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http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_localdtw/ ... ood-stamps

This sort of thing is why many people don't take the idea that the government can't cut spending seriously. If the government were more responsible with our funds, there wouldn't be as many complaints.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

Food stamps are a fundamentally bad idea, but the fact of the matter is that such programs are extremely marginal as part of the overall big picture, and there's at least as much waste in private industry.

To put it another way, execs who get paid $2M a year and suck at their jobs get all kinds of perks they don't need or deserve because private industry is at least as inefficient not only in day-to-day operations but also because the profit motive is itself a form of waste.

The government can cut spending, but pragmatically, it won't until there's absolutely no choice. I think that time may be still a few decades away, if Japan and Russia are any indication.

Most government waste is not little fall-through-cracks type deals, but various forms of entitlements to corporations and stupid, expensive programs such as pork barrel, education, useless research and aid to non-profits, tax credits for self-serving or worthless aid, and huge expensive programs, military or otherwise. Food stamps and regulatory bureaus are fairly marginal as part of overall spending and waste.

Try closing a stateside military base or ending an unproductive civil program such as farm aid, school vouchers, expensive or otherwise lame programs like JROTC and such, or health research or the like. It's politically impossible.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I don't think anyone on this board would defend his right to food stamps. However, this is fairly small time stuff when compared to things like the billions in oil subsidies.




They may not always be handled in the correct way, but there is nothing at all wrong with Food Stamps. In fact, it's more inline with where welfare programs should go. All you can get with Food Stamps is Food, and they're not the easily transferable coupons they once were. Handing out money is a terrible way to solve any problem, these kind of targeted initiatives do more good with less possibility of misuse.

Dvergar /
Quisling

Give a man a fish...

EDIT: Ok, straight up. The problem with food stamps is that they've superceded what should be real priorities which is a living wage and programs to provide direct access to menial but guaranteed jobs.

Providing free food is a sorry alternative to making life as a lower-class American livable without aid.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

If I could get food stamps I would. Its something like $200 every two weeks for food. As a college kid, I'd kill for a whole foods diet.

RETIRED.
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Mayonaise[/armory]
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Jerkonaise[/armory]

Your problem is with the implementation of the program, not the "fundamental idea" of food stamps. They should be a piece of a larger program to educate or train people to stand on their own two feet. However, there are plenty of times where even the current program is only a short-term measure for people in tough times. Too many people look at welfare and their immediate response is some black slob living off the government their whole life. While those people do exist and need to be cut off, there are a lot of people who only need welfare programs infrequently, or only once in their lives. These programs need to be there for these people.

Dvergar /
Quisling

Food stamps solution:

1) Recipient needs to provide some community service or governmental service (cleaning roadways, parks or stuffing envelopes) in order to receive a payment if they're unemployed.
2) The program should be managed like WIC, where only certain pre-approved foods are available via the food stamps, to keep Mayo's from eating beyond his means.
3) Set a lifetime maximum benefit per recipient.

Edit: Nvm on the second half. Misread amounts.

Well, of course no one would try to defend it, it's indefensible. It's hardly, "small time stuff," either, when we're told that we have to keep pumping money into these programs or it's evidence we want people to starve and/or die. I'm sure this is not some 'isolated incident' and that there are plenty of other examples out there that don't generate media coverage because it doesn't involve millionaires.

I don't think the government should subsidize or bail out business, but the tax breaks they're discussing removing from the oil industry aren't specific to the oil industry. Every company in the country can take advantage of those tax breaks, and the only reason the oil industry is singled out is to score political points with the sort of people who only pay enough attention to catch the headlines. They should repeal those tax breaks for every industry if they're repealing them for one industry.

The amount of earnings not collected from the oil companies in taxes due to these tax breaks is about $4.3 billion per year. That's around 0.2% of this year's deficit and would only fund, at most, 10 hours of current US government spending. Oil company subsidies are not driving our fiscal problems, spending in Washington is, but politicians can’t admit this because then that makes them the problem, and that doesn't work well when you run for re-election.






