Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics Universal Basic Income? Guaranteed Job?

Is there no way to discuss the other side of this problem without being inferentially cast as a hard hearted unsympathetic person?

It is obviously true that many people have encountered some situation that has made them "poor"

But it sems equally obvious that many poor people make very bad life choices
Some of this is bad luck of not being taught otherwise as children, etc.
But if part of the problem is people making bad choices, it does not seem like giving them more benefits addresses the problem

Imo there already is assistance available. I do not recall the last time i saw a starving person. And there are housing programs also. And i agree that it would be good to offer work... Although that is problematical.

We all know of people that we would never hire as employees
Imo it is foolish to act as if such people do not exist

At some level, people need to learn self discipline
And imo this does not happen unless they see some consequence to their choices
And, for some people, they will remain bums regardless of the consequences

I agree that many of our efforts in this respect are inadequate, or misguided
Otoh,
It may be difficult to train a 45 year old coal minor for the jobs that are available.... And which jobs are often located elsewhere
The governme ts simply not capable of sheilding its citizens from all bad outcomes

Not sure if there is a point here. Not a solution in sight.
1) Yes, some people do make bad choices. But just like anyone else they deserve a chance at correcting that. Following your logic a criminal makes a bad choice so we should lock him/her up and throw away the key? Is it not possible to teach them to make better choices? And in the process not let them starve to death. Not sure where you're going or if you have a suggestion.
So then I guess we should just throw them in the trash if they can't be as you would like them to be?
2) Apparently you have not traveled the country. Try the Ozarks. Try parts of West Virginia. Try parts of New York State. There are many starving people. Many more than you can imagine. In June 2016 there were 60,042 homeless people in NYC, 14,981 homeless families with 23,213 homeless children. Many of them starve.
The purpose of government is to support its citizens - not ostracize them. So while you can't shield people from all possible mistakes that they may make, you can't discard them either.
3) Coal MINERS can do many other things. They can and have been retrained. And if they aren't able to thrive at anything other than manual labor there is plenty of that to go around. We have a crumbling infrastructure that needs rebuilding much of which requires manual work. There are buildings, damns and etc. to be raised. Government should, as it did in the 30s, prioritize that work. That would employ tens of thousands of people.

So in summary, other than creating jobs, retraining and helping people stay alive, what suggestion do you have?

I think we started out by admitting that job retraining is hopeless in the long run because any job you could retrain a coal miner to do will not exist soon. We will have more and more people with no job prospects because of automation. A UBI is one way to see that they don't starve.

Of course that brings up another problem: The poor having lots of kids, all with equally poor prospects other than becoming cannon-fodder or criminals. Maybe long-term birth control has to be heavily pushed in the free medical care?

Well, as an unapologetic commiehippieetc I still say it doesn't matter if someone makes bad choices, good choices or no choices. With the wealth we collectively have, everyone should have the resources for a decent living, including free health care.

The notion of punishing bad choices is so arrogant and unnecessary. It implies that your judgment is superior and everyone should live up to your standards.

Hogwash, who appointed you as mother superior? Get off it and learn to share without restraints.

Now I agree, if that is not the system so that all participate, I do not expect any one of us to live that way. But if we are going for a compassionate, caring world, why not?

Tip of the hat again!

So you give everybody UBI cash with no strings and most of the poor get conned out of their money because bad people purposefully try to cheat the ignorant and the elderly. There are whole industries that do nothing but cheat the poor.

Resources wasted. Try again, and this time don't assume that everybody is as smart as you.

Let's not make this into the Republican voter fraud BS. In any program there can be fraudulent use. Doesn't mean the program is no good. There are ways to avoid it. Talk about throwing the baby out with bath water.

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Yes, but all too many people in the USA do think that you can discard them --- which means that despite all the ranting of the pseudo-religion of "Americanism", there is no sense of unity in America, no sense that "we're all in this together." And this blindness to our social unity has been here right from the beginning.

From Mrs. Frances Trollope's 1832 classic, Domestic Manners of the Americans :

Long, disabling and expensive fits of sickness are incontestibly more frequent in every part of America than in England, and the sufferers have no aid to look to, but what they have saved, or what they may be enabled to sell. I have never seen misery exceed what I have witnessed in an American cottage where disease has entered....
"I suppose there is less alms-giving in America than in any other Christian country on the face of the globe. It is not in the temper of the people either to give or to receive.
"I extract the following pompous passage from a Washington paper of Feb. 1829 (a season of uncommon severity and distress), which, I think justifies my observation.
"'Among the liberal evidences of sympathy for the suffering poor of this city, two have come to our knowledge which deserve to be especially noticed: The one a donation by the President of the United States, to the committee of the ward in which he resides, of fifty dollars; the other a donation by a few of the officers of the War Department to the Howard and Dorcas societies, of seventy-two dollars.' When such mention is made of a gift of about nine pounds sterling from the sovereign magistrate of the United States, and of thirteen pounds sterling as a contribution from one of the state departments, the inference is pretty obvious, that the sufferings of the destitute in America are not liberally relieved by individual charity."
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This is the kind of temporary housing that containers make possible:
There are thousands upon thousands of available containers. They run $2-4,000 each. A Solar-powered air conditioner can be obtained for about the same. (Now, plumbing and electrical supply adds cost, as does insulation, but $10-12 thousand per unit is still less than other temporary housing solutions.) There was a contest in Portland, OR to design housing based upon their ubiquity.

And those are certainly better than a cardboard box behind the Supermarket. Which some people will choose again and again for decades. How many bad choices should you let somebody make?

I think there has to be a limit. If you think giving money to a heroin addict forever is a good policy then you have a warped sense of compassion. Some people are simply beyond making their own choices. Maybe I've run into more of these than most people. At some point they need somebody like a probation officer who says: "I'm going to make some choices for you."