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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

There is unfortunately a large political danger with giving cash. If you give cash, then it becomes possible for pundits to agitate for more assistance on the theory that "you can't live on $X". When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats, it's pretty hard to argue that they are somehow lacking anything necessary to live.

Based on this article, there is also no reason to believe that cash assistance rather than in-kind assistance is necessary. The proposed mechanism is "Parents are happier because they have more money, leading to less fighting within the family. This lowers stress on kids..." But in-kind assistance would also lower stress since parents wouldn't need money.

In-kind assistance has the added benefit that parents can't divert public assistance intended for children's welfare into other goods (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, drugs, junk food).

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Among the things I needed — and had — when I was growing up, but that aren't on your list: books, a computer, a bicycle, moving away from the kids who were beating me up, a root canal, fillings, tooth sealant, an appendectomy, methylphenidate, clothes that weren't itchy, electronic components, music recordings, travel out of the inner city to get into nature and visit family members, a telephone number. My parents got those things with money. In many cases, they were better ways of spending money than more government-issue poor-people sweats would have been.

It might surprise you that putting poor people into gray government housing devoid of life or joy and under the control of administrators not accountable to those people generally results not only in abuses but also in crime inside that housing. But that's what you find, not only in the housing projects you're proposing, but also in military barracks (often in the form of gang rape) and in prisons.

It turns out that, in practice, parents do a better job of assigning resources to their children's welfare than governments do. This is true despite both the occasional glaring exception and the general situation that nearly all parents spend some money on things like tobacco or junk food.

Of course, it would be great to have government or community institutions that serve as a safety net for the kids whose parents aren't providing their needs, for whatever reason. Unfortunately, as a society, we do a terrible job of providing accountability to any kind of institution whose job is ostensibly to care for people without political power — whether we're talking about mental hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, housing projects, or schools. Public schools are only as good as they are because of pressure from parents.

You're right up to the point where you believe that the government should be dispensing cash to the parents. The parents must become self-sufficient if they're to adequately govern their home. People in dire need can be presented with necessities, but should probably not be presented with cash. A welfare case worker should be in charge of identifying "necessities" and given broad leeway to do so, so the family can lift out.

I'm going to guess you're assuming that 'non-self-sufficient' parents are so because of some of their moral failings. Like they aren't "hard-working enough" or "responsible enough". If I guessed wrong, then feel free to ignore the rest of my comment.

If you could assume, for just a moment, that those moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes - like environment, continued bad material situation, stress, perhaps bad upbringing - would you then, in that world, see giving direct support as preferable to waiting for people in need to "get their shit together"?

If so, then consider that we're likely to live in that latter world - continued studies of human behaviour show that we're much more influenced by our conditions than our inner character. This is actually pretty positive, because it means we can actually fix things on a systemic level (and it also means things can be broken on it).

As I point out elsewhere, lots of folks (backpackers, college students) suffer similar material deprivation, environment and stress. Yet they don't make the same bad choices.

Nearly all of India lives in far worse conditions than American poor folks and also don't make the same bad choices.

Your theory doesn't seem to be predicting the world very well.

would you then, in that world, see giving direct support as preferable to waiting for people in need to "get their shit together"?

The post you are responding to explicitly favors giving direct support - just in-kind rather than cash.

...continued studies of human behaviour show that we're much more influenced by our conditions than our inner character.

[citation needed]

> As I point out elsewhere, lots of folks (backpackers, college students) suffer similar material deprivation, environment and stress. Yet they don't make the same bad choices.

Short-term, voluntary material deprivation and stress, both of which you can end instantly at any time you want if you so choose, isn't the same thing as poverty.

> Nearly all of India lives in far worse conditions than American poor folks and also don't make the same bad choices.

Exactly my point. No sane person would call nearly all of Indians a nation of lazy, irresponsible people, and yet it's a popular sentiment towards the poor in western countries. I think my theory predicts the world pretty good.

> The post you are responding to explicitly favors giving direct support - just in-kind rather than cash.