It's definitely handled better than it was in the past, and there were massive positive improvements to welfare programs under Clinton (I'd almost take another four years of Obama if we could have him with a Republican congress--it worked wonders in the 90s). I'd still prefer that sort of charity be handled by private organizations.

Aestu, who is going to define this "living wage," and what are we going to do when applying it inevitably leads all these "living wages" driving up costs so that we have to continually rise the "living wage" as a matter of routine? Who's going to provide these guaranteed menial jobs? No one wants other people living in poverty and squalor, but there are economic realities involved that people who use phrases like "living wage" never seem to stop to consider. The last time I checked, the majority of people earning minimum wage were high school and college students. Are you going to suggest that we don't have starter/entry jobs for that demographic?

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

Not necessarily. One of the most effective welfare programs in the developing world is Brazil's Bolsa Familia, which literally hands out money to poor families (provided they follow conditions such as sending kids to school and giving them vaccinations). It's cut poverty and inequality dramatically since it's been implemented. Handing out money is economically efficient and transparent, and it can avoid some of the unintuitive results that things like food aid can cause. It isn't always the best solution (and perhaps it wouldn't work well in the US), but it can work very well under the right conditions.

Laelia Komi Anomalocaris

You're only looking at the "wage" side of the equation, and not the "living" side.

I don't think the "living wage" is a certain amount per hour people need to get paid to be able to get by. I think the "living wage" is a condition of society where people are more free and enjoy a decent quality of life and dignity no matter their station in life.

I believe that takes the form of things like affordable housing, mass transit, and sustainable, gainful industry. I believe the solution is not to simply raise wages or offer handouts but to build civil infrastructure and establish domestic stability through institutions to provide people with what they need - fair access to housing, education, and transit.

Terminating corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies is another part of the picture: ensuring American industry is competitive and offers a fair playing field for start-ups versus complacent behemoths.

The way that is done is through civil programs and fair, prudently administrated partnerships between business and industry.



Partnership of business and government.

The government would act as a subcontractor for local firms. The benefit to industry would be zero recruitment and turnover expense. All other subcontractors would be outlawed to prevent abuse of migrant workers. Workers would still be free to establish 1:1 relationships with their employers.

There should be a law to the effect that all goods sold in the United States must be produced in accordance with American labor and environmental law. Do that and watch China collapse.



Poverty is a function of distribution not supply. In fact I believe the work day should be cut to five hours a day, four days a week, and staggered, to prevent unemployment and improve consumer spending.



I would definitely assert that, and I feel the dismal employment rate for college/HS grads supports that assertion. You also overlook that for many menial workers, minimum wage is what they have in life. Many people are stupid, uneducated or otherwise flawed, and that is fine. Life is like that, and I think that just because someone can't do anything more than menial work doesn't mean they shouldn't have their place in society. Hence the living wage - not that everyone should live the life, but that life should be livable for everyone, without food stamps or other forms of direct assistance.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

That's not disagreeable, but it's not what is generally bandied about when most people say "living wage." It's also not something we get to using the current model of governance.



I'm going to assume you meant "business and government" since "business" and "industry" are essentially the same thing. I think we should eliminate all tax loopholes for business...by eliminate taxes on business. After careful consideration, and these many discussions about the necessity for a progressive tax system, I've come to the conclusion that corporate taxes only serve to put the burden of taxation on the very people those of you who support protecting via a progressive tax system: the poor and middle class. This is because any tax placed on business ends up being treated as a cost and built into the products and services a business provides, which means that the end user ultimately pays those taxes.



We already have a system close to this at the unemployment office (at least here in VA, don't know how you folks do it elsewhere), and the very people who should be finding some type of gainful employment and getting off unemployment/welfare sit around discussing ways to fill their job-search quotas without getting hired so they can continue to collect benefits. I have a friend in another state that works for a high-tech communications company, and they recently adopted a policy not to sign the unemployment job-search form in their state unless the applicant possessed a degree or experience related to their industry. They did this because they would receive multiple inquiries from unqualified individuals who were only coming in to "apply" because they knew they wouldn't qualify for a job and wouldn't be hired. Once they stopped signing forms for unqualified candidates, the deluge of "applicants" slowed to a trickle.



