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When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.
Two separate examples bubbled up through the twittersphere:
First, consider an 'early retired' couple. They have been held up as a sympathetic example of citizens who will be deeply impacted by losing their health insurance subsidy. But a bit of reading shows something... surprising:
Okay, first and foremost, its sheer statistical fact that your average 60-year-old will OBVIOUSLY consume more medical services now and in the immediate future than your average 30-year-old. Hence the risk premium for the 30 year old would ideally be much, much lower. But if they're in the same risk pool, the 30 year old is having to cover a LOT of conditions, medications, and services they are vanishingly unlikely to use. AND, if the 30 year old is paying taxes... they're contributing to the subsidies that those 60 year olds are using to cover things like:
That. Issues that arrive in older age or due to a rough lifestyle. This seems sort of sympathetic. And yet:
$127,000 per year? On pensions? This legitimately sounds like a princely sum to me. And... early retirement? That they achieved through working for governments? Bill the Civil Engineer, and Shelley who worked in banks and other state institutions? This is NOT your stereotypical blue collar family who busted their ass for decades to set aside a nest egg.
For God's sake. An extra $15k-20k a year is NOT going to bankrupt anyone worth a low seven figures. I cannot square that circle at all. And if they're not worth low 7 figures then how the hell did they decide to retire in their 50's? Oh, wait:
They just wanted to consume more. That's... fine on its own, but I don't think you get to complain if you drop out of the workforce early that those remaining in the workforce don't want to fund your trips or medical care.
Being slightly uncharitable, I read this as a couple that very intentionally gamed certain financial systems in a way that let them extract a lot of personal benefits from comparatively little effort and input, and are continuing to do so after they retired by sloughing their largest non-optional expenses on the next generation.
And finally. No dependents. Its not like they've got mouths to feed and kids to raise. Every dollar they spend here on is solely on themselves, and contributes 'nothing' to the future productivity of the country.
There's a counter argument that they've quite possibly contributed more to the system in their working years than they've extracted. Maybe. But I cannot be convinced that they are justified in receiving $15-20k a year paid by young, healthy people who are still trying to build capital... when they clearly possess the means to pay their own way. Of course, government pensions are ALSO being paid for by younger generations' tax dollars. So this does start to seem quite... parasitic.
They've worked about 30 years, and they'll be retired for 25-30 more, it seems likely that they'll have extracted more wealth from the system, especially if they divert said wealth from productive uses, than they put in when all is said and done.
Second, a pair of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S.
Twitter thread with commentary Here. Original video here.
They're DREAMers, so not the most blatantly offensive example of illegal immigration. But after learning about their situation I still don't want to share a country with them:
They have three kids. They're not married. First two aren't his. She's a SAHM.
Caleb calculates they'll owe about $3,300 in federal taxes this year (the commentary thread wrongfully implies he pays zero).
Own a house.
$133k in 'bad debt.' (that is admitted/disclosed)
Total debt (including the house) is $420k.
Early 30s.
So, at the very least the house can be seized to cover most or all of that debt if they ever just stopped paying. But hearing the rest of their financial situation and how aggressively they (well, mostly her) spend money and I'm really forced to assume they're getting financial support from some other programs to eke out more than a basic level of existence.
I am at a loss as to how these people could be considered a net benefit to the country. Unless one of those kids goes on to cure prostate cancer or something, booting them out would have no noticeable negative effect. To be faaaaair she seems to be the main problem. If it were just him cranking out work it'd be hard to be offended.
But we have two non-citizens and their kids enjoying, from the sound of it, a living standard higher than the median American in their age bracket (just counting the home ownership, for sure) and overall paying little into the system at present, and racking up enough debt that its questionable if it'll ever get paid down.
Presumably they have a net positive effect on GDP when measured on the spending side, and if we ASSUME they don't declare bankruptcy, or renege and duck out on the debt, or just die early (not something I wish on them), they're helping the engine of Capitalism in this country sputter along.
And yes, YES there are plenty of U.S. Citizens who are doing WORSE than this. Caleb has had many of them on his show.
But ask me how I'm damn near certain that these two aren't saving enough for retirement and will not save enough for retirement (around the 41 minute mark she talks about pulling money out of her retirement) so if they're around in their late 60's they're either still working with no end in sight OR have figured out a way to sponge benefits out of the government to maintain their livelihood and yet still die with a mountain of debt someday.
I doubt they'll be in any position to retire early like Bill and Shelley up there. It certainly seems like they're choosing to live parasitically, but unlike the early retirees they still have a lot of good working years in front of them to make up the difference.
Two separate cases that are only similar in the abstract: couples who have gamed parts of the U.S. economic system so as to have their lifestyles paid for without contributing as much to it as the support they have extracted (yet). Bill and Shelley managing to pull off a plan that would be virtually impossible to repeat for anyone much younger than they: get the state government pensions + the Fedgov subsidies and then stop working well before most people could afford to do so.
This raises a question: are 'we' really supporting this entire apparatus on the efforts of some small and possibly shrinking minority of our actual population? Without getting too Randian, what's the ratio of productive/unproductive left now?
It leads me, specifically, to ask: HOW MANY PEOPLE DO WE HAVE IN THIS COUNTRY PULLING THESE KINDS OF SHENANIGANS. There have to be known strategies that are shared amongst groups on how to follow these paths, exploit edge cases, take advantage of lax enforcement, or otherwise slip into niches that allow you to live 'above your means' for some period of time if not indefinitely. On the individual level its rational. On the population level, the equilibrium can get dangerously unsustainable. Have we crossed that tipping point? I don't know. Feels like it to me.
I personally recall visiting a friend in college and learning that both of his parents (in their 50s) were 100% disabled, getting checks from SSI. Both were mobile but certainly had some impairments... but what stuck with me is more the fact that they had a massive collection of Disney movie memorabilia (especially Tinkerbell) all throughout the house, displayed on shelves floor to ceiling, and even then I wondered "who paid for all this and how does buying these kinds of trinkets square with the claim that you're unable to support yourselves and need government help? Clearly you've got money to spare if you can spend it on things that has no investment value."
We've got some indeterminate number of guys like Oscar paying $3500/year in taxes into the system. We've got some indeterminate number of guys like Bill pulling $15,000/yr OUT of the system in insurance subsidies. WHO THEN IS MAKING UP THE DIFFERENCE. Someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my country is dying.
Today was payday for me. I had a really good month last month. And yet I look at my actual pay stub and see that ~24% of that will never even touch my account due to Federal Taxes. Florida has no income tax, so I can be certain that money is going to pay for all kinds of lovely U.S. Government programs. And now, I have to wonder, what portion of that is going to help Oscar and Natasha raise their kids and pay their mortgage. What portion is paying down Bill and Shelley's insurance premiums so they can take a cruise, or fly to Australia or whatever.
I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years. Trump and DOGE showed just how blatantly fake/fraudulent much of it is, earlier this year. But this here has me putting a face on the issue and that makes it feel personal, even though I have no direct grievance against these folks.
Here's my personal history:
Never used welfare, food stamps, or even unemployment insurance. Have literally never pulled money from a government program to pay my bills... other than the Covid stimulus.
I've held two government jobs in my life. One was Census Enumerator, the other was Public Defender for the State of Florida. Its not inconceivable that I could work for the Gov't in the future, but right now I have no intention to return. No pensions for me.
I've made some boneheaded financial decisions in my life. Its not even a joke to say that I've only been able to reach my current financial position because I was trading Crypto in 2014-2020, and it happened to work out for me. I have never rugpulled a memecoin or otherwise indulged in the scammier parts of that ecosystem.
Yet. YET I've managed to maintain my life on what I earn, and follow most of Dave Ramsey's advice to have adequate savings, minimal (unsecured) debt, and I fully intend to sock away enough to retire on my own even if I never get to draw a social security check.