I should have wrote "unconditional support", by which I mean support that doesn't make assumptions about what the helpee really needs based on helper's view of personal virtue.

> [citation needed]

Start with "fundamental attribution error" and continue from there; it's pretty well-studied area.

Short-term, voluntary material deprivation and stress, both of which you can end instantly at any time you want if you so choose, isn't the same thing as poverty.

How do you define "poverty"? Apparently it's not material deprivation, harsh environment or stress. So what is it?

I think my theory predicts the world pretty good.

Your theory predicts that intelligent Asian professionals, when faced with material deprivation, environment and stress will make good choices? Similarly for upper middle class Americans temporarily placed in an educational situation?

And it's only a narrow set of people who will actually wind up making bad choices?

I guess I totally misread your post. So in fact, it's not true that "moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes"?

The fundamental attribution error is not a magic incantation to ward off all evidence of bad decisionmaking or moral failure.

> How do you define "poverty"? Apparently it's not material deprivation, harsh environment or stress. So what is it?

It's being stuck in material deprivation. My theory is that it's most often caused by harsh environment or medical conditions. "Harsh environment" includes being born into poverty.

My theory predicts that even intelligent Asian professionals will make bad choices faced with enough material deprivation, environment and stress. People backpacking and students are doing it out of their own choice and can always stop backpacking and go home / drop out or change university to a less demanding one. Unless they're doing either to escape poverty, at which point you can clearly see it's not the conditions of backpacking/education that are the source of one's problems.

> I guess I totally misread your post. So in fact, it's not true that "moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes"?

My point is that there's much less moral failings happening at all than people (usually in a better situation) like to think. That is - a person X is not poor because he's lazy, he's poor because he is malnourished and so stressed that he doesn't have spare cognitive capacity to educate himself and get a better job. My theory predicts that if you solve his direct financial needs for a predictable while (for him; as opposed to random, one-off, non-repeating, small help that doesn't let him plan), he'll most likely recover and start to improve his condition.

> The fundamental attribution error is not a magic incantation to ward off all evidence of bad decisionmaking or moral failure.

No, but it's a name for when people are too eager to see bad decisionmaking or moral failure where there is none. Also, I pointed it out as a starting point - articles describing the concept in detail cite studies about the effects of environment on human behaviour and elaborate on how predictable humans are if you can set up the external conditions.

I'm sorry I am not linking to anything concrete, but I'm writing from a crappy hotel over Great Chinese Firewall. I am asking you to trust that if you start from fundamental attribution error, you'll end up reading about relevant studies :). It's 5 minutes for you, 5 minutes per site for me :(.

My theory predicts that even intelligent Asian professionals will make bad choices faced with enough material deprivation, environment and stress.

In that case, India falsifies your theory. Virtually all of India - including the professional class - is stuck in material deprivation vastly worse than American poverty - the average American poor consumer unit consumes $20k/year, while Indian GDP/Capita is $6k/year (adjusted for cost of living).

They don't usually make the same bad choices. They get educated, save money for a rainy day, mostly avoid drugs, etc.

Actually, now that I think of it, English literature adjuncts are another counterexample.

My theory predicts that if you solve his direct financial needs for a predictable while...

Why financial? Why not just fix malnourishment directly?

I did google the fundamental attribution error, but I did not find any studies showing that certain specific environmental conditions will cause all sorts of people to engage in the same bad behaviors that poor Americans engage in.

The most I found is studies showing things like "people will attribute a basketball player's poor shooting success to ability rather than reduced lighting." This suggests a bias is present, but doesn't come close to proving your thesis.

I guess we're talking a bit past each other and I'm talking myself into a circle as well, but let me try and clarify:

> In that case, India falsifies your theory. Virtually all of India - including the professional class - is stuck in material deprivation vastly worse than American poverty - the average American poor consumer unit consumes $20k/year, while Indian GDP/Capita is $6k/year (adjusted for cost of living).

