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Why America's social policy is not helping the poor
There's a section of Youtube lately that is focusing on the faces of poverty in America. Not in a predatory way like 'get rich quick' influences, crypto scammers, and redpill adjacent-sphere individuals like Andrew Tate who are looking to exploit the desperate poor to make profit, but rather to shine a light on the mindset of poverty in America.
One of the most recent videos is by Andrew Callaghan interview and documentary about the Kia Boys, a group of young teenagers around New Haven notorious for stealing and lifting Kia's and Hyundais who had a vulnerability in their system allowing easy theft. It's a fascinating watch, but what's most interesting is how they want to spend the money they earn from carjacking. Not to support their families, not to pay for college or to get a GED, but rather to consume the latest fashion trends and to aspire to selfish hedonism.
Another youtuber is tackling American consumer debt and looks at how consumer choices end them in significant, and often insurmountable debt without extreme lifestyle and person changes. Caleb Hammer interviews people (in a fairly obnoxious and click-baity style) in significant loan and credit card debt, breaks down their finances, and tries to get them on a budget with a varying amount of success. The most common factor of the guests he has on his show is eating out- for most of his guests, almost 33% of most of their monthly income is eating out at various establishments and other spending that does not significantly increase their quality of life. Many of his guests would have significant personal income if they could have some self-control in their consumptive habits.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America. The social resources are stretched thinner, to the point our politicians decided it's better to serve incoming illegals than their own constituents on the off-chance they're willing to work the menial jobs for well below livable wage for the area. Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.
So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations. Imagine that individuals in section housing have to work at Amazon fulfilment centers. Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers. People in section housing could be bussed to the job, and also have regular police presence and social workers more intimately involved in their lives along with people helping them understand budgeting. It would require insane amounts of manpower, but it would also be the first step in actually beginning to address the problems of the slums.
Was this modest proposal made in jest? I want to reply seriously but can't help shake the feeling that I'm just missing the joke.
It was a spitball idea, not one that I think should be implemented verbatim into government policy. There needs to be a way for at risk and poor people to have constructive outlets and understand the importance and value of gainful employment. If you think its so juvenile, can you think of something better?
Sure - nothing. Just doing absolutely nothing and not even bothering with enforcement is a better suggestion than giving a company like Amazon this insane amount of power over the lives of their employees and the incredible competitive advantage of a workforce who are unable to leave their jobs without losing their homes. Amazon already treats their workers incredibly poorly and pays them so bad that a huge proportion of them receive government welfare on top of their earned income - are they going to be included in this program too and forced to do a bunch of extra free shifts for the existing employer in order to get those benefits? They were even projected to exhaust the US labour pool this year because their churn rate is so atrocious! Amazon is a company that has repeatedly gone out of their way to ensure that they get concessions and exemptions from government policies in the pursuit of profit, and I can't imagine that they'd change their spots for this.
The potential for abuse here is just staggering - do you think a woman who is on welfare is going to risk reporting their boss for sexual harassment/abuse when that all but guarantees they'll be homeless for the next 90 days? Your proposal only even makes sense if you're talking about a very specific subsection of welfare recipients. If I'm a university graduate who failed to find a job in six months because the economy just entered a recession, what exactly would I be learning from my new role as a serf for Amazon? Having that experience on my resume would make me less likely to get a real job (to say nothing of the opportunity costs, where I could be using that time to upskill or expand my resume) and more likely to stay dependent upon the system for life. If a hard-working coal-miner with two decades of experience finds themselves struggling to find a job after their mine got closed and all the jobs in their town got shipped off to China, what are they going to be getting out of this? If a housewife whose husband died due to COVID ends up applying for welfare, what greater purpose is served by taking her away from her children for eight hours a day to do menial labour so degrading and demanding that she has to piss in a bottle to avoid taking bathroom breaks? And of course on the flipside, if a hulking 7 foot tall gangster with violent tendencies and substance abuse issues shows up on the welfare rolls, you're actively putting the people who they work with at risk.
I'm sure there's some small subset of people (other than Jeff Bezos) who would benefit from this insanely expensive and demanding program, but the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. My answer might have been glib, but I'm under no real obligation to provide a functional alternative because I think your proposal is seriously flawed.