I'm unmarried and have no dependents so I'm pretty much boned on my tax bill, although I do use some strategies to mitigate the damage.
I have debt comparable to Oscar and Natasha, but on a good day, when everything shakes out, I'm probably at around $250k net worth, and diligently reducing the debt load as I go.
I have not taken an extended vacation in almost exactly 5 years. I could afford to, but it feels irresponsible for various reasons and I've chosen to prioritize financial stability for so long its hard to break that habit. For the right woman, perhaps.
And some days I feel like an utter buffoon when I can see people living a lifestyle that matches or maybe even exceeds my own by making choices that, while individually rational, are deleterious to the overall fabric of the civilization they exist within. Its bad enough if they're burning up our surplus wealth that could have been put to productive use, all the worse if the capitalist machine itself starts to break down under the strain.
One of my favorite little storybooks as a child was The Little Red Hen. The hen goes around seeking assistance from the other animals to make some bread from scratch. Finding no help, she completes the whole process herself. and at the end of the day when the bread is done all the animals follow the wonderful smell and show up hoping to get a piece. And she politely tells them to fuck off. (I also read The Rainbow Fish as a child, that message didn't stick.)
I start to feel like that's going to be my life trajectory. Building as much as I can through my own efforts while trying to cooperate with others, who have found alternate ways to subsist, and then when I finally sit down to enjoy it all, in this version the farmer shows up with a shotgun and says "these other animals are hungry, you're gonna share half that loaf with them." Bluntly and uncharitably, this seems like the logical outcome of the many policies that the Boomers implemented over decades to keep themselves financially secured into old age, which has left a lot of cracks and crevices in the mess of various entitlement programs that various amoral latecomers can latch onto and coast along even after the Boomers are gone.
All paid for by whatever percentage of the population is suckered into actually producing wealth and paying their taxes every year.
I don't want to dehumanize them. Bill and Shelley seem like good people. Oscar seems like a decent guy. I want my fellow Americans to thrive, along with most humans on earth. I do NOT want to tolerate a system that has such a mix of malincentives and avenues for cheating that it is actually easier for the low-conscientiousness hordes to simply shove handfuls of seed corn into their mouths and demand payouts from the most productive members of society than it is for them to maintain a job, not acquire too much debt, and live within their means with enough saved to sustain them into old age.
But human beings are exceptionally good at finding ways to drive excess calories into their own bellies at the expense of others. You might even say this is the actual basis for the entirety of the culture wars: which tribe will do most of the work, and which will consume most of the rewards. Bastiat had it right a long time ago. I don't blackpill over this stuff, but I do wonder how one is supposed to feel when the entirety of your civilization depends on your demographic continuing to accept a status quo that confers benefits on everyone BUT your demographic.
Oh, did you hear that California is going to put a Wealth-Tax Proposal on the ballot next year?
I'm sure its nothing to worry about.
You’re going to die.
Go on vacation.
I was single and after getting my BS and Masters I was ready to eat my slice of the American pie. Instead I still work retail and am now in debt. I said fuck this system about a year after I graduated and now owe student loans and credit debt. I defaulted on the cards. And I’m going to be paying my student loans probably for literally ever.
Now I just got engaged (grammas ring!) and all of a sudden care again. She makes as much as me. We’ll both eventually make more (my American dream isn’t dead - just angrily smoldering).
We still went on vacation this year. A once in a lifetime for both of us (ahem? once we make more maybe this trip will seem quaint) trip on the Washington north near Olympic National Park and on the Oregan coast, right on the beach, where I proposed.
I could’ve taken that 8k and done something else with it. We could’ve saved more (currently we’re saving about 10k a year … we have about 115k in in total savings between my 401k and her divorce) or put it towards a debt.
But we’re paying that debt - and what if she dies tomorrow? Or me? Or one of her kids (which will ruin her for years)?
Go on vacation man.
Go to the Oregan coast and walk out at midnight and feel it.
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Am I a parasite? I got into a car accident about five years ago that was my fault, and I received a payout from my insurance company that was grossly disproportionate to the premiums I paid during the time I used that carrier. I was effectively leeching off of every other policyholder who didn't file a claim during that time period. Thanks to the payout, I was able to buy a new car within a week of the accident. And yes, I could have afforded the new car otherwise; I wouldn't have been financially destitute, or even had to take out a loan. And there are probably people who were with that company for years who never made a single claim who were paying for my carelessness. But nobody would realistically call me a parasite; I purchased a product meant to cover exactly that situation, and I used the product for what it was for.
Now imagine a scenario where every insurance policy includes a clause where the policy doesn't cover any driving done within 24 hours of an inch or more of snowfall. Would you risk driving in that situation? Maybe you would in some circumstances, but you'd have to think long and hard about whether that trip was necessary, and I guarantee that Ubers would be hard to find and very expensive. How would this affect the economy? A lot of people say that money makes the world go round, but it would be more accurate to say that insurance makes the world go round. As a civil defense attorney, my salary is paid almost exclusively by insurance companies who are governed by extremely complicated webs of policies and splits and reinsurance and a bunch of other fun stuff dating back to the 1940s in some cases and involving policies that no one would have thought they'd still be paying claims on in 2025.
When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance. You may say that you work hard, etc., etc. and will never need these policies, but that's about as ingenuous as saying that you're a really good driver and thus don't need liability insurance. You may say that the people who receive the greatest benefit from welfare policies pay the least into it, but how much you receive in insurance payouts is only loosely related to how much you pay in. A guy who crashes a brand new Mercedes a week after driving it off the lot and bought the policy at the same time as the car is getting much more than someone who insured luxury vehicles with the same company for decades, yet no one would say that he is lucky for this having happened because he really got his money's worth. And saying that it's compulsory isn't a great argument either, because a lot of insurance law is more compulsory than you think. Insurance markets are highly regulated; I have a small bookshelf in my office filled with publications discussing all the regulations involving insurance coverage in Pennsylvania, mostly as they apply to large companies whose own welfare you rely on without even realizing it. Believe me, the insurance companies would have left half the Fortune 500 out to dry if regulators hadn't told them they couldn't.
Which brings me to my larger point: Deciding that someone is a parasite is more complicated than you think, and is usually more determined by innate biases than anything objective. Consider that most conservatives consider themselves in favor of "law and order" and all the popular implications that expression has. I don't think it's too controversial to state that poorer areas of cities have more crime than wealthier ones. I also don't think it's controversial to assume that residents of lower crime areas tend to contribute a disproportionate amount to the police budget through taxes. Yet I've never once heard a conservative suggest that cities should direct more police resources toward patrolling wealthy communities and less towards poorer communities with higher crime rates. And I've never heard any conservative suggest that residents of poor neighborhoods are parasites because they get more policing for their dollar than people who live elsewhere.
OF course, this is because there is a broad societal consensus that crime is a bad thing at that society as a whole benefits from lower crime rates everywhere. We can say the same thing about most white collar crime, which wasn't even recognized as crime until relatively recently. In the early days of the Republic, if you went to the authorities because you suspected your accountant was stealing from you, the response would be along the lines of "That's a shame. You should consider finding another accountant." Of course, these days we expect that if we entrust people with out money that they won't just steal it from us, and that companies have certain responsibilities to consumers that they can't just straight up lie, and all kinds of little other things that we take for granted these days. If a poor person buys a bottle of cheap whiskey that in the past would have been adulterated beyond recognition but these days will result in no harm greater than a hangover, we don't say that he's freeloading off of taxes used to fund the FDA. And when Donald Trump files six bankruptcies for companies he owns, conservatives don't call him a parasite because in the 19th Century legislatures recognized that limiting the liability of investors was better for the economy than making the holder of a single share liable for the whole kit and kaboodle, and that a formalized system of bankruptcy was better than throwing people into debtor's prison or hounding them for the rest of their lives. The losers are obviously the creditors who are left holding the bag, but to a certain extent the possibility of default is priced into the transaction. In other words, we all pay a little bit for the fuckups of irresponsible business owners, even if we ourselves are paragons of success.
