President Trump recently signed an executive order urging state CPS agencies to partner with any adoption and foster care agencies that are willing, regardless of faith based discrimination those agencies may engage in. This flies in the face of organizations defending (or perhaps attempting to establish) LGBTQ rights, which have been lobbying for the prohibition of government partnerships with faith based adoption organizations that discriminate based on their beliefs. Their argument is that faith based organizations often hinder adoption more than they help. According to Donald Trump though, there are currently 400,000 children in the U.S. waiting for adoption or foster care, and the prohibition in some states of government partnership with faith based adoption agencies is a significant part of the problem.
There are a few things that are important to understand, before moving on to the critical question. The one that should be most obvious is that government prohibitions against partnerships between CPS and faith based child placement agencies does reduce resources for child placement. While partnerships would require the states to provide some funding for those agencies, that is not their only source of income. Thus, by refusing to work with them, states are actually refusing to use existing resources that are at their disposal. Second, states refusing to work with faith based agencies has not increased the number of purely secular agencies significantly. This is not a matter of faith based agencies competing with secular agencies. Partnering with faith base agencies in addition to secular agencies will not actually hinder adoption more than it will help, because all of the existing secular options will still exist. It would be trivial for state Health and Welfare departments to add a page to their web sites listing all partner agencies, along with any restrictions those agencies have. (Even many secular agencies only serve married couples, based on a large body of research showing that children with married parents have significantly better mental and emotional health than children with single or cohabitating but unmarried parents.) In short, religious child placement agencies cannot prevent people from going to secular agencies, and they have no power to interfere with placements made by those agencies. The claim that faith based agencies often hinder adoption more than helping is actually completely false. They may not adopt children to LGBTQ or single parents, but they still have a net positive rate of adoption, and they do not hinder adoptions arbitrated by secular agencies.
The critical question all of this brings up is this: Is it appropriate to put idealism ahead of need and practicality? The fact is that state prohibitions against partnerships with faith based placement agencies significantly reduce the rate at which children can be placed. The fact is, state prohibitions against partnerships with faith based placement agencies is putting an ideal of fairness for LGBTQ people ahead of the well being of children. What is more important, that governments do not provide even the slightest amount of funding to people who base their services on their faith or giving these 400,000 children homes? Does the want of LGBTQ people to be treated exactly the same as everyone else, even down to the most trivial details, outweigh the need of these children to have stable homes with good parents?
Perhaps it is time for U.S. liberals to start thinking about how their social justice crusade is actually affecting other people. They have raised a huge stink about Trump enforcing Obama's immigration policy, resulting in the detention of 100,000 illegal immigrant children, but minor inconvenience to a tiny portion of the population is enough for them to ignore 400,000 American children who are in a very similar boat. President Donald Trump may not be perfect, but at least he actually cares about our children.
How screwed up is a nation that will endorse religious discrimination that causes serious harm to enormous numbers of children, to allow a minority of around 4% of the population to feel affirmation?
10 May 2020
The Healthier Plant Based Diet
Plants are a great source of nutrients. We should eat plant based diets, because otherwise we will be unhealthy. Actually though, how to plants compare, as a source of nutrition? The answer is: Badly.
Meat has a lot of nutrients. Plants are actually a pretty poor source of protein. It is true that most plants have some protein, but "some" is not generally very much, and protein is not just one thing. Protein is a bunch of things. Proteins are made from amino acids. Different organisms require different amino acids to build the proteins they need. Some can synthesize their own amino acids, but most omnivores (including humans) can only create a handful of the amino acids they need, and the rest they have to get from their diets. Most plants do not contain even close to all of the amino acids humans must consume to remain healthy. New vegetarians and vegans often find themselves getting sick fairly quickly after eliminating meat from their diets. The most common cause of this is deficiencies in certain amino acids. It is possible to obtain all necessary amino acids from plant sources though. Beans, eaten with rice is the easiest way of covering all bases, which is why oriental cultures that eat much less meat than Americans do not tend to have health issues from this. They eat soy beans and rice as major parts of their diets. Meat is more dense in protein though, meaning less of it needs to be consumed to get enough of all necessary amino acids. Most vegetarians and vegans do not want to eat beans and rice as part of every single meal. This means they must find other sources of necessary amino acids. This makes these dietary lifestyles quite complicated, at least initially, because to get sufficient quantities of all necessary amino acids in a meat free diet, one must know what combinations of plants must be eaten to maintain health. This can be a lot of work, but it is possible, with sufficient dedication. Protein is probably the most commonly cited place where meat free diets tend to be deficient, but it is hardly the only one.
Protein is not the only place where meat is a superior source of nutrition. In fact, meat is also fairly rich in most vitamins and minerals. There are a few holes. Meat does not contain vitamin C, which is why sailors eating exclusively pork would get scurvy. It also tends to have little or no vitamin A and vitamin D. Meats tend to be fairly high in B vitamins especially. Other vitamins vary with the type of meat. A serving of meat at each meal is not sufficient for ideal health, but it will at least provide enough nutrition to survive, if you also have a source of vitamin C and get enough sunlight to cover your vitamin D needs. In fact, multiple culture have survived on almost exclusively meat for at least 6 months at a time and sometimes for longer during famines. The same is not true of plants. Most plants have a much narrower nutrient profile. To get the same nutrients one would from eating a piece of meat requires eating multiple different plants, and this time beans and rice will not cover it. Herbs used for seasoning tend to be very high in a very narrow range of nutrients, so seasoning food with multiple herbs can help, but again, to cover all bases requires access to a much wider variety of foods, and it requires research and math to ensure proper nutrition. Meat also has a broad range of essential mineral micronutrients that can be hard to find in plant food sources. Perhaps the most well known of these is iron. Iron can be found in some plants, but the quantity is much lower than in meat and thus requires consuming significantly more of the plants. Sulfur is another micronutrient vegans are often deficient in. Meat is an excellent source of sulfur. Plants tend to contain significantly less. Even high sulfur plant foods, like beans and cabbage, only have a small fraction of the sulfur content of meat. As with everything else, the successful vegetarian or vegan will need to track micronutrient intake and eat fairly large quantities of some plants to maintain the ideal intake of micronutrients.