Here by "bad" choices I meant "bad from comfortable western observer's point of view". The decisions are probably mostly good from the POV of the poor person involved. People in India are stuck im material deprivation because of the environment - the state in phase space in which their society is in. Similarly, many poor people in western countries.

> Actually, now that I think of it, English literature adjuncts are another counterexample.

Sadly, I don't know anything about this class of people.

> Why financial? Why not just fix malnourishment directly?

I don't think anybody will say that this isn't helpful. It is. Hell, it's almost as good as giving money away, assuming you cater to his particular needs - take into account what foods he absolutely dislikes, his time schedule, his allergies, etc. Because if you don't, if it's MIL-STD-01 meal pack 3 times a day, this is robbing one from dignity and in case of people with allergies / some types of mental conditions it's stress-inducing.

People generally have a need of control over their own fate. It's a base Maslovian need. Most of the in-kind conditional help as implemented in today's welfare denies the beneficiaries such control. This has a serious psychological impact, and you don't have to look further than mental institutions and care houses to see the problems it causes. Or even observe how people abuse welfare or even refuse it at all in order to cling to any semblance of control over their lives they have left. Handing out cash empowers people. They can chose their meal, chose what they invest in, chose their direction.

Another keyword (an almost-synonym to FAE) I forgot about - correspondence bias. The general direction I'm trying to point towards is the one presented by things like Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Conformity Experiment, FAE/correspondence bias, the entire economy and game theory - that people's decisions and outcomes are generally predictable based mostly on things external to them. That people follow incentives, determined by things like their mental state, stress, environment, available opportunities, etc. - and that explaining something away as "laziness" or "bad character" or "irresponsibility" is in most cases counterproductive.

If I manage to get hold of a semi-decent Internet connection (allowing to load anything better than plaintext) tomorrow I'll look for links to some sources.

>If I guessed wrong, then feel free to ignore the rest of my comment.

[proceeds to ignore comment]

I should have wrote "then please correct my guess"...

While your abstract theory is very interesting, it's not really addressing my point, which is that, in practice, parents mostly seem to do a better job than welfare case workers of identifying necessities and allocating money to them. I was giving some anecdotes to clarify how this works in practice, but also I think this article provides another useful piece of empirical evidence showing that it does.

So maybe instead of coming up with social prescriptions based on abstract bullshit theories that sound good to you, which is because they flatter your preconceptions or because you've heard them repeated frequently, you should open your eyes to the things that are actually happening in the actual world, and see what happens in reality.

I agree that parents are better at determining their needs, but that's why they need to become self-sufficient. While they're not self-sufficient, they should be given only non-cash contributions so that they can survive while becoming self-sufficient, which makes them truly free to make determinations for their family. A parent can't really say he/she is doing that while they're on anyone's dole.

I've seen the model I've advocated work well dozens of times in reality.

Please understand that all of the groveling before "empirical results" is thinly-veiled hypocrisy. How many times does someone see a dense academic document and say "Oh, this totally changes my opinion on this controversial issue"? Almost never; if they agree with the outcome, they beat everyone over the head with it and call them denialist for not accepting it, and if they disagree, they insist that the outcome is biased, that there were "flaws in the methodology", etc.

If I did give you an article, study, or paper that supported my claims, don't pretend like it would matter. 98% of the time, people will accept propaganda that supports their existing opinion on controversial issues, and nothing else. It's why our media is the way it is.

Did you read the article? Your point seems to be in direct contradiction to it. And it seems to be based entirely upon your own ideas with no supporting evidence.

Your reply demonstrates perfectly why in-kind benefits are politically superior to cash. You've now demanded that specific goods be added to the list and we can explicitly have a debate on the merits of those goods.

I've lived in housing far worse, in terms of material living conditions, than what I'm proposing. I'll happily do it again, most likely next Jan.

The main problem you describe (people committing gang rapes) is a problem with the people rather than the environment. Folks aren't materially deprived, they are just bad people. Now consider these folks: http://www.zostel.com/media/photo/Jaipur_Zostel_Common_Room_... Suddenly, materially worse living conditions don't seem so bad. Instead of "gray government housing devoid of life or joy", it's a fun youth hostel.