Insofar as social welfare programs are insurance, they're among the most efficient kind of insurance, since the risk pool includes everybody. Since it's compulsory, we already recognize that it's not going to be the kind of gold-plated payout one would expect from a private carrier. When I totaled my car, the insurance company was, by law, required to find listings for similar cars and pay market value. By contrast, even something as explicitly tied to how much you pay into it as unemployment insurance only nets a percentage of your total loss. Are there downsides? Of course. Some people will ruthlessly try to min-max their benefits, and others will engage in outright fraud, and there is an omnipresent moral hazard that reliance on welfare will lead to dependence. But these same arguments can be made about private insurance. Yet I hear no one arguing that there's something problematic about people who try to maximize their insurance payout through legal means of getting them to enforce the contract, I never hear suggestions that the existence of fraud means we should get rid of insurance altogether, and I never hear people arguing for self-insurance to reduce moral hazard (yes, people with insurance are more careless about certain things than those without, and those with insurance often only take certain precautions because the insurance companies require it).
I think that's definitely a model of welfare that can be used to describe a high-trust society, but I don't think it's particularly accurate in defection-heavy, low trust societies that exist today. In the UK for example, half a million people between the ages of 16 and 24 have literally never worked (and are not in education). Their welfare payments are not insurance payouts for people who have paid in but who have fallen on hard times. They have never paid in, and they've been claiming from the day they were eligible. And of the entire working age population, a full 25% are on benefits.
I'd be fine if a had a literal insurance system of unemployment, provided by the private sector and which people had to pay premiums to receive. What we have is a simple transfer from the (shrinking) productive part of the population to the unproductive part, and we pretend it's an insurance system.
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That’s how it used to work, then civil rights groups spent twenty years bitching and moaning about how minority communities were under-policed. When it finally changed they spent the next thirty years bitching and moaning about how minority communities were overpoliced because it turns out policing involves arresting people, and most of the criminals in those communities were locals.
In other words, a group that was entitled to government assistance that would largely be paid for by someone else argued that they didn't need as much of it as was publicly assumed. In any other context, the conservative reaction would be to hold them up as paragons of virtue who were willing to be self-reliant and solve their own problems without the assistance of government. But in this particular context that was totally unacceptable, and they insisted that these groups accept as much of their assistance as they deemed necessary.
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While it might be morally offensive that these spendthrift slackers aren’t working as hard as you are, economically it doesn’t matter very much. You can think of your own prosperity in terms of absolute (nominal) numbers, but the real value of your wealth matters a lot more, and the real value of your wealth depends on your relative position in the economy- what fraction of the total economy you own.
If all government aid to these people were switched off overnight and your 27% tax bill were reduced to zero, you would own 27% more of the economy than you do now, but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain. So you wouldn’t be much richer, you might be poorer, and your relative status would be much lower because the median income would skyrocket (because the parasite class would be dead).
Of course it does. The luxury of the spendthrift slackers is paid for by the industrious.
This is basically the Broken Windows theory writ large.
That relies on the presumption that conservatives seem to have where government spending is nothing but a deadweight loss. You see this in things like "Tax Independence Day", which is the day, usually in late May, where the average American "Stops working for the government and starts working for himself". Except this "working for the government" is really just financing one's own consumption. The idea is as ridiculous as "Mortgage Independence Day", when you "stop working for the bank and start working for yourself". Well, I do pay the bank, but I'm the one living in the house, not the bank manager. By the same token, I spend the first five months of the year driving on highways and sending kids to public school and enjoying police protection and all the other things that are provided by the government. And yes, this includes all the social welfare programs that some assume are for other people, but aren't really; I voluntarily spend a lot of money on insurance that I hope to god I never have to use, and social programs are no different. Are private insurance companies a deadweight economic loss?
No, transfer payments are financing other people's consumption.
Not ridiculous at all; there's a reason there used to be mortgage-burning parties.
Social welfare programs are called "insurance" in order to bolster arguments such as this, but they really aren't. For one thing, if they were like private insurance (other than extremely regulated forms like health insurance), there would be some actual underwriting involved. Premiums would have some relationship to risk. There would likely be policy limits. Incurring a loss deliberately would be fraud; failing to mitigate a loss would also result in loss of benefits. They don't look much like insurance at all, except when insurance is turned through regulation into a social welfare program.
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In the short term that’s true, but we’ve run lots of experiments to see if government can allocate capital more efficiently than the market over the last century, and the answer seems pretty clear. Once things had time to shake out, the economy would almost certainly be larger. There are lots of reasons to support government taxing and spending such as cool jets existing or reducing wealth inequality/pasification of the proles, but greater GDP is not one of them.
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I don't see seven figures anywhere in this.
The pension is easily worth that.
Someone making $50000 a year for 20 years will have made 7 figures, but we don't count that as "being worth seven figures". You have no reason to think they would be able to accumulate enough of that pension to reach seven figures.
Net present value of their pension at the current fed funds rate is about 3 million. Stocks and flows of money can be converted back and forth. If you consider the fact that most retirees will aim to draw down their nest egg, we should actually count their equivalent net worth as higher. On top of that they haven’t even started to draw social security. The total value of their government benefits is probably around 5 million when compared with someone seeking to get the same income from their own investments.
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A future income stream has value; there are standard ways to calculate it. Yes, we have to take into account thing like inflation and the chance of death, but those can be figured in.
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If you have a pension paying out $127k a year the capital value of that pension even assuming a 5% rate is over 2 million dollars (as a perpetuity, in reality people die so the true value will be less, but still very likely over 7 figures).
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I’m assuming he means net worth
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The parasites in this situation are the health insurance companies, and to a lesser degree, the actual providers.
I was recently sick, and it took four different doctor visits before somebody just gave me the antibiotics which fixed whatever problem I was having. The first one, an "urgent care" told me to just rest and hydrate. The second, my PCP, gave me a covid test, said that it was negative, shrugged, and said R&H, the third (telehealth) gave me a useless antibiotic and did no testing. The fourth, another UC, gave me a strep test, a mono test, and then some steroids and antibiotics.
This is retarded. A family member, when I was first complaining about being sick, offered to just write me a prescription for the cocktail of drugs he takes when he starts feeling sick, but me being a good little boy said I wanted to go see a doctor.
This should have been a 2 minute long discussion with a pharmacist at most where I tell them what drugs I want, then half an hour at my local lab where they do a few tests for me, and that's it.
As it is, with the retarded "health" cartel, there was probably thousands of dollars of useless waste spent on useless doctors and useless nurses performing useless tests (covid? Really? Flu?). Their goal is to gatekeep as many things as possible behind absurdly expensive gates, then when costs go to infinity, they demand the government subsidize them.
The couple you talk about in the beginning of this post suck, but so does the industry they're sucking.
As usual this is all made a lot worse when the government subsidises all of it.
Completely agree with this. I use a website called telyrx (https://telyrx.com/), so that I can have some amoxicillin and tamiflu on hand, if paxlovid wasn’t so expensive it’s another one I would have ready to go.
I use daily 5mg Cialis from HIMS.
About 4-5 a week so 149$ for 4.5 months or so.
This place cheaper and reputable?
Actually just asking reputable since I can check price myself.
E: I guess I didn’t need to give you any of that information but I’ve been sharing deep insights about myself online since 1997 so I guess why ever stop ?