On a vegan diet, it can even be hard to maintain a good intake of fat. We have already discussed protein. Macronutrients tend to be the first place would-be vegans and vegetarians fail. On a plant based diet, it is generally easy to consume enough carbohydrates. As we discussed before, protein can be difficult. The last macronutrient, fat, is also often a challenge for vegans. Most fruits, vegetables, and grains are very low in fat content. There are some really good plant based sources of fat, but they tend to be more expensive. Fruits like avocado are a common source of fat for vegans and vegetarians. Olives also contain a decent amount of fat, and olive oil can be a good addition to vegan meals. One of the best sources of both protein and fat for vegans and vegetarians is nuts. Nuts have some protein, though they do not cover amino acids anywhere near as well as meat. Nuts have plenty of fat, and they do quite well in mineral micronutrients. They actually work better as a complement to meat, as they cover most of the nutrients meat tends to be lower on, but they can be very valuable in a vegan diet. Fats are an essential macronutrient, not as a source of energy but as a solvent for certain vitamins that cannot be absorbed by the body unless they are dissolved in fat. Fats are also a very good source of energy as well, but the real value of fats is in allowing the body to absorb other essential nutrients. A diet too low in fat may manifest as vitamin deficiencies, which can make the problem hard to diagnose. Consuming more fat soluble vitamins will not help, if fat intake is too low.
The biggest failure with the vegan diet may be the high carbohydrate content of plants though. The human body can get by with fairly low protein intake, so long as all essential amino acids are accounted for. Excess protein is just turned into energy. It also does not take a lot of fat to carry enough of the fat soluble nutrients. Excess fat is turned into energy or stored. Carbohydrates are actually a non-essential nutrient. Both protein and fat can be consumed for energy, but they are both also essential in their own rights, outside of their context as energy sources. Carbohydrates have no such alternate context. They are only useful as a source of energy, a role which can be played by both protein and fat. Carbohydrates are more immediately accessible as energy, but this is not necessarily a good thing. Experimentation with low carb and keto diets has shown that for most people, it is possible to better develop the ability of the body to rapidly convert fat into energy. Most people who reduce or eliminate carbohydrates in their diets eventually return to normal function, once the body adapts to the new diet. It turns out that human reliance on carbohydrates is an environmental adaptation, and the body can just as easily adapt to diets that provide energy mostly as fat. This does not work so well with protein, however, as breaking down protein into energy can create toxic levels of certain byproducts, when protein is the primary source of energy. Even then though, the evidence suggests that at least some people can adapt even to this. Most keto diets, however, rely on a combination of fat and protein to avoid toxic ketoacidosis. Vegan and vegetarian diets tend to go in the opposite direction though, with a glut of carbs and potential deficiency in fat and protein. In the long run this can cause type 2 diabetes. The reason we do not see more diabetic vegans is that the high carb intake is countered by high fiber intake, which slows the uptake of carbs and tends to prevent or reduce blood sugar spikes. It is not clear, however, whether there may be additional problems caused by very high carb intake, despite the mitigating effects of fiber. One thing that is known is that the brain favors ketones as its energy source over glucose. Glucose is the primary source of energy provided by carbs. Ketones are produced when fats and proteins are broken down to create glucose. It is unknown exactly what the long term effect of keeping the brain on glucose as a fairly exclusive energy source, rather than allowing it to run off of ketones a bit more, but it is very unlikely the effects are beneficial to anyone. It is possible that brain functions may be hindered when ketones are not available as an energy source for the brain, but there is not sufficient research on this to prove anything yet.
Overall, meat is generally an excellent source of a well balanced diet. It certainly takes a lot less tracking and math to stay healthy, with meat as a significant part of the diet. Vegan and vegetarian diets are not fundamentally more healthy than a diet that includes meat, and in fact, fundamentally they are less healthy. One reason most vegans and vegetarians are healthier is because they actually make sure they get the nutrition they need. If the average person who eats meat regularly did the same, that person would very likely be at least as healthy as most vegans and vegetarians. Another reason most vegans and vegetarians are healthier is survivor bias. Many people try vegan and vegetarian diets. A lot of those people get sick on those diets and quit. Those who remain are people who are better suited to those diets. If we accounted for all of the people who got sick on vegan or vegetarian diets, we would probably find that those diets are not significantly healthier than diets that include meats. The fact is, successful vegans and vegetarians are mostly people who are naturally more able or adapted to handle those kind of diets. If only especially healthy people can be successful vegans or vegetarians, then of course vegans and vegetarians are healthier on average! The fact however, is the meat is the healthier food, because one serving of one kind of meat can cover the same nutrition as many servings of multiple kinds of plants. Replacing meat in one's diet with plants is hard, because meat is so nutritious and plants are not. Meat does not need to be a major part of a healthy diet, but the role of plants in most human diets is to cover the occasional deficiencies in meat and to provide some fiber to keep the gastrointestinal tract going. This does mean that a healthy diet should include more plants than meats, because plants have limited enough nutrition that it takes a lot to cover those holes. Eliminating meat entirely, however, does not make a person significantly more healthy. The work required to maintain a balanced diet so you do not die from malnutrition is what makes vegetarians and vegans healthier, as well as the fact that to survive a meat free diet, they also must be naturally more healthy and resilient. In the end, the fact is, meat is healthier food than plants, even if it is not perfect.
