs, prostitution, gambling and stuff of this sort.
I have almost unlimited free time.
I also happen to be a 25 year old geek with too much time on his hands. Besides reading slashdot, I also work on a few projects at SF.
Free time with no money = ?
I disagree that income is the mean reason for ghettos.
and I know growing up within a mid sized family with an income far far less then that and never wanting for anything, and still in my opinion a significant portion of the money being spent on things that we could easily do without.
If you are greedy and materialistic you will never have enough, if you are not then you could never even come up with ways to spend nearly 75K.
And I will try to debunk some of those other examples you mentioned.
Quality education:
I now attend the university of Waterloo, considered by many to be the best university in Canada, and significantly more expensive then others in this country.
With some good planning my family managed to send me here, and I would estimate the whole thing (3 years now) has actually make us money even without factoring in the small amount of paid work I have done here and only minimal scholarships.
So for me, education is not free, it is a net gain.
Retirement:
My parents, still quite young, have considered retiring soon. and after some though it become clear they could easily live on a few thousand a year that they could easily make doing nothing.
Marriage:
I agree, but who does not have a few hundred dollars.
My sister just got married, and I would doubt that more then $300 was spend by the family on the occasion.
It all depends on intelligence and your level of materialism, personally I probably only spend about $80 dollars a year above food.
Healthcare:
In Canada it mostly is, not that I ever go to doctors anyways.
Safe Neighborhoods:
My entire family lives in very very safe neighbourhoods. and for example my place nets a pretty good profit.
Income is the main reason for poverty, not the main reason for ghettos. Ghettos are a result of lack of social programs, too many archaic laws, too many prisons, too high of a cost of living, and general risk exportation to certain neighborhoods (like predatory lending, and liquor stores).
1. You are Canadian, I'm American. The environment is very different in my country and my examples apply to my country.
2. In my country retirement isn't even an option for a majority of families specifically because the cost of living and tax burden are so high that the retirement age keeps getting pushed back.
3. You don't have to be a greedy materialist to figure out that money is security/freedom. People who have it don't have to worry about jail because they can afford a lawyer. If they or someone they care about gets sick they can afford to stay at the hospital or have the best treatment. If their kids want to become something they have the money to guarantee that with hard work it's possible.
If you do not have enough money you cannot guarantee any of this in the USA. Canada is a different story, college education in Canada is relatively cheap if not free like it is in Europe so it's not to be compared to the $50k-100k Bachelors degree and another $50-100k for a Masters in the USA.