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This doesn't work because 1) stupid people will ask for antibiotics when they don't have good reason to expect them to work, and 2) giving out unneeded antibiotics has bad externalities. And the pharmacist can't administer a stupidity test.
And even in your case, you say that one doctor gave you a useless antibiotic before the second doctor gave you a useful one. If you go to a pharmacist, how are either you or the pharmacist going to know which one is useful and which one isn't? How are either of you going to know that your condition needs antibiotics at all, aside from you getting lucky? ("It worked for my family member, so it should work for me", and that actually being true, is luck.)
Well first of all the family member is a doctor (just not a family doctor), and second: how does the doctor know? Are they given secret knowledge that is inaccessible to mere humans?
Doctors aren’t priests. The stuff that 90% of PCPs are doing could be replaced by a flow chart. As far as antibiotic stewardship, when China and India and Brazil and everybody else gets on board, maybe.
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I had very, let's say, luke warmly received thoughts on this earlier in the week. What if the dead weight is actually half of society? Or 75%? Or 90%? I'm not entirely convinced we're not already there.
(There were some good rebuttals but I'm still uncertain)
Basically your accounting in that comment was too loose to get a good idea of where the breakpoint is. First of all, bringing anything Federal into it is a problem because of the deficit; a lot of Federal spending is financed through debt rather than current revenues, so it's mathematically possible for no-one to be a net taxpayer. Also, there's a lot of indirect taxation (all taxes paid by businesses are ultimately covered by individuals) which you'd need to add in.
New York spends over $36,000 per pupil which gets you near that high number, but the average is about $18,000, which is your low number, so this is skewed a bit high. But it's pretty well known that people without kids do subsidize the education of those who do have them.
Yes, but only the Haredi have the wherewithal to pull this off.
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This strikes me as a Hayekian knowledge problem. Local charities can help people in need but can use discretion (ie local knowledge) to minimize free riding. In contrast, federal government programs are designed to lack discretion (ie rules based). Even if the rules might make sense, people will figure out how to MinMax
If there is anything I've learned hearing about the levels of fraud in Somali Minneapolis, it's that the fraudsters just take over the programs. When your entire workforce is low trust, high time preference, high in group preference, congenital felons, no public work can ever possibly hold up. Unless you disenfranchise them, disallow them to work in anything that requires any trust what so ever, they will just naturally siphon maximal stolen wealth from any institution you allow them access to. There is no mechanism to combat this beyond cutting the areas they inhabit off from the money spigot and hoping and praying Darwin solves the problem.
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You think old people extracting wealth through government handouts is bad in the US? Wait till you come to the UK, the whole country is set up as a gerontocracy designed to protect the income and assets of the old over the needs of the young.
If only I could get just 24% of my hard earned money taken from me instead of 47% (marginal).
Looking at how bad they have it in the European nursing home countries makes me feel better in relative but not absolute terms, it is true.
Parasitism seems to be baked into the bread itself over there.
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This appeared in my history, so I've probably linked it here before, but as far as interesting old blog posts about welfare go...
I'll quote the pieces I think most relevant in response to your post, but I encourage reading the whole thing.
And if you want a bonus:
If you've gotten through the above, superior thoughts, I'll scratch out a few of my own down here.
As far as I can see it, welfare is the summation of a few factors:
The result is a bunch of policies that address pressing first-order concerns, but have some pretty nasty second- and third-order consequences that are extremely difficult to talk about while retaining sympathy for the people involved.
Can welfare continue to exist in its current form? Not forever, sure, but forever is a long time. How long can it last? Until the rubber hits the road, which is probably keyed off of the sharp population declines in our near future more than anything. There's a reasonable argument to be made that Europe (to a greater extent) and the US (to a lesser extent) are currently getting choked out by welfare. But that's somewhat besides the point. The reality is twofold: first, that welfare will continue until the affected nations are more or less forced into a New Deal of sorts, because those benefiting from welfare planned their lives around receiving it and aren't remotely prepared for the consequences of not having it; and second, that it is much, much better to not be on welfare than to be on welfare. Look at your two examples. The first couple have their future at the mercy of regular politics - their future is not under their control, and if Idaho should ever become unable to pay their pensions, they will be in unbelievably deep trouble. The second are in wild amounts of debt and are going to be barely scraping by, eternally. Their (presumable) food stamps are a pittance compared to how they've decided to sell themselves into slavery for the benefit of the banks. Either their consumption will sharply dry up once their income equals their debt payments, or they declare bankruptcy and lose everything and will never have a house again. Is either case remotely enviable? (Also, I'm pretty sure that way more of your money is going to cases like the first one, and barely anything is going to the second one. Social Security and Medicare together are about 33% of the budget, and only around 5% goes to food stamps, child tax credits, etc. The second couple is more outrageous from a morality point of view, but the first is vastly more expensive.)
Couple of things you mentioned that stood out to me.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that standard economic measures like GDP are flawed insofar as they only capture production and not reproduction, when it's pretty clear that the latter means a lot more in the long term. So if everyone's just looking at GDP for a vibe check on how the economy is doing, they get the totally wrong perspective and miss the steamroller coming down the road.
For America specifically, the source of this support is not so much "the productive" as "the debt." For 2024 the debt (1.9T) is comparable in size to Social Security (1.5T). So there are people buying US bonds on the principle that the government will pay them back before it has to raise taxes. That is bound to stop at some point in the near-ish future (order of decades, not years). When it does, either the welfare will stop or taxes will go up, or probably both. This is the "New Deal" territory I was talking about earlier. Who knows what exactly will happen here? Easy to make predictions, but reality has a habit of surprising you.
This is like "I'm going to do nothing to my bully to show that I'm better than him", but worse. It's indistinguishable from "I am powerless to do anything against him, and I may be forced to actually help him, but I;m rationalizing it away".
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I disagree with this idea that it's "much better not to be on welfare" in the most strident of terms. What are you even talking about? You go on about how it's "insecure" for these people, without even mentioning the fact that they are far MORE likely to have security than someone actually working, paying for their benefits, who has to worry about losing a job or getting priced out of their area, etc.
This is just a completely nuts take imo. Not even mentioning the fact that these people DON'T HAVE TO WORK!!!
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I've occasionally mused that we should have a separate GDP term that captures "investment into The Future (tm)", specifically with an eye to things like capital investments that are net efficiency improvements. Something like "how much discretionary spending are spending above and beyond the cost of keeping the economy going?" But I think as a measure it's poorly-defined because "The Future" isn't necessarily something we all agree upon: is California's meandering, super-expensive high-speed rail project such a capital investment? I think it's easier to defend that (most) healthcare spending isn't a long-term investment because in many cases it's just fixing something that maybe didn't need to be broken: in an ideal world (let's assume Fully Automated Gay Space Communism, but that's probably a less-universal ideal than when Star Trek TNG was still on the air) we'd have relatively few doctors because people wouldn't get injured, at least as often.
But it's a hard metric to fully define. I'd be interested in reading more if any economists are looking this direction.
Progress Studies is basically this, with all the political issues one can imagine. But there is still some interesting work being done on the topic.
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To be fair, most government-paid civil engineers take a much lower salary than they could in the private sector. So it's not quite that this guy figured out a hack here, only that he sacrificed early to reap a larger return later. Similarly the State took the inverse deal: pay him less now in exchange for more later, in order to make their budgets temporarily look better.
I think the solution for both is actuarial integrity -- defined benefit plans need to be run in such a way that the State pays in year X the expected future costs of all (incremental) future liabilities accrued during year X. The only real exploitation is that voters in X accrue liability for year >X without paying for it, another intertemporal transfer of wealth.
A non-solution (afaict) is for governments not to hire competent civil servants and instead farm that stuff out to McKinsey consultants and others. Not because the McKinsey consultants aren't smart, but because it's a diffusion of accountability that ultimately costs Idaho more than paying competitive salaries for in-house expertise.