(In contrast, my experience staying in real poverty (aka a nice building in an average Maharashtran village) was far less fun. The lack of mosquito netting, power, internet and running water made life quite unpleasant.)

    > You've now demand that specific goods be added to the list

In fact, the opposite:

    >> It turns out that, in practice, parents do a better
    >> job of assigning resources to their children's welfare
    >> than governments do.

I am disappointed that you think that I was "demand[ing] that specific goods be added to the list", and given that level of incomprehension, I don't think engaging further with you on this will be productive.

The only way many people can stay mentally coherent to ideological positions is if they don't read dissenting positions too closely. They try to slot opposing opinions into pre-formed straw-man arguments, then they reiterate their pre-fabricated counter-arguments.

It's a pattern you see almost universally in the user comment sections of political journalism. People who want to think find the comment section's tone hostile, because it's filled with ideologues with Pavlovian responses and pre-canned arguments. The ideologues don't need to read what the other side's ideologues have written - they just need a few key words and they're salivating. Political comment sections are a write-only platform.

I don't think this phenomenon is specific to any political ideology, mind. I think it's fairly universal.

I honestly don't know whether to upvote you for describing an important phenomenon or to downvote you for semi-implicit accusation of intellectual dishonesty towards a long-time HN user.

Personally, I disagree with 'yummyfajitas conclusions, but I wouldn't go as far as to imply motivated reasoning.

Plenty of long-time HN users engage in motivated reasoning and intellectual dishonesty for ideological reasons. At times, it's positively predictable.

YF's post: a rose by any other name, etc.

YF may not have been dishonest, but the post was also not worth engaging.

Agreed. Thank you.

Surely none of us is without sin when it comes to intellectual dishonesty.

Your reply demonstrates perfectly why in-kind benefits are politically superior to cash.

Pardon me, but you remind me of the "What have Romans ever done for us?" scene from the Life of Brian.

> When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats

What if someone inherited a place to live, but has no money? What if she grows her own food, but she can't afford the suit she needs to interview for jobs?

Premise 1: Each person's situation is distinct. In other words, there is no standard group of benefits that would solve everyone's problems.

Premise 2: Poor people will use cash to improve their lives in the long term, rather than just blowing the money on short-term pleasures.

That second premise is exactly what's being demonstrated in small studies, national programs outside the US, and surveys.

What if someone inherited a place to live, but has no money?

If someone has wealth I'd generally expect them to consume that wealth before receiving wealth transfers.

But more generally, if people have some of their needs being met but not all, then they can consume only some of the available in-kind benefits. E.g., a wealthy person with no income (like you described above) might provide their own housing but get their food from the government cafeteria.

Premise 2 is both debunked in the US. Google the consumer expenditure survey and witness poor folks spending money on short term pleasures. Your premise 2 also conflicts with the article: Even if bad behavior does make poverty worse, it’s also the case that poverty causes bad behavior in the first place.

Now you can try to improve the choices that poor folks make. But you can also just eliminate the bad choices and directly manage their lives until they develop the ability to manage their own life.

If someone has wealth I'd generally expect them to consume that wealth before receiving wealth transfers.

You don't need to make it so complicated. Just tax people on their wealth and income, then pay everybody the basic income. Those at the very top will end up paying far more in taxes than what they receive in basic income.

Recent article about this: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3040832/world-changing-ideas/a-un...

I would disagree on the relative merits of in-kind vs. cash assistance, for reasons that have mostly been explored by other replies. There is a specific problem, I see though, and it's what all of these quotes have in common:

"When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats"

"You've now demanded that specific goods be added to the list and we can explicitly have a debate on the merits of those goods."

"then they can consume only some of the available in-kind benefits"

"But you can also just eliminate the bad choices and directly manage their lives until they develop the ability to manage their own life."

