Seattle
Valued Senior Member
I
Giving someone free nursery care isn't going to mean much if they get shot going to the nursery. Having local jobs isn't good for the local neighborhood? We're not talking about Google moving into Watts. We're talking about people being able to open more Mom and Pop retail.
You're saying if we did that, everyone would have to leave? There is already section 8 housing. Clean up the inner city and create more section 8 housing. That's more effective than providing free nursery care for every kid in America hoping that the trillions spent will help just one kid get out of poverty.
Throw in insurance, partial coverage, then if you are left out it's pretty much unaffordable for many. When you add insurance, guarantees, assistance, it still has a cost to the system and that cost generally goes up, not down. That cost is also generally ignored. You could go to the doctor every day and justify it as "well, it's free" but if everyone did that the system would implode.
I do actually favor universal healthcare but there needs to be some buy in cost and use cost (just as with anything else).
Guarantee student loans and tuition goes up. Before the latest guarantee program no one was complaining about unreasonable tuition. Now people who probably shouldn't go to college have loans they can't pay and they are no further from poverty as evidenced by the fact that they still aren't earning enough to even pay for their student loan and tuition now is even higher.
People who could afford a house were buying houses then came the sub-prime mortgage mess that almost brought down the financial system. When trying to guarantee that everyone could buy a house, that doesn't mean that everyone could afford a house. Nothing changed there.
These are cases of assistance trying to change the outcome by not really changing anything and just making matters worse.
Aid to Africa and decades of no improvement. Would it be more helpful to let your children stay at home until they are 30 or try to equip them to go out into the world on their own at an earlier age? There are exceptions of course but assistance often results in delaying the progress that you are looking for.
There are more direct ways to solve some problems IMO. Even just giving a rent free apartment to all homeless would be more effective and cheaper than the total cost to the system presently. That's assistance of course but it's much more targeted (and cheaper) than the present "assistance" that has very little to show for it.
Inner cities haven't changed in decades or on the street homelessness or mass exodus out of poverty. It's more likely that the Cuban guy escaping by life raft with no assistance will be doing much better after 20 years than is the case for most inner city residents.
Are you arguing that cleaning up the inner city (not gentrifying some prime neighborhood overlooking the ocean) is a bad idea and that you would move to Watts if it had a decent grocery store and no drug dealing on the corner? Being poor isn't a genetic defect. If you give people safe neighborhoods they will take care of the rest. Your argument (which I know can't be your intention) seems to be that if you improve their local conditions they would have to move so you can never improve their conditions. Inner city living isn't always cheaper. You can find basic housing in safer areas for the same rent.Cleaning up the inner city - reducing crime, improving schools, making the streets safer, moving new businesses in - means existing resident can't afford to live there any more. So in that sense you've made the problems with homelessness and poverty worse, they are just someone else's problem at that point.
Giving someone free nursery care isn't going to mean much if they get shot going to the nursery. Having local jobs isn't good for the local neighborhood? We're not talking about Google moving into Watts. We're talking about people being able to open more Mom and Pop retail.
You're saying if we did that, everyone would have to leave? There is already section 8 housing. Clean up the inner city and create more section 8 housing. That's more effective than providing free nursery care for every kid in America hoping that the trillions spent will help just one kid get out of poverty.
I agree that as a blanket statement you can argue either side. In general, IMO, that is frequently the case. Consider medical care, not everyone has it, it's more expensive (as a whole) here than most anywhere else and it's far from the best. When I was a kid, we didn't have medical insurance, you just paid when you needed medical care. As a kid I remember the doctor actually making a house call a time or two.I don't buy the attitude that assistance makes problems worse.
Throw in insurance, partial coverage, then if you are left out it's pretty much unaffordable for many. When you add insurance, guarantees, assistance, it still has a cost to the system and that cost generally goes up, not down. That cost is also generally ignored. You could go to the doctor every day and justify it as "well, it's free" but if everyone did that the system would implode.
I do actually favor universal healthcare but there needs to be some buy in cost and use cost (just as with anything else).
Guarantee student loans and tuition goes up. Before the latest guarantee program no one was complaining about unreasonable tuition. Now people who probably shouldn't go to college have loans they can't pay and they are no further from poverty as evidenced by the fact that they still aren't earning enough to even pay for their student loan and tuition now is even higher.
People who could afford a house were buying houses then came the sub-prime mortgage mess that almost brought down the financial system. When trying to guarantee that everyone could buy a house, that doesn't mean that everyone could afford a house. Nothing changed there.
These are cases of assistance trying to change the outcome by not really changing anything and just making matters worse.
Aid to Africa and decades of no improvement. Would it be more helpful to let your children stay at home until they are 30 or try to equip them to go out into the world on their own at an earlier age? There are exceptions of course but assistance often results in delaying the progress that you are looking for.
There are more direct ways to solve some problems IMO. Even just giving a rent free apartment to all homeless would be more effective and cheaper than the total cost to the system presently. That's assistance of course but it's much more targeted (and cheaper) than the present "assistance" that has very little to show for it.
Inner cities haven't changed in decades or on the street homelessness or mass exodus out of poverty. It's more likely that the Cuban guy escaping by life raft with no assistance will be doing much better after 20 years than is the case for most inner city residents.
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