[ One astute commenter noted that one good that McKinsey does produce is laundering the low status of working for bumfuck Idaho into PMC-respectability. An excellent observation, if something of a tangent here. ]
Eh, bankruptcy is (in expectation) priced into the transactions. Lenders make out fine charging these two 7% interest on their HELOC and car note. It's not like dumping it on the fisc.
Their retirement on the public dime, OTOH, will certainly be dumped on us.
A big issue for public pensions is that many were originally paid for with corruption. Public unions promised politicians support in exchange for pensions. Taxpayers at the time happy because they didn't get stuck with a big bill at the time, but now the bills are coming due. So I don't really have much problem giving these pensioners a haircut; their pensions are dirty money.
No different than any other public obligation or liability. Might as well shaft municipal bondholders too on this theory,
Yes. Difference is there's at least some chance the bondholders will be shafted.
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"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away"
But I doubt it, they built the propaganda into the name "public servant".
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In an efficient market, that's true. Is that even legal right now? I know that college admissions have changed over time (and between jurisdictions) between unmeritocratic discrimination being illegal and required.
I would not be the slightest bit surprised if charging previously-illegal immigrants the real cost of a loan (or just denying them) was blocked by anti-discrimination laws.
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Nervous laughter.
Sorry, I came of age during the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis, I am overtly sensitive to the whole "Just give money to financially irresponsible people and hope that in the aggregate we make adequate returns to justify the risk" approach.
I'm sure SOME lessons were learned since then. Maybe not the right ones.
I'm sure it'll be fine.
The problem with the '07-08 crisis wasn't with the returns, it's that the loans were packaged into MBS and sold to investors under a false bill of health. The lessons weren't that you can't have high-risk/high-return assets, only that you must not try to pawn them off as low risk with fanciful assumptions. And that buyers of those collateralized debt must do more diligence.
The bill of health wasn't false. It's trivially easy to take a cdo prospectus and simulate what happens in the event of a catastrophic drop in house prices.
It's just that everyone - buyers, sellers, rates, regulators, all assumed that this was a very low probability event. Reality turned out to be worse than nightmare/worst case scenarios in various stress tests cooked up by regulators.
The sellers (who are often accused of fraud) kept the risky tranches on their books while selling the safe ones - the opposite of what one would do if they knew the risk.
No, they assumed it was uncorrelated and that you could lower risk by bundling large tranches of mortgages.
That works until there is a large correlated event that impacts all of them at once.
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The issue was that they never really understood the level of systemic risk involved. The whole securitization scheme was based on the idea that, while high-risk mortgages might be too risky on an individual basis, in aggregate only a small percentage of them would default, and the riskiness led to higher interest rates. If you're assuming that a certain percentage of the mortgages are going to default over a given time period, you can price that in. They didn't forsee that there would be a foreclosure crisis that would lead to default rates grossly in excess of what was anticipated, and that this would cause a domino effect whereby the problem would keep getting worse.
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Yes and no. It was obvious from day 1 that those CDOs weren’t good as good. They were labeled AAA but had yields materially higher compared to other AAA. This was attractive for insurance companies who legally were required to have a percentage of assets in AAA. But the only reason why one AAA trades at a yield much higher than other AAA is that the first isn’t really AAA.
Bingo. Pennies are free in front of a steamroller stuff.
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I have mixed feelings about this.
As you alluded, it isn't clear how many jobs are civilizationaly load bearing to begin with. Mine certainly isn't, unless you count having and raising children, and, no, that isn't counted at this point, in these discussions. Depending on what they are, it's not clear how many people can or should do them. Mr and Mrs Tinkerbell collectors might not be able to do them even if they were in good health (again, depending on what they are). 200 years ago almost everyone would be farming and making textiles, and since farming and textiles have become relatively niche, it's unclear how many of the "jobs" that have replaced them amount to watching one another's children and walking one another's dogs. We're apparently close to automating even emails and spreadsheets.
If I had heard about this 100 years ago, I would have supposed people would work a lot less, or we would have something like a UBI, but that's not what we have. Maybe we have bullshit jobs and gaming the system instead? Which isn't great, plenty of people are upset about the current state of affairs. I don't particularly want my kids to spend 40 hours a week, for 40 years doing fake work, that seems in some ways worse than farming and textiles, but it seems to be the direction we as a civilization are heading in.
Yeah I have to say, on the face of it, it really does seem absurd that we are so incredibly wealthy compared to our ancestors and yet we work just as much, or at least pretend we do.
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Why is "civilizationally load bearing" a relevant yardstick? Civilization advances by making all that stuff trivial so people can focus on doing other shit. That's the the measure of civilization, not who produces corn.
And no one that has ever worked in textiles would dare assert that it's in any way worse than an office job. That shit destroys your body.
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Parasitism, stripped of the morally-loaded connotation, is ultimately a classification of a symbiotic relationship between different species of organisms. The notion that symbiosis is an extremely widely-observed behavioral pattern in the Animal Kingdom, but for some reasons human relations can never be understood like that, is an artifact of political correctness. As far as the question over when is it appropriate to refer to someone as a parasite, you can say almost never. But when is it appropriate to understand relations between races of people as symbiotic, the answer is almost always. Take something like the behavior observed in the Animal Kingdom we call aggressive mimicry:
Foreign races of people establishing themselves in a host society- their identity, cultural signals, political influence, is unequivocally a symbiosis, its mere existence is derived from its interaction with its host.
But is in-group elderly care a parasitic relationship? The Elders of a society are typically the ancestors of the descendants investing in their care, so describing that as parasitism would not really conform with that classification of relationship observed ecologically. The impetus for elder care has in-group evolutionary advantages that explain its existence.
Take a racial and cultural identity like black. It exists purely in symbiosis with a host society. It depends on the host society for everything. It only exists relative to its host society. Without its host, it would not exist. Same with "Dreamers", foreigners who embed themselves in a host society. "Dreamers" only exist because of the long-term interaction between foreigners and their host body. That is a symbiotic relationship, in contrast with elderly care.
There are clearly non-parasitic symbiotic relationships. "Chimerica" is a symbiosis between America and China but one that is mutually beneficial. But when foreigners embed themselves in a host and demand all sorts of political, cultural, and economic concessions that harm the host Nation, it's valuable to understand that as parasitism, in order to properly understand the nature of the threat, even if it's not constructive to call anyone a parasite.
Honestly I am in awe at your ability to bring the Jews into every little topic, no matter how distant they may seem. Chapeau...
It's not at all a distant issue, the concept of social relations between races of people being characterized as "parasitism" originated with Jewish/Gentile cohabitation. That characterization of that as a foreign guest/host relationship originated at least with Marin Luther's writings but the concrete association goes back to the 18th century, i.e. the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Herder (1791):
But I pointed to a more concrete example of Dreamers or in the general sense mass third world migration, foreign diasporas who deman some right to access to the United States and Europe and massive political, economic, and cultural concessions. Nor is the concept of aggressive mimicry only limited to that historical relationship, I have indirectly accused you of engaging in that behavior by appealing to concepts like "fair competition" that appeal to Whites but are just empty words you use to try to justify your presence among us. You only signal those values in order to obfuscate the threat of genetic replacement from the third world by making it some natural outcome of "fairness", i.e. signaling values you know we have an affinity for, but for an aggressive purpose.
Other examples of mimicry would be Kash Patel's humorous attempts to appeal to White culture, which very often become that Inglorious Bastards three-fingers meme.
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If it is sustainable over generations then no, if not then yes. This isn't a difficult question and it's clear that OP talks about the latter.