Meat has a lot of nutrients. Plants are actually a pretty poor source of protein. It is true that most plants have some protein, but "some" is not generally very much, and protein is not just one thing. Protein is a bunch of things. Proteins are made from amino acids. Different organisms require different amino acids to build the proteins they need. Some can synthesize their own amino acids, but most omnivores (including humans) can only create a handful of the amino acids they need, and the rest they have to get from their diets. Most plants do not contain even close to all of the amino acids humans must consume to remain healthy. New vegetarians and vegans often find themselves getting sick fairly quickly after eliminating meat from their diets. The most common cause of this is deficiencies in certain amino acids. It is possible to obtain all necessary amino acids from plant sources though. Beans, eaten with rice is the easiest way of covering all bases, which is why oriental cultures that eat much less meat than Americans do not tend to have health issues from this. They eat soy beans and rice as major parts of their diets. Meat is more dense in protein though, meaning less of it needs to be consumed to get enough of all necessary amino acids. Most vegetarians and vegans do not want to eat beans and rice as part of every single meal. This means they must find other sources of necessary amino acids. This makes these dietary lifestyles quite complicated, at least initially, because to get sufficient quantities of all necessary amino acids in a meat free diet, one must know what combinations of plants must be eaten to maintain health. This can be a lot of work, but it is possible, with sufficient dedication. Protein is probably the most commonly cited place where meat free diets tend to be deficient, but it is hardly the only one.
Protein is not the only place where meat is a superior source of nutrition. In fact, meat is also fairly rich in most vitamins and minerals. There are a few holes. Meat does not contain vitamin C, which is why sailors eating exclusively pork would get scurvy. It also tends to have little or no vitamin A and vitamin D. Meats tend to be fairly high in B vitamins especially. Other vitamins vary with the type of meat. A serving of meat at each meal is not sufficient for ideal health, but it will at least provide enough nutrition to survive, if you also have a source of vitamin C and get enough sunlight to cover your vitamin D needs. In fact, multiple culture have survived on almost exclusively meat for at least 6 months at a time and sometimes for longer during famines. The same is not true of plants. Most plants have a much narrower nutrient profile. To get the same nutrients one would from eating a piece of meat requires eating multiple different plants, and this time beans and rice will not cover it. Herbs used for seasoning tend to be very high in a very narrow range of nutrients, so seasoning food with multiple herbs can help, but again, to cover all bases requires access to a much wider variety of foods, and it requires research and math to ensure proper nutrition. Meat also has a broad range of essential mineral micronutrients that can be hard to find in plant food sources. Perhaps the most well known of these is iron. Iron can be found in some plants, but the quantity is much lower than in meat and thus requires consuming significantly more of the plants. Sulfur is another micronutrient vegans are often deficient in. Meat is an excellent source of sulfur. Plants tend to contain significantly less. Even high sulfur plant foods, like beans and cabbage, only have a small fraction of the sulfur content of meat. As with everything else, the successful vegetarian or vegan will need to track micronutrient intake and eat fairly large quantities of some plants to maintain the ideal intake of micronutrients.
On a vegan diet, it can even be hard to maintain a good intake of fat. We have already discussed protein. Macronutrients tend to be the first place would-be vegans and vegetarians fail. On a plant based diet, it is generally easy to consume enough carbohydrates. As we discussed before, protein can be difficult. The last macronutrient, fat, is also often a challenge for vegans. Most fruits, vegetables, and grains are very low in fat content. There are some really good plant based sources of fat, but they tend to be more expensive. Fruits like avocado are a common source of fat for vegans and vegetarians. Olives also contain a decent amount of fat, and olive oil can be a good addition to vegan meals. One of the best sources of both protein and fat for vegans and vegetarians is nuts. Nuts have some protein, though they do not cover amino acids anywhere near as well as meat. Nuts have plenty of fat, and they do quite well in mineral micronutrients. They actually work better as a complement to meat, as they cover most of the nutrients meat tends to be lower on, but they can be very valuable in a vegan diet. Fats are an essential macronutrient, not as a source of energy but as a solvent for certain vitamins that cannot be absorbed by the body unless they are dissolved in fat. Fats are also a very good source of energy as well, but the real value of fats is in allowing the body to absorb other essential nutrients. A diet too low in fat may manifest as vitamin deficiencies, which can make the problem hard to diagnose. Consuming more fat soluble vitamins will not help, if fat intake is too low.
The biggest failure with the vegan diet may be the high carbohydrate content of plants though. The human body can get by with fairly low protein intake, so long as all essential amino acids are accounted for. Excess protein is just turned into energy. It also does not take a lot of fat to carry enough of the fat soluble nutrients. Excess fat is turned into energy or stored. Carbohydrates are actually a non-essential nutrient. Both protein and fat can be consumed for energy, but they are both also essential in their own rights, outside of their context as energy sources. Carbohydrates have no such alternate context. They are only useful as a source of energy, a role which can be played by both protein and fat. Carbohydrates are more immediately accessible as energy, but this is not necessarily a good thing. Experimentation with low carb and keto diets has shown that for most people, it is possible to better develop the ability of the body to rapidly convert fat into energy. Most people who reduce or eliminate carbohydrates in their diets eventually return to normal function, once the body adapts to the new diet. It turns out that human reliance on carbohydrates is an environmental adaptation, and the body can just as easily adapt to diets that provide energy mostly as fat. This does not work so well with protein, however, as breaking down protein into energy can create toxic levels of certain byproducts, when protein is the primary source of energy. Even then though, the evidence suggests that at least some people can adapt even to this. Most keto diets, however, rely on a combination of fat and protein to avoid toxic ketoacidosis. Vegan and vegetarian diets tend to go in the opposite direction though, with a glut of carbs and potential deficiency in fat and protein. In the long run this can cause type 2 diabetes. The reason we do not see more diabetic vegans is that the high carb intake is countered by high fiber intake, which slows the uptake of carbs and tends to prevent or reduce blood sugar spikes. It is not clear, however, whether there may be additional problems caused by very high carb intake, despite the mitigating effects of fiber. One thing that is known is that the brain favors ketones as its energy source over glucose. Glucose is the primary source of energy provided by carbs. Ketones are produced when fats and proteins are broken down to create glucose. It is unknown exactly what the long term effect of keeping the brain on glucose as a fairly exclusive energy source, rather than allowing it to run off of ketones a bit more, but it is very unlikely the effects are beneficial to anyone. It is possible that brain functions may be hindered when ketones are not available as an energy source for the brain, but there is not sufficient research on this to prove anything yet.