All of these things have massive overhead at the administrative, procurement, and distribution tiers. Each of these things costs a lot of money:

1. Deciding on what to distribute

2. Subsequently arguing with recipients over the addition of items to the available benefits, and subsequently approving new items

3. Selecting and procuring the available options for each benefit item or type.

4. Distributing each item.

5. Tracking inventory of each in-kind benefit.

6. Negotiating returns of each in-kind benefit.

7. Balancing stock levels of available benefits to match the partial consumption of some recipients.

While I haven't seen a specific evaluation, I would be completely flabbergasted if this overhead was somehow a lesser cost than the potential loss of cash benefits to pleasure spending.

EDIT: To summarize, why manage this all centrally instead of relying on market dynamics that are well understood and efficient retail and distribution infrastructures that already exist?

Once the minimum benefit is determined, you can of course rely on market dynamics to provide it. The government can put out an RFP for caring for poor people and the lowest bidder can service the contract.

As for determining the actual minimum benefit, that's really just the job for a few bureaucrats. Once the basics are specified, the rest reverts to (free) political pundits - e.g., kragen arguing that books should be included.

And note that the losses due to pleasure spending can be HUGE in some cases, mainly relating to location. For example, consider the various housing projects in the east village, upper west side, etc. The cost of pleasure spending is $manhattan 2 bedroom - $cheaper location dormitory (living in Manhattan without roommates is a consumption choice).

Market forces will guarantee that any bidding for an RFP will maximise profit and minimise actual social spending.

It's bad enough trying to manage IT procurements through RFPs. When you try to manage social spending through RFPs, the result is madness.

This is empirical, and not just opinion. The UK has made a policy of outsourcing all kinds of critical social services to "market forces", and the results are predictably unsatisfactory.

Why would they be anything else when you have a direct and clear conflict of interest between maximising shareholder returns and providing effective services?

I think it's really spurious to imply that moving to a luxury apartment would be high on the list of priorities for anyone receiving a small cash infusion instead of in-kind benefits. I see no reason to expect even a small number of people receiving assistance to squander it on overpriced housing.

Is there any evidence to suggest that cash assistance to poor families is wasted at anywhere near the rate you're describing? I can understand being uncomfortable with the amount that may get spent on alcohol or other vices, but I still think that any reasonable amount to expect would be much lower than the amount wasted on administering in-kind and similar benefit programs. Just think about how much it costs us as a society to administer EBT systems -- it raises the cost of food for everyone, not just the benefit recipients.

Is there any evidence to suggest that cash assistance to poor families is wasted at anywhere near the rate you're describing?

There are 53,809 NYCHA housing units in Manhattan alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authorit...

Assuming an average market rent of $2,000 (a huge underestimate), and assuming dormitories could be provided in distant brooklyn/queens/bronx for $700 (an overestimate), that means we are wasting 70M/month on luxury goods for poor folks in one county alone.

Are you really trying to claim that the cost of administration would exceed $1300/month per housing unit?

Across the entire nation, the cost of administration doesn't need to exceed 1300/mo to be a worse option than cash benefits. It just needs to be greater than whatever waste recipients generate in aggregate. Manhattan low-income housing: 53,809 units, per your above claims, from one of the most expensive places to live in the entire country. 46.7 million Americans were below the poverty line in 2014:

https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/

The vast majority of the US is quite a bit cheaper than NYC. Further, we don't need to provide cash assistance to match an area's rent -- thus achieving the same "ship out the poor people" policy you seem to espouse above. If someone can spend their $500 monthly benefit on Manhattan rent, or spend that same benefit on NJ rent, many will choose the latter and thus avoid the waste you claim is inevitable.

And you've still cited no evidence which makes me think that the waste you're citing could exist on a national scale anywhere close to the administrative burden of an in-kind program.

That would mean that market dynamics are used to plan but not administer the benefits. Distributing can lets market dynamics take care of everything.

"In-kind assistance has the added benefit that parents can't divert public assistance intended for children's welfare into other goods"

This can always be done, sometimes at tremendous inefficiency.

http://www.fns.usda.gov/tags/water-dumping

'"Water dumping" involves buying beverages that require a container deposit and immediately dumping out the contents in order to return the container and receive the deposit credit in cash.'