It's always been a feature of European culture. In 5th-century BC Athens, laws mandated that sons provide fathers with food, care, housing, and protection and they lost citizenship as a penalty if they failed to provide. If Elder care is not sustainable then it's a societal failure. A foreign diaspora harming the host nation is a much different kind of dynamic than elder care.
Under the Romans during the time of the republic the paterfamilias (oldest male head of the household) had full powers of life and death over his progeny, even when they were adults and had been married off, see how during the Catilinarian conspiracy a conspirator was killed with no trial whatsoever just on the command of his paterfamilias.
That too is part of "European Culture" as you say but it's a good thing we have decided as a society that parents killing their children is abhorrent and to be made illegal (this power of life and death was de facto outlawed during the early stages of the Empire, the practice of exposing newborns still continued despite being made illegal but that's a different thing than killing a 20 year old), a very similar argument can be made with Elder care when the elders are those who took and took from society back when they were young without contributing enough and now want the younger generations to cough up more so they can go to the grave living the high life with no regard for what happens for society when they are six feet under.
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I guess it depends how much of a "decoupler" you are. Are you going to change your policy preferences based on two anecdotes about unsympathetic beneficiaries?
If anything I am now more aggressively wedded to my general policy preferences (Read: Anti-Federalism, reduction of FedGov Spending to whatever is needed to maintain national defense and a Judicial system, and throwing all welfare programs back to the state level).
How that shakes out in terms of what policies I expect to see passed is a little difference.
Isn't that federalism? I thought that the federalist policy position was the one that wants to maximize power reserved to the confederated states.
Yes, but look at the positions supported by the people who actually labeled themselves anti-federalists.
Huh, interesting. I wasn't aware of that, shame on me I guess. Thank you for the correction!
Its a historical quirk that one wouldn't be aware of unless one had studied the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debates.
Which I have.
But the common parlance has changed.
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Nothing you say is wrong on its face. Bill and Shelley are boomers milking the system in all the legal ways they were told they could. Oscar and his wife are a young dumb couple who, as you noted, are far from the worse Caleb has had on his show. They're only making the culture war rounds because they're illegals. They're also young enough that it's hard to declare they are going to be lifetime parasites--at least Oscar is working!
I can't get too worked up about them after watching all those bodycam and parole hearing videos I mentioned. The people who are really a "parasitical" class are not boomers crying that their health insurance is going up or a DREAMER couple who will probably declare bankruptcy. It's the people who will never be gainfully employed, will probably spend most of their lives on the street or in prison, and prey on society in much more literal ways than making your insurance premiums go up.
Insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, yup. But how dare government workers collect pensions and how dare old people demand expensive medical care? These aren't the worst parasites out there.
Government has always been a cow to be milked, and under the old patronage systems the corruption was far worse. How many bailouts has the government shoveled money into to rescue failing businesses and failing industries? How much money did we spend on Afghanistan over 20+ years to achieve literally fuck-all in the end? We could also talk about Iraq, and Ukraine, and Israel, and Argentina, all can be plausibly defended as providing some value to American interests, but fuck that's a lot of money we're giving to non-Americans.
You may or may not have seen the latest trend in ragebait: all the (mostly black) people screaming on TikTok about how their EBT is about to get cut off if the government shutdown doesn't end. The comments are the usual: noticing how many expensive braids and fake nails and tattoos and the like these people wear, asking why Single Mom of 6 does not have a father in the picture, etc. Lots of nutpicking with juicy videos from welfare defenders openly telling poor people to steal from Walmart, single moms haughtily declaring they "don't want to work," etc. Numbers thrown around like $4000-$6000/month in welfare (which I seriously doubt).
These stories are understandably infuriating. They make for very easy ragebait to amp up working Americans who see a bunch of lazy, shiftless people getting fat on their tax dollars. I won't lie and say I would not enjoy seeing some of these "parasites" get made to work or go hungry as much as any Randian.
But ultimately I think you are being manipulated to hate the easily hateable. If you are really concerned about the government spigot and all the parasites bleeding the beast... well, like I said, there's much bigger bleeding to rage at.
That you find their parasitism morally acceptable doesn't make it not-parasitism. The parasitism here isn't old people demanding expensive medicare; it's demanding to be subsidized in that. Generally I would consider pensions not-parasitism (since they're delayed compensation), but what I mentioned earlier -- unions getting pensions in "negotiations" where the other side of the table has been bribed through political support -- makes them something bad.
We can only know if they're a parasitical "class" if these people are actually representative of some class rather than being one-offs. The retired couple seems most likely to be such; surely there are many such couples similarly situated. The financially irresponsible DREAMER seems more unique, or at least I hope so.
But this includes the people in the videos you were complaining were just ragebait! Or, at least, it includes the absent single fathers who aren't in those videos. Sometimes there really is something to be mad about, and just trying to gesture at some other group who is worse doesn't help.
People collecting pensions they were promised as part of their work agreement is not parasitism. If you think workers should not receive pensions, you can advocate for ending pensions (and indeed, that is happening, and will probably happen even in the few places where pensions still exist, like government employment). You can complain about unions and their tactics, but the individuals who expect to collect on the benefits they were promised are not being parasites for expecting a legal obligation to be fulfilled.
As for old people demanding expensive medical care, we have discussed before the diminishing returns of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep Grandma alive for another month, and those are legitimate ethical debates, but an old person who wants health care and reasonably expects to receive it even if it is more expensive (because they are old) is not parasitism unless you're prepared to advocate for the ice floe health care plan.
If you actually read my post, instead of just rushing to chew on my heel as usual, you'd have seen I admitted I also feel the rage and find these people infuriating. My point is not "A worse than B, therefore you should not be angry at B." My point is if you're concerned about the broad dysfunction of society and how to fix it, A is actually more impactful than B and you should consider that B might be an emotive distraction. By all means, let's squash the parasites as well, but let's be clear about motives.
If that obligation was obtained corruptly, I think they are.
Transfer payments are huge. Trying to point to some bigger but much more nebulous problem looks like a distraction to prevent doing anything about transfer payments.
If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension? As as a follow-up question, is there any union or pension scheme that @The_Nybbler does not think is "corrupt"?
Did I say don't do anything about transfer payments? So what do you want to do about transfer payments?
Maybe we should also look at what the biggest problems are and consider how to allocate efforts accordingly.
"Bigger but more nebulous problems" are indeed harder to "do" something about than raging at welfare moms on TikTok. I don't fault people for taking the ragebait and going for the low-hanging fruit per se. You don't want to fix transfer payments because you have a rational economic plan to do so and you want to make things better for anyone else. You want to fix transfer payments so you can laugh as Laquisha is kicked onto the street. And I'm not even completely faulting you for that! I have not become as blackpilled as you, though my heart is increasingly bitter, but I have started to accept that schadenfreude is one of the few satisfactions left to us.
But don't lie to yourself about your motives. Tell me you want to fix some other stuff that doesn't warm your culture warring heart and maybe I'll believe there is some principle involved.
You shouldn't have joined a corrupt union. The payment is not somehow cleansed of its corruption by the fact that it goes to you and not the union.
Cut them off or reduce them very significantly.
Or maybe we should look at transfer payments.
You didn't answer my question about whether any union would meet your criteria for being non-corrupt. And do you expect everyone who joins the union to do an investigation of its corruption and come to the same conclusions as you? Should we just take it as given that you think no one with a union pension should be able to collect on that pension because they're guilty of complicity in "union corruption"?
Okay. I say that glibly: at one time I would have been willing to take a personal hit in the form of reduced or no Social Security for myself if it would "fix" SS. Now I am too jaded to believe that's being anything other than a chump. But sure, at some point transfer payments are definitely going to have to be cut/reduced, and I bitterly hope it's not until after I'm dead.
Or we could look at both and not just go for your low-hanging emotionally satisfying culture war targets.