Overall, meat is generally an excellent source of a well balanced diet. It certainly takes a lot less tracking and math to stay healthy, with meat as a significant part of the diet. Vegan and vegetarian diets are not fundamentally more healthy than a diet that includes meat, and in fact, fundamentally they are less healthy. One reason most vegans and vegetarians are healthier is because they actually make sure they get the nutrition they need. If the average person who eats meat regularly did the same, that person would very likely be at least as healthy as most vegans and vegetarians. Another reason most vegans and vegetarians are healthier is survivor bias. Many people try vegan and vegetarian diets. A lot of those people get sick on those diets and quit. Those who remain are people who are better suited to those diets. If we accounted for all of the people who got sick on vegan or vegetarian diets, we would probably find that those diets are not significantly healthier than diets that include meats. The fact is, successful vegans and vegetarians are mostly people who are naturally more able or adapted to handle those kind of diets. If only especially healthy people can be successful vegans or vegetarians, then of course vegans and vegetarians are healthier on average! The fact however, is the meat is the healthier food, because one serving of one kind of meat can cover the same nutrition as many servings of multiple kinds of plants. Replacing meat in one's diet with plants is hard, because meat is so nutritious and plants are not. Meat does not need to be a major part of a healthy diet, but the role of plants in most human diets is to cover the occasional deficiencies in meat and to provide some fiber to keep the gastrointestinal tract going. This does mean that a healthy diet should include more plants than meats, because plants have limited enough nutrition that it takes a lot to cover those holes. Eliminating meat entirely, however, does not make a person significantly more healthy. The work required to maintain a balanced diet so you do not die from malnutrition is what makes vegetarians and vegans healthier, as well as the fact that to survive a meat free diet, they also must be naturally more healthy and resilient. In the end, the fact is, meat is healthier food than plants, even if it is not perfect.
26 April 2020
Poor American Spending Logic
When people get on the subject of welfare and basic income, I hear a lot of complaints about how poor people tend to be bad with money. There are a handful of complaints that are so common they are practically cliche. One is the complaint that poor people use food stamps to buy lobster or other expensive foods. Another is that poor people use food stamps to buy a lot of soda and junk food. People like to complain about how poor people do not put money into savings or investments. I also frequently hear complaints about poor people not working full-time jobs. Of course, there is also the complaint about poor people having seemingly expensive possessions. These complaints seem to come from conservatives more often than liberals, but I hear them pretty regularly from liberals too and sometimes even from progressives. The fact, however, is that poor people generally are not bad with money. In fact, in my experience poor people are better with money on average than middle class and wealthy people!
The food stamp complaints are both pretty easy to explain. Food stamps are a program intended to supplement the food budget of a family, so they can afford more healthy food. For some, more healthy may mean the difference between not enough and enough, but often it just means topping off the food budget to allow the purchase of fresh vegetables and other healthier foods. Unfortunately, most poor people do not need more food. What they need is money to pay for insurance, a new set of clothing, some money to help cover rent, some money to pay for utilities, some money to pay for car repairs, some money to cover home repairs, and some money to pay for repair or replacement of essential appliances. When a family gets food stamps, that family typically starts spending less "real money" on food, to reduce other financial burdens that food stamps do not cover. The quality and quantity of food purchased may remain the same. Further, most poor people do not have terrible diets to begin with. Studies have found that poor people tend to have very similar food purchasing habits to middle class people, whether they are on food stamps or not. On top of that, food is the single easiest kind of welfare to get. There are soup kitchens, food banks, food drives, and religious food charities in most places in the U.S., where poor people can get enough food to stay healthy, and these sources tend to provide far healthier food than most people choose to purchase. Thus, even studies on what people buy with food stamps tend to underestimate the health value of the food they are actually eating, because those studies do not account for the fresh produce and other much healthier foods poor families are getting from various charities. Very few families get exactly the right amount of food stamp money. Many get significantly less than they need, relying heavily on food banks and religious charities for fruits and vegetables and other healthier foods, while using the food stamps to purchase everything else from the store. Others get more than they need, especially after accounting for other sources of free food. These families face a few options. They can spend all of the food stamps on the cheaper products they would normally buy, getting more than they can eat and either collecting more and more food until there is no room left for anymore and they have to start throwing away some of it, they can just not spend all of it and collect more and more unused food stamp money that the state will eventually seize once they no longer qualify for food stamps, or they can buy more expensive foods, so they maintain the same amount of food purchased while still spending all of their benefits. There is no financial benefit to saving the money or buying and later throwing out surplus, thus the wisest decision they can make is to buy more expensive food. Likewise, if those who are not getting enough are buying more calorie rich foods, typically considered junk food, to ensure they are getting enough to eat, that is also the wisest choice they could make. Yes, junk food does not have all of the necessary vitamins and minerals, but humans can survive much longer with vitamin deficiencies but eating enough calories than they can getting enough vitamins but not enough calories. The fact is, whether they are buying lobster and filet mignon or soda and potato chips with food stamps, poor people are actually making the best financial decisions given the resources available to them and the limitations imposed on those resources.
The reason poor people do not save or invest has nothing to do with capacity. It is easy to look at the budget of a poor person and find places where he or she could save money. Further, poor people are not choosing not to save due to stupidity, poor financial skills, or lack of financial knowledge. Poor people do not save money because it is illegal. The fact is, to qualify for welfare, you may not have cash or assets worth more than some threshold. A family that saves money will easily amass enough to exceed that threshold. If that money is in investments or a bank account, Department of Health and Welfare investigators will discover it and deny welfare. This denial of welfare will force poor people to draw from investments and savings to pay the bills until they are practically gone. At this point, they can qualify for welfare, giving them enough income to save again, until they exceed the thresholds. This leaves them with only two options. They can live on a more frugal budget, forgoing wants and less important needs while they are on welfare, so they can save money, and then live on that same frugal budget once they no longer qualify until their savings and investments are gone, in an infinite cycle, or they can just not save, living on a higher budget with welfare indefinitely. In the first case, they live on a smaller budget and never amass significant savings, and in the second case they live on a larger budget and never amass significant savings. Again, the wiser financial decision here is exactly what they are doing: Not saving and not investing. Of course, they could just take the money out in cash and stuff it in a mattress, but it would be against the law not to report that money, and if it was ever discovered, they would never qualify for welfare again, and they might be required to pay back all welfare benefits they have ever received. In other words, the only option poor people have for saving or investing is illegal. Again, poor people are making the wisest financial choice available to them, and any poor handling of money is being done by fairly wealthy elected representatives, not by the poor people themselves.
