Which candidate is going to let any kids out of cages?
I mean, the only posters I can confirm are for open borders are me and you (obv I’d bet safe money on a bunch of others; tom, greg, vic, catface et al) so what’s really going on? If you have a closed border people will be detained. If people are detained more than a few hours they will be in a “cage”. That cage can be tricked out with books and video games and soft beds and freedom of movement like “country club” prisons but it’s still a cage.
Seriously. Extremely hard to overstate how good getting 1000 a month would be for the homeless/very poor. The % of the population getting food stamps (the easiest welfare program to qualify for by far) is 9.3%… the % of the population living under the poverty line is 12.3%. In other words a fully 25% of the people living under our hilariously understated poverty line don’t even qualify for food stamps. There are only 6.7M people living in Section 8 and public housing combined nationwide… which means a full half of the people living under the poverty line receive no housing benefits at all.
I’m sorry but the current means tested poverty programs are a joke, very politically unpopular, and help very few people as a % of the population. Yang’s UBI would increase total spending power for the bottom 90%+ of the population.
I feel like a lot of the liberals on this forum massively overestimate how widespread welfare programs are, and somehow think that the poor are actually getting helped currently. They aren’t. If you don’t meet a hilarious list of criteria currently you aren’t getting any help at all.
I’m sorry but the future of welfare isn’t means tested. It’s a robust package of benefits given to all citizens. This makes it massively more popular, which in turn makes it possible to make it much larger. In the future I wouldn’t be surprised if 60% or more of the typical middle class families income came in the form of UBI, and there were zero people living in the kind of conditions survived by people living under the poverty line today. Why? Because the government would literally be giving every family more money than the current federal poverty line.
In the future there simply aren’t going to be enough jobs to go around. We’re going to have to deal with that by making sure everyone has a minimal standard of living (and in the process kill off the stress of wondering how you’re going to pay your basic bills), and to make that politically feasible we have to give it to everyone. Don’t worry, the money is going to be coming from the people you want to tax… basically the people who make 200k+ a year now.
The central victory of the conservative political movement is mobilizing resentment. For whatever reason, the human brain is programmed to explode with rage at the thought of other people getting stuff you aren’t, but only if its salient. So in places that are in decline, like the dozens of Ohio towns I’ve spent most of my life in, the people playing by the rules have objectively terrible lives, and they know it.
And while these folks aren’t Mensa material, they are DEFINITELY smart enough to know they are getting a raw deal. The central, tragic failure of the Democratic Party is their complete lack of an ability to connect with these people. SPOILER ALERT: means tested tax deductions and telling 50 year olds to learn to code isn’t where its at.
They are, of course, massively racist, but they voted (D) for a very long time when the party actually offered them something they understood.
You’re not wrong but looking at this in too narrow a scope in time and place.
The central tool of conservative political movements is and has always been resentment. Triggering it and exploiting it. Fear and resentment (of anything) make people vote more conservatively. It’s like a fundamental psychological response. I can’t cite offhand therecent studies demonstrating this tendency but you can see it expressed as far back as the early Roman republic where in times of existential crisis they would elect somebody dictator for a year.
What the important recent change here is the sorting of the 2 parties along ideological lines. There were plenty of liberal Republicans even in the 1970s. Since the capture of the party by its far right in 1980 it has been pushing rightwards at every opportunity.
That might have something to do with why Yang is for a massive mental health funding boost. Why is UBI the only program that is expected to solve every single problem in the whole world?
I generally think most people can do more positive things for their own lives with 1000 dollars that they can spend on their own biggest priorities than the government can accomplish with 1500-2000. Big entities like government agencies have a lot of waste, and tend to leave areas entirely untouched that REALLY matter to the people on the ground.
I’m sorry but you’re going to have to learn how to have some level of trust for your fellow citizens. Give them the resources to fix their own lives. Poverty isn’t a character trait it’s a lack of cash. Give them cash and let them figure out how to solve their situation. The sizable % of the poor who aren’t massively mentally ill will see their lives improve exponentially.
the people given UBI were all able bodied people who were long term unemployed and the goal was go get them to be employed. Essentially targeting the group of people least likely to show positive results from a UBI.
The amount was a relatively small 560 Euros a month.
They exempted these people from the rules of Finnish unemployment where you have to participate in the labor market to keep getting benefits. They did not exempt the control group.
Despite all that it showed significant positive impacts on the happiness levels inside the group receiving the benefit, but even that was contaminated and could possibly just be a result of them getting the extra attention.
Since then there have been better studies in other places, but count on this one being referenced a ton by anti UBI people. It’s propaganda at this point.
You understand that people cutting that second job and spending more time with their kids is a very good thing right? One of the big arguments for UBI is that it is very good for families.
The very poor are supposed to keep getting help. UBI isn’t the end all be all. One of Yang’s big 3 policy ideas is time banking, which doesn’t get brought up much.
You also have to absolutely understand that the 1000 a month UBI is a trojan horse. Once we get that done it’s popularity will make increasing it a politically profitable stance. This is how we completely eliminate poverty. The first step is 1000 a month.
See my stats from earlier. The existing welfare state is already dead. Decades of undermining it have reduced it down to covering roughly 1/20 people, and those people live a very precarious existence where their benefits last for 3-4 years almost max. They also have a very difficult time climbing out of poverty with it because as they increase their earnings their benefits get taken away at a greater than 1:1 ratio.
The means tested welfare system needs to be uprooted and replaced. It’s political poison, it doesn’t help the people it should as much as it should, and it’s comically inefficient. Just accept that it has to die for us to move forward. It isn’t worth the trouble.
Assuming you provide them with mental healthcare I don’t expect the government to remove all sadness from the world. People will still die of cancer too.
I don’t see the point of earmarking money for specific types of spending. Just let people buy what they need.
I know you come from the UK and the housing situation is super different, but here in the US you basically always have the option to move somewhere quite a bit cheaper than one of our major metros. An hour or three outside of any of our major cities there’s cheap decent housing to be had for 500/month per adult (including 1-2 kids) or cheaper. It’s where many of our working poor live now.
A lot of people seem to be obsessed with figuring out how to find beds for homeless people within a few miles of a downtown where a square foot of housing costs 400 bucks. That’s just not a good use of money.
One nice thing about the US is that we have virtually unlimited space in every direction in most places.
You’re right. Generally speaking the homeless are getting no benefits or almost no benefits. They are usually too far gone to be able to jump through the hoops. Another point for UBI IMO. If everyone gets it they don’t have to jump through any hoops.
