while it might seem that evidence suggesting that that US poverty level is actually far below the official rate is good news (to the extent that it is true), nothing is simple in a politically polarized world. Conservatives would have to accept that a number of government programs have had a dramatic effect in successfully reducing poverty rates. Liberals would have to accept that poverty is now a much smaller problem than several decades ago.
I recommend the whole post for its analysis of data and concepts.
My opinions:
1. The rising tide of economic growth has tended to lift all boats, and that accounts for some reduction in poverty, as properly measured.
2. Government transfer programs, such as food stamps, have also contributed to poverty reduction. Certainly this is true numerically.
3. But government transfer programs have, in my opinion, undermined social norms regarding work and marriage. The high implicit marginal tax rates that arise as people lose eligibility for benefits when they earn income have made it uneconomical for women to marry low-wage men. So low-wage men work less and marry less than they would otherwise.
Should permanent poverty be made more tolerable by the gov’t?
The Dems are offering more comfy poverty, with a much less rewarding first step out. The Reps are offering easier exit from poverty, but less comfort for those who remain stuck.
The best the gov’t can do now is make it much more rewarding for those in poverty to take the first steps out of poverty. Getting a job without losing benefits for some time. Having far more jobs available, even gov’t National Service jobs which produce services or goods whose market value is less than the cost of the jobs.
From Tyler’s ideas to pay people to stay home:
“Instead of paying people to dig and fill ditches we could pay people to help train machine-learning apps, enter data, subtitle videos. take surveys, maybe even fold proteins to disrupt viruses.”
Low wage work needs to be much more heavily supported, so that the working poor are living better lives than the non-working poor.
“Low wage work needs to be much more heavily supported, so that the working poor are living better lives than the non-working poor.”
Let’s say one assumes that most able people should be encouraged to work. (It’s worth pointing out that this now far from a universally-held belief. If the rich and their machines are able to make more than enough for everybody, well … a lot of people already consume without producing and without savings, so …)
But under that assumption, that encouragement would come from a big gap in utility, welfare, lifestyle (whatever you want to call it) between working and not working.
Putting legal considerations to the side, one way to widen the gap is to lower the condition of those who don’t work. That is, eliminate their welfare benefits and make them desperate for whatever money they can get so they can survive. You could even ban panhandling and vagrancy and enforce vigilantly enough such that they really don’t have any other options. Except mooching. But you could try to get at moochers, restricting occupancy to singles or legal families, i.e., no adult “joeys” living in the kangaroo pouch of someone else.
Ok, even if it were legal, that seems politically out of the question. It’s a particularly bad problem because the standard of “intolerable deprived” keeps going up.
The other way is subsidize work such that even low wage work pays for a lifestyle far higher than the welfare floor. The trouble is, if you gave it to everyone, a “universal basic earned-income bonus”, it would cost too much.
If you just give it to some people at the bottom and phase it out, there is little incentive to work more or harder, and people will just find the easiest thing they can do that satisfies some bureaucratic regulation that qualifies them to receive the huge bonus, rather than an actually productive thing that would pay a lot more, but with no bonus.
There’s no good way out of the problem.
The reeks and wrecks don’t like their condition.
It’s not clear if making them go to work a nonsense jobs improves it or not. I think unemployment would be healthier for me, my family, and my community then having to put in 40 hours of make-work a week, but I might be different then the class normally associated with this.
Timothy Taylor is such a nice guy that he politely overlooks the elephant in the room: immigration. Legal immigrants are 50% more likely than non-immigrant citizens to live in poverty, and their children are twice as likely to live in poverty as children of non-immigrants. Illegal immigrants are much more impoverished (!) even than legal ones, but we are not given precise figures. (Source US Census ACS and various think-tank reports.)
If we had strongly discouraged poor immigrants since we began the “war on poverty” we would have tens of millions fewer people living in poverty in America.
Interestingly, many of the immigrants swelling the ranks of America’s poor would not be “impoverished” in their own countries— legal immigrants tend to be relatively poorer in the US than they would be back home, though absolutely richer due in part to high consumption of American social-welfare spending (which contrary to the incessant lies you hear, is *not* withheld from immigrant households).
Fifteen years ago Arnold Kling openly advocated “importing poverty” as a welfare project for the whole world (to be financed by Americans. Even though Americans democratically oppose that by large margins, and indeed, it costs them and their descendants hugely).
Have you revised your views at all, Dr Kling?