Poor people choosing not to work full-time jobs is actually a fairly well understood phenomenon, and anyone complaining about this as an instance of poor people handling money poorly is either stupid, ignorant, or deliberately spreading lies to encourage discrimination and prejudice against the poor. Most U.S. welfare programs have hard cutoffs where benefits are reduced or withdrawn entirely once a certain income level is reached. A person working 20 hours a week near a threshold will be in a hard position, where increasing hours or pay will cross a threshold, reducing welfare benefits by far more than the earned income increase. In this situation, the best financial decision is to refuse additional hours, promotions, and raises. This is the poster child for the "welfare trap", though is it hardly the only place where people get trapped in the U.S. welfare system. For some reason, despite how well known this is, U.S. lawmakers have such poor financial skills that they are incapable of implementing any of the numerous viable solutions to the problem.
Poor people in the U.S. often have fairly valuable possessions, or at least, they have possessions that others view as valuable. The most cliche complaint I have heard about this is women shopping at Walmart, who pay for their groceries with food stamps while talking on an iPhone. This reveals some profound prejudice against poor people. For example, this betrays an assumption that everyone on food stamps has always been on food stamps. A great many Americans are on food stamps at any given time, but a significant portion of those are people who have recently lost jobs and are either looking for a new job or becoming more educated to qualify for higher paying jobs. Perhaps that woman bought the iPhone six months ago, when she or her husband had a high paying, full-time job, but then that job was lost a few weeks ago, leaving her with an iPhone but having to rely on welfare for food. Even if she was on food stamps when the phone was purchased though, the ability to afford an iPhone while on an income low enough to qualify for food stamps is impressive! How does a poor person afford an expensive smart phone on such a small budget? By careful spending and saving! That woman at Walmart, checking out with food stamps while talking on her iPhone is very clear evidence that poor people are good at managing money! If she was bad with money, how would she have been able to afford a phone worth half a month to a month of rent? The last thing we should be doing is punishing poor people for good money management, and if they can afford expensive electronic devices, they are clearly managing their money well. What else can they be expected to do with the surplus money they have as a result of wise financial decisions, when they are not allowed to save it?
The evidence is clear: Poor people are better with money than the lawmakers writing and passing the bills that give those poor people welfare. The financial decisions middle and upper class people decry as evidence of poor money management are actually the best financial decisions poor people can make, within the context of the artificial welfare economy they have been stuck in.
When considering the financial skills of the American poor, it is critical to understand that they are not operating under the same economic conditions that free Americans are. They are not allowed to save significant amounts of money. Their spending choices are heavily restricted. They are punished when they earn too much. When we judge them based on the economic conditions of the wealthy, who are free to spend and save as they like, poor American spending logic may seem to make no sense and even be incredibly unwise. When judged on the economic conditions they actually live in, however, most poor Americans are using very wise spending logic. The average middle class American lives paycheck-to-paycheck on several times the budget the average poor American does. If poor Americans are able to afford luxuries like iPhones and lobster, that strongly suggests that poor Americans have far far better money management skills than any other income class!
The food stamp complaints are both pretty easy to explain. Food stamps are a program intended to supplement the food budget of a family, so they can afford more healthy food. For some, more healthy may mean the difference between not enough and enough, but often it just means topping off the food budget to allow the purchase of fresh vegetables and other healthier foods. Unfortunately, most poor people do not need more food. What they need is money to pay for insurance, a new set of clothing, some money to help cover rent, some money to pay for utilities, some money to pay for car repairs, some money to cover home repairs, and some money to pay for repair or replacement of essential appliances. When a family gets food stamps, that family typically starts spending less "real money" on food, to reduce other financial burdens that food stamps do not cover. The quality and quantity of food purchased may remain the same. Further, most poor people do not have terrible diets to begin with. Studies have found that poor people tend to have very similar food purchasing habits to middle class people, whether they are on food stamps or not. On top of that, food is the single easiest kind of welfare to get. There are soup kitchens, food banks, food drives, and religious food charities in most places in the U.S., where poor people can get enough food to stay healthy, and these sources tend to provide far healthier food than most people choose to purchase. Thus, even studies on what people buy with food stamps tend to underestimate the health value of the food they are actually eating, because those studies do not account for the fresh produce and other much healthier foods poor families are getting from various charities. Very few families get exactly the right amount of food stamp money. Many get significantly less than they need, relying heavily on food banks and religious charities for fruits and vegetables and other healthier foods, while using the food stamps to purchase everything else from the store. Others get more than they need, especially after accounting for other sources of free food. These families face a few options. They can spend all of the food stamps on the cheaper products they would normally buy, getting more than they can eat and either collecting more and more food until there is no room left for anymore and they have to start throwing away some of it, they can just not spend all of it and collect more and more unused food stamp money that the state will eventually seize once they no longer qualify for food stamps, or they can buy more expensive foods, so they maintain the same amount of food purchased while still spending all of their benefits. There is no financial benefit to saving the money or buying and later throwing out surplus, thus the wisest decision they can make is to buy more expensive food. Likewise, if those who are not getting enough are buying more calorie rich foods, typically considered junk food, to ensure they are getting enough to eat, that is also the wisest choice they could make. Yes, junk food does not have all of the necessary vitamins and minerals, but humans can survive much longer with vitamin deficiencies but eating enough calories than they can getting enough vitamins but not enough calories. The fact is, whether they are buying lobster and filet mignon or soda and potato chips with food stamps, poor people are actually making the best financial decisions given the resources available to them and the limitations imposed on those resources.