That sounds good on paper, but I think we owe waaaaaaay toooooooo muuuuuuuch mooooooneeeeeey to China to get away with that. Even if we did and China didn't do an automatic recall of a majority of our debt, how are we going to regulate that? Remember a few years back when they started finding lead in Chinese imports? Even if China and/or other countries agree to those terms, they're not going to abide by them without someone watching them like a hawk.



That 'distribution' doesn't happen by accident. You reap what you sow, and a lot of those on the bottom end of the distribution have a behavioral model that puts them where they are. The real answer to this problem is finding a way to encourage these people to change their behavior to a pattern that reflects those among others in society who are experiencing or have experienced success.

The short work-day, thirty hour work week was tried in France...it was not an economic triumph.



Assert what you want, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics says, Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly-paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 25 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 4 percent of workers age 25 and over. That's even with the rise in unemployment among high school/college students since the recession began, and the current high rate of unemployment.

Not having jobs available for that demographic hurts the economy in the long run, because high school/college jobs are where many people (begin to) develop their basest jobs skills.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

That's also why I don't vote, and it's why I simply don't care about the outcome of individual elections.



If there were no business taxes, only personal taxes, how would you discourage big businesses from circumventing tax law by providing even more non-monetary benefits to the rich and powerful?



The problem there is that the system is still imposing a Sisyphean task on the unemployed: what if there are simply no jobs to be found? Hence I think a WPA-style program where the applicant is simply given a job (with fixed responsibilities) is best, and I think ensuring accountability and productivity is where private industry would complement the populism of government.



Make them pay for the enforcement. Don't like it? NP, we'll stick to domestic production.



Life is not fair.



The purpose of the economic system is to satisfy man. Arrangements designed to do that, even viable arrangements, don't work well when forced to compete against economic systems designed only to maximize net output no matter how bad the quality of life (in China, for example). Hence my previous proposal.



The flaw here is that the Labor Statistics Bureau does not count the long-term unemployed as part of the labor pool. Hence older people who may have given up aren't counted.



We need more vocational training in this country.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Remove the exemptions for individuals, and develop a system to tax non-monetary benefits.



Like I said, we have a system very much like this now, and there are still people who game that system. Those are people businesses cannot afford to be saddled with because they produce little or nothing and still consume resources, cost of their "labor" at the very least.



Sticking to domestic problem would be swell, but as we're part of a global economy now, there's always going to be something that is imported. That would probably even out a bit if we would stop taxing exports and start taxing imports, or at least bring our rates of import/export tariffs in line with our international competitors.



It doesn't have anything to do with 'fairness.' Certain behaviors have predictable outcomes. If you constantly have sex without using birth control, someone will eventually end up pregnant. The same goes for spending/saving behavior, and choices in job and education. If wiping out poverty is really our goal, we have to start discouraging behaviors that lead to poverty while encouraging behaviors that lead to personal prosperity.



You talk like the economy is something people designed and built, not something that developed inadvertently over the course of history. The global economy is showing you what system is most productive. Now, there are non-tangible costs associated with that system that most everyone will agree are detrimental, but let's not imagine it's simply China that was putting France at a disadvantage. I can't imagine the French are any less inclined toward productivity than anyone else on the planet, but when laws were put in place preventing people from working in excess of 30 hours a week even if they might have wanted to work more, it not only reduces productivity, but also discourages capital investment.



It's not a flaw because those numbers aren't measuring the unemployed. They're measuring the employed.



On-the-job-training is vocational training.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

I don't want the poor to starve or go without life saving medical care.

I just want them to think they could.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/ ... TL20110519

$40,000/sec borrowed? Wow.