When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats, it's pretty hard to argue that they are somehow lacking anything necessary to live.

That's extremely gross. Most poor people are poor in part because of serious health problems. Giving people "3 square meals/day" implies forcing them to accept some standard issue, probably godawful cafeteria food that they have no control over. This can make health problems far, far worse, driving up medical expenses and driving down their ability to be productive.

To me, that sounds like a) hell and b) permanent underclass in the making.

And if you think in-kind assistance cannot be diverted to other goods, you are really, really clueless as to how creative people can be about converting the things they can get into the things they want to get. The reason we have all kinds of laws about how you can use food stamps is because so many people find ways to convert them to guns, alcohol, you name it.

"Most poor people are poor in part because of serious health problems."

Citation needed? There was a study a while back purporting to state that most bankruptcies in the United States were due to medical costs, but that turned out to not be the case upon further examination.

Not a citation and not a proof, just pointing out an additional group - there is a whole class of mental problems that can lead one to poverty and keep them there. They often need money and stable situation (have time to visit a doctor, have money to buy drugs OR have a job to have an insurance to get drugs) to be kept at bay, and if they force you into bad situation it becomes very hard to get out of it.

Some people are employable only because huge inefficiencies that exist in job market (e.g. it's easy to pass a programming test and hard for your employer to determine your actual productivity) and that would be better off on an UBI, providing some value without the stresses of not getting paid for being unable to e.g. maintain 9-5 schedule, or your employer not understanding that you have random periods of downtime due to depression.

I don't have a citation handy. I had a college class on homelessness some years ago. I have read a fair amount about poverty. I am currently homeless. My medical handicap is a primary underlying cause of my lack of housing and challenges involved in trying to resolve that.

It is too late to edit the comment. It may not be "most" poor people (ie more than 50%) but it is certainly many.

I can also confidently state that a high percentage of homeless individuals have either a medical or a mental health condition that is an underlying cause of homelessness hy substantially interfering with their ability to make their life work. I believe that for the homeless population this is well over 50%, though I don't have a citation for that either. However, my previous college class and firsthand experiences suggest that health problems lead to homelessness. I know that once you are on the street, it can be hard to take care of yourself and homelessness often does cause or worsen health issues. I think this reality masks the degree to which health problems both precede and contribute to incidence of homelessness. I think most people think people on the street are ill because they are on the street. But everything I have seen indicates most of them were ill before they became homeless and that fact contributed to them ending up on the street or outright caused their homelessness. In many cases, being on the street does cause a worsening of their health, but that should not be misconstrued as "Well, they are only ill because they are homeless."

Everyone I have ever known reasonably well who had a serious health crisis experienced significant financial stress as a consequence, above and beyond the high medical expenses per se. Some things I have heard over the years: Job loss, time away from the job, passed over for promotion, took a demotion to a lower paying position. There are also additional expenses incurred beyond the medical expenses, such as higher food costs due to being too sick to work, transportation expenses if they need to travel to get care, etc.

I also recall reading in an article that the most common factor in cases where women were on welfare for very long periods and could not seem to get off welfare was that she was de facto responsible for providing care for a relative with high needs of some sort, either a special needs child or elderly parent in poor health or similar scenario.

Also note that "bankruptcy" is not directly correlated to "poor". You can go bankrupt while pulling in six figures, and be able to supply your family's basic needs throughout the process. Bankruptcy just puts a legal stop to debt collection.

> There is unfortunately a large political danger with giving cash. If you give cash, then it becomes possible for pundits to agitate for more assistance on the theory that "you can't live on $X".

I'm not clear why that's a problem.

Why is the minimum wage never sufficient? Do you think it'll actually stop at $15/hr? It's insufficient because people always want more free money, and there are always politicians that are willing to exploit that for personal gain.

The minimum wage is never sufficient because it's never, to date, been enough to comfortably support a family, as the article we're commenting on demonstrates. Fortunately for you, your "damn these lazy, greedy poors" rhetoric is still quite popular.