The reason poor people do not save or invest has nothing to do with capacity. It is easy to look at the budget of a poor person and find places where he or she could save money. Further, poor people are not choosing not to save due to stupidity, poor financial skills, or lack of financial knowledge. Poor people do not save money because it is illegal. The fact is, to qualify for welfare, you may not have cash or assets worth more than some threshold. A family that saves money will easily amass enough to exceed that threshold. If that money is in investments or a bank account, Department of Health and Welfare investigators will discover it and deny welfare. This denial of welfare will force poor people to draw from investments and savings to pay the bills until they are practically gone. At this point, they can qualify for welfare, giving them enough income to save again, until they exceed the thresholds. This leaves them with only two options. They can live on a more frugal budget, forgoing wants and less important needs while they are on welfare, so they can save money, and then live on that same frugal budget once they no longer qualify until their savings and investments are gone, in an infinite cycle, or they can just not save, living on a higher budget with welfare indefinitely. In the first case, they live on a smaller budget and never amass significant savings, and in the second case they live on a larger budget and never amass significant savings. Again, the wiser financial decision here is exactly what they are doing: Not saving and not investing. Of course, they could just take the money out in cash and stuff it in a mattress, but it would be against the law not to report that money, and if it was ever discovered, they would never qualify for welfare again, and they might be required to pay back all welfare benefits they have ever received. In other words, the only option poor people have for saving or investing is illegal. Again, poor people are making the wisest financial choice available to them, and any poor handling of money is being done by fairly wealthy elected representatives, not by the poor people themselves.
Poor people choosing not to work full-time jobs is actually a fairly well understood phenomenon, and anyone complaining about this as an instance of poor people handling money poorly is either stupid, ignorant, or deliberately spreading lies to encourage discrimination and prejudice against the poor. Most U.S. welfare programs have hard cutoffs where benefits are reduced or withdrawn entirely once a certain income level is reached. A person working 20 hours a week near a threshold will be in a hard position, where increasing hours or pay will cross a threshold, reducing welfare benefits by far more than the earned income increase. In this situation, the best financial decision is to refuse additional hours, promotions, and raises. This is the poster child for the "welfare trap", though is it hardly the only place where people get trapped in the U.S. welfare system. For some reason, despite how well known this is, U.S. lawmakers have such poor financial skills that they are incapable of implementing any of the numerous viable solutions to the problem.
Poor people in the U.S. often have fairly valuable possessions, or at least, they have possessions that others view as valuable. The most cliche complaint I have heard about this is women shopping at Walmart, who pay for their groceries with food stamps while talking on an iPhone. This reveals some profound prejudice against poor people. For example, this betrays an assumption that everyone on food stamps has always been on food stamps. A great many Americans are on food stamps at any given time, but a significant portion of those are people who have recently lost jobs and are either looking for a new job or becoming more educated to qualify for higher paying jobs. Perhaps that woman bought the iPhone six months ago, when she or her husband had a high paying, full-time job, but then that job was lost a few weeks ago, leaving her with an iPhone but having to rely on welfare for food. Even if she was on food stamps when the phone was purchased though, the ability to afford an iPhone while on an income low enough to qualify for food stamps is impressive! How does a poor person afford an expensive smart phone on such a small budget? By careful spending and saving! That woman at Walmart, checking out with food stamps while talking on her iPhone is very clear evidence that poor people are good at managing money! If she was bad with money, how would she have been able to afford a phone worth half a month to a month of rent? The last thing we should be doing is punishing poor people for good money management, and if they can afford expensive electronic devices, they are clearly managing their money well. What else can they be expected to do with the surplus money they have as a result of wise financial decisions, when they are not allowed to save it?
The evidence is clear: Poor people are better with money than the lawmakers writing and passing the bills that give those poor people welfare. The financial decisions middle and upper class people decry as evidence of poor money management are actually the best financial decisions poor people can make, within the context of the artificial welfare economy they have been stuck in.
When considering the financial skills of the American poor, it is critical to understand that they are not operating under the same economic conditions that free Americans are. They are not allowed to save significant amounts of money. Their spending choices are heavily restricted. They are punished when they earn too much. When we judge them based on the economic conditions of the wealthy, who are free to spend and save as they like, poor American spending logic may seem to make no sense and even be incredibly unwise. When judged on the economic conditions they actually live in, however, most poor Americans are using very wise spending logic. The average middle class American lives paycheck-to-paycheck on several times the budget the average poor American does. If poor Americans are able to afford luxuries like iPhones and lobster, that strongly suggests that poor Americans have far far better money management skills than any other income class!
29 March 2020
What Good is a Federal Job Guarantee: Another Basic Income Plug
What good is a Federal job guarantee, when states are putting their entire populations under quarantine?
This article has a dual purpose. One purpose is to call on Bernie Sanders to drop his Federal Job Guarantee agenda, an ill advised program that can only ever delay but never solve the problem of declining numbers of jobs as more and more jobs are automated, in favor of a Universal Basic Income, which he once believed was a noble long term goal. Of course, Sanders is never going to read this. This blog does not have a very large number of followers, and last time I checked, it was not getting a whole lot of traffic. The other purpose is to review the pros and cons of a basic income once again, with the addition of some things I have not discussed in the past, because no one was ready to listen.
