Timelordwho wrote:
Almalieque wrote:
Timelordwho wrote:
How would you ameliorate poverty, other than your "remove all welfare" plan.
That's the thing. He has no plan. His concern isn't poverty, but the government's role in the solution, regardless if it is successful or not.
That's my point.
A large piece of the big C. ideology is to complain about how the government operates, and the efficiency of it while offering no administrative solutions. Which actually is a solution, but it's not popular to say "let the wolves take what they may" as their anti-poverty plan, so it's left unspoken.
The problem is that big L liberals will insist that anything that *isn't* a government solution isn't a "plan". How many times do we hear people say "Well, the conservatives have no plan to fight <insert problem here>". Our plan is to remove obstacles to success. And in many cases, the government programs that purport to help people actually create those very obstacles. Welfare is a great example of this.
The "plan", is that by removing people from welfare roles you increase their incentive to work. As I have stated many many times in this thread, welfare creates an opportunity cost to work. It decreases the relative gain for the same amount of work. When you do that, the population receiving welfare will work less statistically than they would have otherwise. More importantly (and as I've also stated in this thread), the kind of work differs. When welfare makes it possible to support a family of 4 on a part time job at a low skill dead end job, many people will sit in low skill dead end jobs. And because of this, they will not advance economically. If you have to find a better job to support yourself and maybe your family, you'll take the risk and spend the effort to seek out better paying jobs, with higher skill requirements, and begin a progression of a work career that will, over time, result in much higher standard of living than you'd ever receive from a dead end job plus welfare benefits.
At the same time, by eliminating the costs associated with welfare, you reduce the tax burden on the very portions of the economy that may employ those people. So you improve their odds at both sides of the equation.
Is this a guarantee of success? Of course not. Nothing is. But statistically, the set of people currently on welfare will be much better off in 10 years if we eliminated welfare than they will be if we don't. And their children will be vastly better off.
And yes, for the much smaller set of people who would fail in this system, you allow private charities to take up the slack. One of the problems with the counter arguments to this is that those saying charities can't do this almost always start with a calculation of costs that assumes the same spending level that the government currently spends on welfare programs. But that's absurd. Absent the entitlement structure of government assistance, far fewer people will find themselves in dire need. Thus private charities would not need to spend nearly as much money to help them. Additionally, as private charities, they can place greater restrictions on assistance and be much more capable of making good decisions about who is really in need and who is just taking advantage of free stuff.
That's "the plan". Is there a problem with that plan? It's just funny because Alma insists that I oppose welfare, not because of the effect on poverty, but because I don't like the "source" (ie: government), but it's abundantly clear that he (and many liberals) like and support big government solutions to problems entirely because they are "government solutions". Again, I'll point to the preponderance of the idea that any solution that doesn't involve a government solution isn't a solution at all. It's a very common assumption among liberals.
Quote:
I'm all for 'reform' and improvements in efficiency, I'm enough of a little-c conservative that proper allocation is relevant to my interests. That isn't what is really desired in this case, rather a general strangling of departments until they look incompetent enough to cull.
We conservative don't have to do anything at all to make government programs look incompetent. You actually kinda have to wear a thick set of pro-government lenses to *not* see this.
Edited, May 21st 2015 2:10pm by gbaji 