It's not clear why wasting more money than necessary on a government program is a problem?

I should clarify. I don't see the problem with pundits saying "You can't live on $X" when you really, demonstrably can't raise children well on $X, where "raising children well" is defined as positive psychological and employment outcomes. The article suggests that this is the situation we're in right now; therefore I'm fine with people agitating to improve that situation.

If, as you fear, America should at some point find itself giving too much to the poor, then perhaps proposals to limit that would be appropriate, but right now (and for most of recorded history) we have the opposite problem, and your fear does not look at all realistic.

UNHCR has some experience with this http://www.unhcr.org/515a959e9.pdf

I don't understand the conservative desire to centrally manage the lives of the poor, taking away choice and freedom in favor of centralized bureaucracy.

What? I assure you that the the meddling, micromanaging social services bureaucracies are not run by "conservatives". Far from it.

A conservative or libertarian model would tend more toward a negative income tax or guaranteed basic income than what we have now. In fact, Milton Friedman was a big advocate of the NIT.

Neither of which are examples of centralised bureaucracy?

That aside, conservative politicians aren't famous for demanding that the poor be given free money.

The current British conservative government seems intent - quite literally - on starving the poor to death. That seems to be more usual for conservatives than aggressive agitation for a guaranteed basic income.

"That aside, conservative politicians aren't famous for demanding that the poor be given free money."

Milton Friedman is just about the most famous conservative/libertarian economist there is. Nobel Prize, even.

Arguably not a politician, though.

What? I assure you that the the meddling, micromanaging social services bureaucracies are not run by "conservatives". Far from it.

Yes, they are. These services are known as prisons and you will find no greater a champion of their construction and expansion than among the most hard right wing members of the Republican party.

"Yes, they are. These services are known as prisons"

Nice attempt to shift the goal posts, but I'm not going to bite.

We're talking about welfare reform, not prison reform.

Prisons are the largest form of welfare in the US. They provide food, clothing, shelter and medical care to millions and millions of people who would otherwise be out in the cold. You don't have to search very far to find tons of examples of ex-cons who deliberately commit crimes in order to be sent back to prison.

FYI, corrections was about $70b in 2006 versus just social security spending was about $550b.

You can get a subsidized housing, free food, free medical care, and direct deposit cash every month from the government, and you don't need to be a felon to do it. In fact, you must not be a felon to be eligible.

>>"They provide food, clothing, shelter and medical care to millions and millions of people who would otherwise be out in the cold"

That's one way of looking at it. Another way is that they entrap many people who don't deserve to be there and would be productive members of society if it weren't for some ridiculous punishment on a nonsensical law.

I think it's unreasonable to believe that even half the people in an American prison would be homeless without it.

"Prisons are the largest form of welfare in the US. "

No, they are not. Prisons and welfare are for totally different purposes.

The desire springs from the idea that if someone is not self-sufficient, they need a manager to oversee their resource management and consumption until they become self-sufficient. It's delusional to say that there's not a large number of poor people whose economic status is directly related to their poor money management skills, poor employability, or other "real problems" that need fixed, not just band-aided by free cash.

In the same way that conservatives want to "micromanage" the lives of welfare recipients, liberals want you to believe everyone's problem is that they don't have infinity money and that there's no such thing as an imprudent expenditure. Liberals usually do not put any weight on independence or self-sufficiency, so they're OK with a society where everyone is on the dole.

By contrast, conservatives believe that people who are not self-sufficient need help to become self-sufficient. Conservatives believe this is micromanagement to the same extent that liberals believe gun control to be micromanagement. To each party, it's the obvious, common sense solution, and it's not about patronizing or babysitting, it's just about supervising people who obviously need supervision.

In the explicit explanation I gave above, what specifically do you not understand?

He doesn't understand your desire. I think he is noticing a certain tendency in posts like yours.

besides being given cash they government fees that people below a certain threshold of income need to be adjusted. There are far too many such fees which hammer the income of those least able to afford it.

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