What good is a Federal job guarantee, when states are putting their entire populations under quarantine? U.S. culture has changed substantially just over the last few weeks as something that was unthinkable only a month ago has actually happened. As such it is time to discuss Universal Basic Income in a context that people would have laughed at a month ago. There are a lot of proven benefits a basic income can bring. One of those is acting as a financial safety net for people who lose their jobs or are otherwise unable to work for more than a week or two. Financial advisors recommend that people save around six months worth of wages, to cover unexpected situations of this nature, but few people do. Most middle class and wealthy people, who are actually able to afford to do this, make poor financial decisions that make saving impossible. Poor people do not get paid enough to afford to save, despite the fact that most of them are forced to make wiser financial decisions by high prices on housing and other things. Further, how can anyone expect individuals to save significant amounts of money when economists are telling businesses and individuals to spend, spend, spend! The fact is, the U.S. economy is built on a fundamental assumption that nothing bad can ever happen and the way things are now is how they are always going to be. Business experts recommend businesses to take on all available debt that they can spend on things that will bring in more profits than the interest on the debt. Individuals are recommended by financial advisors to go into debt on homes, so long as they can afford the mortgage payments. Banks and real estate agents conspire to get home buyers to spend the maximum amount they can afford on a home. The problem with all of this is that the recommendation to businesses is based on the assumption that the profits a business can make in the future will always be equal to or larger than the profits that business can make now. What happens if profits drop below the cost of interest? The recommendation to and pressure on individuals to buy homes that are barely within the limits of their budgets assumes that those individuals will continue to have the same or greater income until the debt is paid off. Again, what happens if a job is lost or an injury makes an income earner unable to bring in wages for even a few months? What happens if a global pandemic of a fairly mild diseases causes mass panic and most people are quarantined by government mandate, many unable to work, for a few weeks or even months?
Up to now, the impact of poor financial advice to businesses and individuals has been largely ignored, because it is easy to ignore when only a small percentage of the population is affected by these tragic events at a time. We can deliberately ignore the injustice of people losing jobs when businesses fail due to following incredibly poor financial advice, because it is only a few businesses here and there, and society can pick up the slack. We can ignore the incredible harm unexpected loss of income brings, because again, it only happens to a very small percentage of the population at a time. This makes it easy for law makers to ignore the fact that programs like a Federal Job Guarantee cannot help people with major disabilities, people who are not suited to the kind of work the government is offering, and people who's time is more valuable to society as a whole doing domestic work like raising children and caring for old and disabled people. It is also easy to ignore the fact that the government can never truly guarantee jobs. Consider a Federal Job Guarantee program now. Just last week, 3.3 million Americans (that's 10% of the population) filed for unemployment. How fast could a well funded, very robust Federal Job Guarantee program find work for 3.3 million people? It would probably take over a year to place everyone, and it would cost far more than the $2 trillion being spent on "economic stimulus" to create enough government projects to employ that many people. That 3.3 million is just the tip of the iceberg. In another recent article, the math demonstrates that a Federal Job Guarantee would already cost around $10 trillion, without this additional 3.3 million people. Another 3.3 million workers would increase the cost by another $500 billion. What else could we do with $10 trillion a year? Oh right, give every single American man, woman, and child $30,303 a year, no strings attached! The cost of a Federal Job Guarantee capable of providing all of the jobs we "need" could instead be used to fund a ludicrous Universal Basic Income, averaging $76,363 per U.S. household (2.52 people per U.S. household, on average). On top of all of that, most of the government projects the Federal Job Guarantee would provide labor for would be closed down right now, due to stay-at-home orders and quarantines. A Federal Job Guarantee cannot provide the kind of jobs people need, when they have to stay at home.
A basic income is not bound to people being able to leave their homes. A simple basic income, providing an average of $2,500 per U.S. household per month ($30,000 per year) would only cost $3.8 trillion. We can do better though. A basic income of $1,000 per adult per month and $500 per child per month (the most recent version of Yang's Freedom Dividend plan) would only cost around $3.3 trillion a year. Perhaps a future article will demonstrate how this can be reduced to less than $500 billion with a simple recovery tax that guarantees everyone gets to keep some of the basic income at the same time as recovering part of it from people who have enough other income that they do not need it.
Universal Basic Income has a lot of serious benefits. Among them are significantly lower crimes rates, rearrangement of jobs that significantly increases economic productivity, the creation of many new businesses, the creation of new jobs, the potential to lower or eliminate minimum wage for a freer market without oppressively low wages, elimination of poverty, easier access to higher education, lower drug use, economic stimulus, greater economic freedom, and a financial safety net in hard times. And now, we add to that, an extension of the financial safety net, a financial safety net even during broad reaching events that affect everyone. A Federal Job Guarantee can provide some of these benefits for a portion of the population, most of the time, but the idea that it is even a guarantee is wrong. A basic income can serve everyone all of the time. A Federal Job Guarantee can easily be overwhelmed by a fairly mild but highly contagious disease in less than a week.
What about the cons? If the government gives people free money, they will just quit working, won't they? Nope. Many will quit their current jobs and get new ones. This will be more like shuffling than anything else though. A great many U.S. workers are stuck in jobs they do not like and are not good at. A basic income will allow them to quit those jobs, opening their positions for people who do want them and are good at them. The result will be a shuffling around of jobs that ultimately makes people happier and more productive. Some will not return to work, but most of those will either start new businesses or move to more economically valuable unpaid work, like caring for dependents. The evidence of this is strong, from a number of basic income experiments. The evidence also shows that currently unemployed people are more likely to work when they have a basic income, if work is available, and if it is not, they are more likely to pursue education to become qualified in work that is available. The fact is, the biggest con of a basic income is the cost, and in the long run the economic improvement and lower law enforcement and judicial costs associated with less crime will end up covering most or even all of that. In addition, the cost of a basic income can be easily mitigated with a progressive recovery tax designed to recover most (but not all) of the basic income from those who already have high incomes. In short, a well designed basic income program can actually provide a net gain in the long run.