I don't know if any union would meet my criteria for being non-corrupt. Nor do I care if those who join the union do an investigation. These questions are irrelevant; if the pension was obtained corruptly, it does not become non-corrupt through either the honest or willful ignorance of the beneficiaries.
You can certainly start a thread talking about Afghanistan or peso-buying. But when transfer payments are brought up and you want to talk about Afghanistan and Argentina instead, it sure looks like a distraction away from transfer payments.
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I have a woman who works for me (Well, for GloboCorp. I'm her manager.) 30yo single mom of two. The state provides her and her kids with free healthcare, Section 8 housing assistance, and more besides. Her kids go to school in one town, do sports in another, and she talks about moving their school district based on petty annoyances. Residency requirements are not a problem because she has told me that you can just lie on them. She was hired as a full-timer, but is down to 15ish hours per week due to latenesses and shrinking availability and callouts. She was actively scouted for promotions at one point (DEI considerations were involved), but she has no interest because making more money might impact how much she collects in transfers from the government. She takes two vacations a year, one usually international.
You're not wrong that she is less of a societal problem than some violent thug committing violent crimes.
But there's a similar theme of standards at play for the both of them. A huge part of the problem with crime is that too many people are sympathetic to the criminals. They believe it would be mean to judge someone just for being a feral rapist. And how many people have ever openly judged my employee for using the system like that? None, of course. We more functional citizens maintain a facade of social equality, no matter how many years we spend watching a perfectly healthy person decline to do more than the barest minimum, because doing more would cut into her TikTok time.
I hit my lowest point fifteen years ago. I dropped out of college after my girlfriend "accidentally" got pregnant to take a construction job with my dad. That was during the GFC, so all the construction work fueled by cheap, bad mortgages dried up until he had no work to offer me. I was getting windmill slammed by male post-partum depression and flirting with total personality collapse (What the fuck even am I if I'm not The Smart Guy? Smart Guys go to college. I'm not in college. What the fuck even am I?). And there came a day when the mother of my children brought me to a government office to apply for welfare.
And that moment, seared into my memory, of sitting in a cubicle while a nice man in business casual asked if I knew how to read... That was the single most humiliating moment of my life. If I hadn't had an infant child I would have preferred to just kill myself. It was so bad it broke through the depression and sparked enough agency to go get a job, any job, no matter how shit. Because a complete downward revision of my life expectations was still preferable to that.
What would my life be like if I hadn't suffered the sin of pride? What would my children's lives be like? How easy would it be to just slip into the permanent underclass? It looks like our society makes that pretty damn easy.
Maybe we should add more friction. Maybe we should hold people to a higher standard. Maybe we should spit at criminals and sneer at welfare recipients, and then do the same to their
retardedgentle-hearted defenders.Maybe we're not being "manipulated to hate".
Maybe we're being reminded to have some basic fucking standards.
From an emotional point of view, I understand. It's easier to get angry at Welfare Mom than Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex. It's a lot more personal when you meet the parasites and see how they live their worthless lives.
From an economic point of view, though, it really does seem like Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex would like to distract us with ragebait about welfare moms.
Transfer payments are the largest Federal expenditures. Granted, most of this is old people and not single welfare moms, but single welfare moms are a not-at-all-insignificant part, and pointing to some nebulous group is just a distraction.
Is a "distraction" a thing @The_Nybbler does not care about, as opposed to things @The_Nybbler does care about?
I can be angry at single welfare moms while also noticing how much money we sunk into Afghanistan and the billions we're sending to Argentina. Our transfer payments, as you point out, are mostly to old people, and if you want to cut them to the point they are no longer our greatest federal expenditure, you won't just be booting single moms off the rolls.
No, a "distraction" is an attempt to prevent something from being examined by pointing to something else.
Distractions. Social Security was over $1.5 trillion in 2024. Including over $200B not due to the old-age program.
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Without numbers, I'm not convinced there actually are larger problems. All I know is that the overwhelming majority of the federal budget goes to welfare of one sort or another, and not corporate bailouts or foreign adventures. Even if the undeserving only amounted to 10%, that's 10% of a staggeringly large sum.
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Sometimes it seems like the main thing keeping me from doing the "exploit every handout and assistance program the government offers" thing is the capacity to feel shame.
Yeah, somebody in the gooning thread said a huge problem with modern America is that we lack the ability to utilize or feel shame.
I think that's true, but only for certain groups...
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Notably, the old patronage systems often built large things of considerable value. The people being robbed by them often saw significant, tangible improvements in their standard of living as an offset. Can we build a Golden Gate bridge today? Can we build a national highway system? This is a legitimate question, I do not claim to know the answer. I'm worried about what the answer might be, though.
I think you are correct that actual criminals are a much more serious problem than mere fiscal-net-extractors. But as you note, insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, and a lot of other things do too, and it's not as though the existence of a worse thing makes less worse things better. It is also, quite notably, not like the crime is actually being handled either.
Most of my life, I've operated off the assumption that even if these systems, both the fiscal handouts and the crime, are very wasteful but we're rich and we can probably afford it. The world I see around me seems a lot less rich now. Maybe this is the algorythm feeding me rage-bait, but it's not looking stellar for my actual family's finances either.
Can we build a Golden Gate Bridge today? Can we still go to the Moon?
We have the money. We have the technology. In theory, we still have the know-how.
But we don't have the will. It's graft all the way down.
I think about Robert Moses sometimes (never miss an opportunity to boost Robert Caro). Motherfucker was a petty, vengeful, tyrannical and (in his own way) corrupt bastard. Anti-democratic and considered public monies his to spend and control. But he got shit done. Arguably in terrible ways sometimes. Lots of people have opinions about how New York could have been done better. But he got it done.
No one can get shit done today. After all the bluster and owning the wokes, do you think Trump is actually going to get anything done? Make America Great Again?
I think sometimes about movies like Independence Day or Armageddon. You've got a literal world -ending threat, so surely under those circumstances, we'd all get our shit together and act like competent adults... at least for a little while, right?
I don't believe that anymore. We'd be so cooked, as the kids say.
We probably are anyway.
For sure cost disease and other considerations are problem, but on a positive note - when I-95 got shut down a few years ago near Philly it did get fixed real fucking fast.
I suspect if the need is there we can fix stuff quite ably, we just don't bother to or need to most of the time.
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laughs nervously in covid
Yeah I'm with you. I'm not saying that was anything close to world ending (it obviously wasn't, as we are here), but it strongly indicated how such a threat would go down. We would bicker and squabble about what was the right thing to do until it was too late.
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This is what bugs me, though.
Its sort of easy for me to accept that there will ALWAYS be an underclass that we can only ever 'contain' and 'placate,' never fully integrate into society regardless of how much we spend. Accept that its a fixed cost and move on.
But then you see ostensibly functional people happily tearing off chunks for themselves, and the scope of the problem starts to seem larger, where the justifications for the behavior are more elaborate, and the political costs of intervening are much steeper.
Yeah, but I bring these up because they're not easily hateable. And yet I still find myself wanting to label them with the 'parasite' moniker because there's me, over here doing just about everything 'right' and getting rewarded with a portion of what I genuinely earned, with the potential for more to be taken later (one hopes not!), and then there's these guys, guiltlessly sucking up resources and clearly expecting no resistance or problems, and just generally living their life with much less stress than I.
A similar source of ragebait that you see on Caleb's channel: "disabled" veterans who are clearly very functional but have managed to find a sympathetic doctor who declares they have service-related injuries which mean they now get a check for life. Even if they never saw combat. Even if they were never in a combat-facing role. Are you man enough to call out veterans for welfare-queen behavior?
