Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty...
My proposed solution is to pick an absolute standard of what "poverty" is and try to solve that. When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved. I believe this is intentional, but it doesn't really matter to the point whether this is just a mistake or not. If we can define "poverty" by absolute standards of access to the basic necessities of life, I think we will find that the United States has already solved poverty or needs to do very little to fill in the last couple gaps.
If, instead, "poverty" just refers to having less than the median, well, the poor we'll always have with us, I suppose.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
Your core point is correct, but it's worth noting that there are principle-agent problems within this. Plenty of people do have the will to simply remove vagrants, but the United States is home to people that will take it all the way to the Supreme Court insisting that bums have a right to camp in your parks if you don't just give them housing. The threat of litigation and the fact that there are lunatic judges that will rule in favor of the bums means that it takes a lot of will to proceed with something as simple as telling bums not to camp in your park. Some of the hoarders don't want to live in filth, but there is a powerful federal government forcing them to at gunpoint.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
I have to confess that I simply do not care about the day-to-day litigation of whether such-and-such attack or finding constitutes a "war crime" or not. The present conflict is the direct result of choices made by Gazans. The conflict can be brought to a close with the snap of the fingers of Gazan leadership, they're simply unwilling to accept the terms of surrender. Arguing about whether a given incident is an example of Israelis behaving badly seems about on par with someone in 1944 arguing that the American response to Pearl Harbor has been wildly disproportionate, and they've sank way more warships than Japan ever sank of the Americans, and it would be terrible to hurt any innocent Japanese civilians. Anyone arguing this would rightly be seen as an anti-American agitator. By all means, sort out whatever you can when it comes to conduct of your soldiers after the war, but I just do not care about the claims of the side that picked a fight that they can't win, particularly when that side's chief tactic is trying to get civilians killed to create international pressure. I am completely fine with Israel inflicting misery until their enemy surrenders.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
Relatedly, eliminating corporal punishment in favor of just modulating the length of prison sentences is one of those things that strikes me as a solution someone could only like if they're basing their policies on squeamishness rather than genuine care. There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
While it doesn't cash out to legible living standards outcomes, the waste and fraud in government spending is meaningful. The illegal alien might not be who receives that $350 per day, but someone is getting $350 per day and they like it that way. This should cause some hesitance in proposing government spending as solutions to problems more broadly.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?
Supplemental poverty is the alternative measure that includes transfers.
Conservatives and progressives both seem to vassilate on what exactly they mean by poverty when it's convenient to do so. Conservatives claim that transfers don't work because they haven't pulled everyone up to a middle-class earned income, but they also note that America's "poor" are housed, clothed, fed, and have entertainment budgets. Progressives claim that transfer programs work and we can tell because supplemental poverty figures tell us we've pulled people up, but then insist that tens of millions are "food insecure". To the extent that the concern is actual material impoverishment, welfare spending works and we do a lot of it.
I do try to be consistent - I occasionally get annoyed by the size of these programs, but the reality is that spending $183 billion per year for the hungry instead of for space has resulted in Americans having entirely too much to eat rather than any issues of "food insecurity".
Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?
I am completely unsympathetic to inequality discourse. Part of the reason is that it's often couched in the language of poverty, insinuating that the relatively deprived are absolutely deprived. Really though, I just generally don't buy that inequality is a real problem. I'm fine with anger at specific elites for specific reasons, but some fuzzy claim that Jeff Bezos just has too much money because Amazon is wildly successful is just annoying to me.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
I remain surprised that there aren't more people that want Israel to win, but don't want to give them $26 billion.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
Probably a similar amount to what we'd expect if American glazers were responsible for replacing all of the windows broken in Israel. But yes, I grant that these are largely wealth transfers within the United States as much as they are funding for Israel.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
Who made this argument?
Potter Stewart, writing the controlling opinion in Robinson v California. I find it amusing that @netstack linked it to approve of the argument - when I read that portion of the case earlier, I couldn't believe the levels of idiocy or dishonesty that Stewart was engaging in by analogizing a common cold to "catching" narcotic addiction.
To me, this gives away the whole game. Bums aren't sleeping outside because it is literally impossible that they could find a place to shelter, they're sleeping outside because they've failed to do so. If the hypothetical options one could avail themselves of to avoid starting a fire to cook suffice to eliminate a claim that it's cruel and unusual to prevent people from starting fires, the same must apply to sleeping. Someone having failed to talk others into cooking for them or paying for them sleep at a hotel shouldn't result in them being granted some putative "right" to sleep where they like.
On the flip side, despite everyone trying to be careful with language, it's pretty obvious that what the town is concerned with isn't "homelessness", it's bums. Someone that is homeless may sleep in their car, they may sleep on a friend's couch, they may stay in a shelter for a couple nights. If you're sleeping in the park, you're not just "homeless", you're a bum, and that is very much a real status that's going to be difficult to change for quite a few people. In the same fashion that many addicts cannot simply elect to stop doing drugs, many bums cannot simply elect to start doing the things necessary to maintain shelter.
Personally, I'm with you that the whole question of status is pretty ridiculous here. Kudos to you for making it all the way through the oral arguments, I simply couldn't bring myself to do it after they started doing laps around whether a stargazer that fell asleep was also criminal. Everyone in the conversation knows the conversation isn't about stargazers and isn't about falling asleep in public, it's about bums and all the trouble that comes with letting bums camp in your park.
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