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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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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.

There is a significant misconception of what "disability" means, and I'm not going to say what you think I might. Dr. Balt, and I'll wager most people, think Keisha is probably able to work. However, the issue isn't whether she can work, but whether any employer would be willing to take a chance on her ability to work. Would you hire Keisha to run your office? Do billing? In the spacious comfort of an internet comment you might hire a woman like Keisha to work at a hypothetically inefficient McDonalds, but in practice, are you willing to tolerate "3-4 absences a month due to illness?" McDonalds neither, which is why the SSI application form asks that exact question.

As long as they-- and the inmates and the etc-- are munching on food stamps, weed, and Xboxes, nearly illiterate but keeping their nonsense within their neighborhoods, the rest of us can go on with our lives.

And if you want a bonus:

Say your father raped you repeatedly for a decade. Hold on, slow down, it gets worse: now you're 40, and he shows up asking you for $2400 because, and I quote, "you have a responsibility to take care of me." There he is in your living room, eyeballing the nice things in your home. If it is a fact that you will inevitably give him the money, is it easier to for you to pair it with your venom or your sympathy? Though it's enraging, there is a perverse pleasure in giving that bastard the money. It tells you that you showed him that you are better than him.

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:

  1. The eternal need to provide somehow for the unfortunate, the unmotivated, and the unwise. This truly does go all the way back. If people are left to their own devices, most of them will attempt to relax and reproduce as much as possible. Something must be taken away if they are to have a surplus for when they truly need it. Separate post, sometime, but I suspect this is the reason behind most forms of government.
  2. Globalism, industrialism, and economic deracination, which makes it easier to support idle workers off of the productivity of others.
  3. Liberal egalitarianism and the elites' sharp retreat from noblesse oblige, removing the old-school frameworks for compelling labor and moral betterment. Again, separate post sometime.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

TFR adjusted GDP is a thing somewhere, it was calculated out on Twitter. The big winners were Israel and Kazakhstan. You'd have to be able to find it.

But it’s sadly not mainstream. (Also, IMO, pure TFR is not enough. You’d have to calculate things like the reproduction of various social and economic classes, weighted heavily towards the middle, and raw investment into maintenance and long-term infrastructure that can be used by future generations. Overbuilding networking in the dotcom boom would write out positive, while shuttering the steel mills would be negative. I guess you’d probably want multiple metrics to capture a place like China which is dramatically overbuilding at the same time as its TFR is cratering.)

AFAICT, outside of true third world shitholes and a few anglosphere cost diseases, places with expanding populations are building, and in the kinds of places with ginormous class differences TFR decline is most concentrated among the poor.

Though it's enraging, there is a perverse pleasure in giving that bastard the money. It tells you that you showed him that you are better than him.

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".

Yes, that is the author's point. The article is meant to aid in the rationalization, you take part in a whole community of people lambasting the leeches, you feel superior and high status, the programs don't' change.

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.

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!!!

The point we disagree upon, I believe, is this: whether security can be guaranteed on anything beyond one’s own self (and, of course, the divine providence we are all obliged to depend on).

Let’s separate these two cases. The second is a simple one of self-imposed debt slavery. The man is working. The first is one where they have worked, but a great amount of their security is explicitly dependent on government largesse.

If Trump 2 has demonstrated nothing else, it’s that government largesse is far from guaranteed. It can be removed as political winds change, and possession being nine tenths of the law, is much harder to keep your hands on over personal holdings. One’s ownership, one’s capacity to work, one’s personal relationships are far more secure than anything coming from the government. The people on the dole are like that lady from Streetcar, always depending on the kindness of strangers. To dispel any subtlety to this point, she didn’t have to work, but she sure as hell got raped.

Another small point. The husband of the first couple is a civil engineer. He alone should have been capable of pulling approximately six figures yearly across his career, probably a little less because it’s Idaho. If he went into private industry instead of civil engineering he probably could have gotten a reasonable amount more. Add on the wife’s salary, adjust for stock market growth, and they could have been dramatically richer if they’d bought index funds starting in the 90s, when they were 30. Why is that hypothetical other couple not up for our ire? Their money has to be coming from somewhere, right? And they sure aren’t working for it. Why is it morally wrong to defer spending on your income in hopes of a future relaxed payday if and only if you’re investing that particular future into the government?

I can agree with the point that, in an ultimate sense, your own skills are more reliable than being on the dole. However, the dole has been pretty good for the last ~60 years or so, and requires far less effort along almost every metric. I'm not saying that people on the dole have it equal to someone on a career, but that the relative security and comfort for effort is INSANELY disproportionate.

In terms of the second couple - they worked for their money and made smart decisions. They deserve to reap the rewards. Earning money via investing is again, a world of difference away from forcibly redistributing other's wealth to yourself via taxation.

Why is that hypothetical other couple not up for our ire?

Because no one made a political ad for them, and they're not crying over not getting Obamacare subsidies. I'm in more or less your theoretical private couple's position, and have been putting off my own retirement precisely because of the ridiculously high cost of health insurance.

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.

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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