You're missing the forest for the trees. You're focusing on Amazon as a company rather than the issue of finding undereducated, isolated, an unemployed young men/women an attempt to integrate into society proper as a successful alternative to violence, drugs, and petty crime. It doesn't have to be Amazon, just any job that doesn't require a high level of previous training and education.
The other aforementioned people you created to dismiss my idea don't necessarily need the program I'm proposing, it's not like those people are about to resort to criminal behavior or aren't going to be assisted by other government programs or are incapable of finding work themselves.
Could you expand on this? I feel like this is just rageposting instead of an actual example. Also, you don't necessarily need to put work on your resume if it's something temporary while looking for a permanent position.
Of course you're under no obligation to provide an alternative, but poopooing something just because you don't like my general idea doesn't really disprove what I'm getting at, either.
Apologies for the delayed response - life's been rather busy lately. Feel free to just ignore this post, but I didn't want to leave your reply abandoned.
They're the company presented and they're the only operation with enough size and reach for this to be a viable option apart from maybe Walmart or McDonalds. Want to increase the amount of corporations involved? That's another layer of bureaucracy, investigation and opportunity for scams (you ever hear about the fake businesses created to harvest COVID relief benefits?).
The job in question has to be one where you don't give a shit about the quality of the output (people don't tend to produce their best work when they aren't getting paid) and with no real importance to it, because there's going to be vast amounts of malicious compliance. What exactly is the big task that needs all this incredibly shithouse and actively hostile labour? You can't trust these people, they have no incentive to perform and every incentive to be so bad at their job they get fired. If getting fired for incompetence means they just get kicked off welfare, I hope you're ready for the political fallout of constant media interviews with single mothers and their starving children who lost their job and all welfare because the Amazon algorithm noticed them taking too many piss breaks.
The other aforementioned people are the ones who are going to be included in the category of "incapable of finding work themselves" - you can't get away with using "about to resort to criminal behavior" as testable criteria without demonstrating precognition and accurate divination. You're going to have to come up with a dividing line between those people and the ones you want to target with your program - sometimes people, through no fault of their own, graduate in years like 2007 and your system needs to be able to account for things like that.
I'm not sure if you've gone looking for a job recently, but having a big gap on your resume is something that hampers the average person's ability to get hired. If you're a hiring manager who's picking up some programmers, are you going to look at the resume of the person who was well off enough that they got to contribute to open source projects for a semester after graduating, or the person who was forced to go be a delivery driver and can't even make the interview on time due to their welfare requirements? (Of course if you allow people to quit their fake Amazon job to go take a job interview without sacrificing their welfare then they're going to be taking a LOT of job interviews with FreeMoneyFromCovid LLC). Having onerous work requirements for someone on welfare means they aren't improving their skills, can't travel for work and are going to have problems going to job interviews.
More than just poopooing, this is pointing out serious structural issues with your proposal that I think play a large part in why this hasn't already been done. You just haven't thought through the consequences of a system like this, or put yourself in the shoes of a person who is entering the system at the bottom, and at the same time you haven't looked at the system from an adversarial point of view - and given that you're trying to turn these people into a source of free and easily exploitable labour, you have to be extremely careful that they don't have the ability to fuck things up and make your corporate partners go "These people are not worth employing even if we don't have to pay for them."
There's a reason that companies don't go drag a 20 dollar bill through the trailer park to pick up a bunch of cheap workers for the day. The "workforce" you're proposing to create with this idea is not just incredibly incompetent, but the few parts of it that are competent are heavily incentivised to fuck with the system in order to either escape it or fuck it up. No company is going to want to have to work with a bunch of gang-bangers that are forced to be in their office by law, and the actual "work" that these people generate is in many cases going to be actively harmful to the company's bottom line (though I'm sure some people will appreciate being able to pick up some meth from their Amazon delivery driver).
This is the actual main thrust of my argument against your proposal: the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Your program requires vast amounts of administrative overhead, has massive costs, potential for serious and egregious abuse, hampers the ability of good people to get real jobs and funnels taxpayer money into private hands that are already incredibly wealthy - and to top it all off, the workforce that results is so terrible that you will have to pay others to compensate for the costs of actually putting them to use.
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