Likewise, I run into it in my professional life, "Retired" cops from New York, Chicago, other big cities, who qualify for Pensions from their home state (and pull certain tactics to maximize the payout), then move down to Florida (see my point about lack of income tax) to 'retire' while pulling part time gigs with local PDs for extra cash. Its one hell of a payout and there's clearly a known strategy for maximizing return on 'investment,' and who the hell would argue our brave boys in blue don't 'deserve' this special treatment? Not I.
Oh, firemen too.
We are culturally tuned to treat these 'heroes' with deference. Ignoring the fact that these jobs have gotten MUCH safer over the decades, and much cushier, and basically impossible to fire bad actors from said jobs.
Yep, my point when I stated "I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years." My political 'awakening' was tied up in realizing how much money was burned bailing out failed banks and pursuing pointless military debacles. Very impersonal, abstract harms.
There's a bit more emotional valence when you can see the face of the person soaking up the wealth, even if its a comparatively trivial amount.
The disabled vets thing on his channel always gets me. I certainly don't begrudge generous payouts to people who got seriously hurt fighting for their country, but there are people getting 3-4K per month who were helicopter repair techs in the military and auto repair techs now. That just seems bananas, and as he always mentions he has NEVER seen a vat come through his show who does not have 20K+ in disability so it doesn't seem like it is correlated to any actual metrics of desert.
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This reminds me of the (imo excellent) argument against student loan forgiveness. It's been stated here, but I've also seen it in other venues (my cousin was patiently trying to lay it out for people on FB for a while, God bless him for his patience). Johnny chose to skip college or go a far more affordable route for college, sacrificing four years of having fun partying with his peers, but gained the reward of not having student loan debt. Jimmy went to a nice school for four years and has a good time, but has to pay back those student loans the rest of his life. Except now Jimmy wants to get his loans bailed out at everyone's expense (including Johnny!), so he would get his short term reward and also Johnny's long term reward, without having to sacrifice anything. This is a terrible social policy to have, because the Johnnies of the world will (rightly) conclude that they are chumps for doing the right thing, and more and more people will mooch off the system until it all comes crashing down eventually.
Similarly, people like you (rightly) feel like chumps for working hard to get ahead when we refuse to let people face the consequences of their bad decisions. I'm not saying you should join them, because I believe virtuous conduct to be intrinsically valuable, but neither could I really find it in my heart to be mad at you if you did join them. It's a raw deal, doing everything right and watching as those who didn't bother still get away with it.
In fairness, I think that isn't necessarily a prerequisite for time in the service to fuck you up in some way. One of my teammates at work was in the army, and has talked about how even just being on watch for the base can mess with your head because of the stress it causes to be hyper-alert like that. Then there's stuff like hearing damage from doing firearms training without ear protection (my understanding from him is that was a thing, which makes sense because in actual combat you don't have time to put in ear plugs so you have to experience it beforehand in a controlled situation), etc. I'm not saying the guys you are talking about deserve the benefits they are getting, because I don't watch the show and I am willing to assume from your description that they don't deserve the benefits. Just pointing out that not serving in combat shouldn't necessarily be a prerequisite here, as there can be legitimate claims even outside that situation.
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This (and the pension double dipping thing) are super crazy. I know of multiple people who are mid 30s, work full time as engineers or accountants, and pull in 30k extra income a year because of military disability benefits.
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Half a loaf? You're quite the optimist that you think you're getting to keep half. I think it more likely that we're going to get the Boxer retirement plan.
Your overall post reminded me of the TW post about the "chump effect." I thought the term was coined by him, but apparently it was the City Journal article he links to.
Stories like the two you pointed out make me feel like quite the chump, as I do most days when I think about these things. I didn't have undergrad debt because I busted my ass in a hard science to maintain grades for my scholarships at a state school. I paid off my law school loans (what a mega-chump move). I drive a 15-year-old paid-off truck. I go to work every day to defend people who are mostly guilty and generally ungrateful. I'm earning a pension, but at best it'll be 60% of the payout that Boomers and Xers are getting from it (thanks to various reforms to keep the system solvent that only took effect long after their benefits were locked in), and that's if I can stick it for another 20 years. So give me that chump jacket, I've earned it.
Wow, how many lawyers do we have on this website?
I for one appreciate your sacrifices.
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Same, same, and same. Although its a 13-year-old Honda, and I haven't finished paying them off, its only a matter of time.
That said I can be 'proud' that I beat out the early stage of DEI-based admissions to actually secure a law school slot in a highly-ranked school and then (eventually) find a decent job.
Its only been in recent years I've realized how much of the deck was actually stacked against me and how much better off I'd probably be if:
A) The system was actually as meritocratic as I believed
or
B) I just said "fuck it" and cut the corners and cheated as much I could get away with.
I don't believe in Karma, although I do believe "what goes around comes around," so I expect I'll come out of things alright. I didn't become the 'type of person' who cheats and cuts corners, so I won't be subjected to the various failure modes that cheating and cutting corners are prone to.
But there's no avoiding the fact that the political system is still functionally designed to redistribute rewards of good behavior and high performance no matter how well you follow the rules, which makes one much less inclined to follow the rules.
I remember feeling like a chump in my 20's and early 30's. Graduated with a crisp engineering degree, making more money than most of my peers right out of school. And yet... the subsidized housing in my area was nicer than anything I could afford... except for having to live around people in subsidized housing. I'd meet women who went into education and the county would subsidize their first home, which I was still over a decade away from doing. About 10 years before I actually bought my first home with a 20% down payment and a fixed rate 30y mortgage, I went to a seminar about home buying which was packed full of immigrants being told all the programs they qualified for. The company I worked for routinely lost government contracts that would get diverted to no-compete minority owned businesses.
None the less, pride kept me from smashing the defect button as hard as I fucking could.
I did eventually get married, have a kid, buy a house in the country, and my investments have appreciated to the point where I may not have to work anymore. Also it turns out when you are married, if your only income is capital gains the first $100,000 are tax free. Is that my defect button? It just might.
Granted, I didn't have as many kids as I wanted. I wish I'd had them earlier. I wish home ownership hadn't been this constantly moving goalpost the first 15 years of my adult life. But unless they pass a wealth tax, which isn't impossible I admit, the 20 years of my adulthood doing the right thing despite feeling like a chump have been better spent than every parasite out there.
As a fellow Caleb Hammer enthusiast, I suggest you check in on some of the episodes with people in their 40's or 50's. The story of the out of control 20 something financing a lavish lifestyle ends quite catastrophically.
But also, I can't wait for EBT payments to halt if this shutdown continues.
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Isn't that just karma? Maybe I misunderstand the term, I'm not well versed in Eastern religious thought.
Simply put, I don't believe in any sort of Cosmic Scale or Ledger such that bad behavior is guaranteed to be punished. Bad people will 'get away with it' in many cases.
But there's a level of path dependence to bad behavior. If you like to commit acts of violence and terrorize others, you're much more likely to hang around violent people and thus you're far more likely to be victimized and/or killed by violence.
Similar if you like to commit theft, scam others, leach off people's goodwill, the sort of people you hang around are more likely to steal from you, scam you, and leach off of you. Which can be its own punishment.
Do things that damage others, at the very least you're risking that one of those people will flip out and come for you in a rage.
The risks you accept by engaging in antisocial, harmful conduct may or may not ever come back to bite you, but you are inviting those risks.
Consider the ending scene of the film It's a Wonderful Life. George Bailey lived a life of relative destitution thanks to making choices that kept him from achieving wealth and fame. And yet, by constantly sticking to his guns and doing the "good" thing, the thing that benefited others, he is a beloved figure and nobody hesitates to come to his aid at the drop of a hat.
Mr. Potter, in contrast, will probably still die rich, but very much alone.
There is no 'just world,' but the world we create is indeed defined by our actions, and just actions will tend to create more justice, if only in your local environment.
Makes sense, thank you for the explanation!
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