The main point here is that basic income is a well tested and proven idea, and our current situation has made it very clear that our current welfare is insufficient and a Federal Job Guarantee would be an equally poor substitute. With a basic income, the $2 trillion stimulus package would be largely unnecessary. Yes, a Federal Job Guarantee with as-needed stimulus packages might be able to accomplish the same thing for the majority of those in need, but a system that requires massive government borrowing every time there is some minor global disaster is a poorly designed a system. A well designed system would have been able to handle the economic and financial issues of the current situation without any additional action from Congress. The fact that a stimulus package is deemed necessary is evidence of the weakness and fragility of our economy, including the labor portion. Our current welfare system has utterly failed to handle the situation. A Federal Job Guarantee would fail just as dramatically if not significantly more dramatically. A basic income, however, would already be here, helping the people meet their needs, without any additional government intervention. A basic income is the enlightened solution to our current problem and many future problems we are bound to encounter. The only true weakness it has is that it cannot be implemented any faster than the recently passed stimulus bill. Had we concerned ourselves just a little bit more with future, instead of deluding ourselves into believing we were too big and powerful to fall, perhaps we would already have one. It is not too late to start though. Yes, we will suffer for our refusal to look beyond the current moment, but we will recover, and with a basic income we will recover faster and be more resilient in the future.
This article has a dual purpose. One purpose is to call on Bernie Sanders to drop his Federal Job Guarantee agenda, an ill advised program that can only ever delay but never solve the problem of declining numbers of jobs as more and more jobs are automated, in favor of a Universal Basic Income, which he once believed was a noble long term goal. Of course, Sanders is never going to read this. This blog does not have a very large number of followers, and last time I checked, it was not getting a whole lot of traffic. The other purpose is to review the pros and cons of a basic income once again, with the addition of some things I have not discussed in the past, because no one was ready to listen.
What good is a Federal job guarantee, when states are putting their entire populations under quarantine? U.S. culture has changed substantially just over the last few weeks as something that was unthinkable only a month ago has actually happened. As such it is time to discuss Universal Basic Income in a context that people would have laughed at a month ago. There are a lot of proven benefits a basic income can bring. One of those is acting as a financial safety net for people who lose their jobs or are otherwise unable to work for more than a week or two. Financial advisors recommend that people save around six months worth of wages, to cover unexpected situations of this nature, but few people do. Most middle class and wealthy people, who are actually able to afford to do this, make poor financial decisions that make saving impossible. Poor people do not get paid enough to afford to save, despite the fact that most of them are forced to make wiser financial decisions by high prices on housing and other things. Further, how can anyone expect individuals to save significant amounts of money when economists are telling businesses and individuals to spend, spend, spend! The fact is, the U.S. economy is built on a fundamental assumption that nothing bad can ever happen and the way things are now is how they are always going to be. Business experts recommend businesses to take on all available debt that they can spend on things that will bring in more profits than the interest on the debt. Individuals are recommended by financial advisors to go into debt on homes, so long as they can afford the mortgage payments. Banks and real estate agents conspire to get home buyers to spend the maximum amount they can afford on a home. The problem with all of this is that the recommendation to businesses is based on the assumption that the profits a business can make in the future will always be equal to or larger than the profits that business can make now. What happens if profits drop below the cost of interest? The recommendation to and pressure on individuals to buy homes that are barely within the limits of their budgets assumes that those individuals will continue to have the same or greater income until the debt is paid off. Again, what happens if a job is lost or an injury makes an income earner unable to bring in wages for even a few months? What happens if a global pandemic of a fairly mild diseases causes mass panic and most people are quarantined by government mandate, many unable to work, for a few weeks or even months?
Up to now, the impact of poor financial advice to businesses and individuals has been largely ignored, because it is easy to ignore when only a small percentage of the population is affected by these tragic events at a time. We can deliberately ignore the injustice of people losing jobs when businesses fail due to following incredibly poor financial advice, because it is only a few businesses here and there, and society can pick up the slack. We can ignore the incredible harm unexpected loss of income brings, because again, it only happens to a very small percentage of the population at a time. This makes it easy for law makers to ignore the fact that programs like a Federal Job Guarantee cannot help people with major disabilities, people who are not suited to the kind of work the government is offering, and people who's time is more valuable to society as a whole doing domestic work like raising children and caring for old and disabled people. It is also easy to ignore the fact that the government can never truly guarantee jobs. Consider a Federal Job Guarantee program now. Just last week, 3.3 million Americans (that's 10% of the population) filed for unemployment. How fast could a well funded, very robust Federal Job Guarantee program find work for 3.3 million people? It would probably take over a year to place everyone, and it would cost far more than the $2 trillion being spent on "economic stimulus" to create enough government projects to employ that many people. That 3.3 million is just the tip of the iceberg. In another recent article, the math demonstrates that a Federal Job Guarantee would already cost around $10 trillion, without this additional 3.3 million people. Another 3.3 million workers would increase the cost by another $500 billion. What else could we do with $10 trillion a year? Oh right, give every single American man, woman, and child $30,303 a year, no strings attached! The cost of a Federal Job Guarantee capable of providing all of the jobs we "need" could instead be used to fund a ludicrous Universal Basic Income, averaging $76,363 per U.S. household (2.52 people per U.S. household, on average). On top of all of that, most of the government projects the Federal Job Guarantee would provide labor for would be closed down right now, due to stay-at-home orders and quarantines. A Federal Job Guarantee cannot provide the kind of jobs people need, when they have to stay at home.
A basic income is not bound to people being able to leave their homes. A simple basic income, providing an average of $2,500 per U.S. household per month ($30,000 per year) would only cost $3.8 trillion. We can do better though. A basic income of $1,000 per adult per month and $500 per child per month (the most recent version of Yang's Freedom Dividend plan) would only cost around $3.3 trillion a year. Perhaps a future article will demonstrate how this can be reduced to less than $500 billion with a simple recovery tax that guarantees everyone gets to keep some of the basic income at the same time as recovering part of it from people who have enough other income that they do not need it.
Universal Basic Income has a lot of serious benefits. Among them are significantly lower crimes rates, rearrangement of jobs that significantly increases economic productivity, the creation of many new businesses, the creation of new jobs, the potential to lower or eliminate minimum wage for a freer market without oppressively low wages, elimination of poverty, easier access to higher education, lower drug use, economic stimulus, greater economic freedom, and a financial safety net in hard times. And now, we add to that, an extension of the financial safety net, a financial safety net even during broad reaching events that affect everyone. A Federal Job Guarantee can provide some of these benefits for a portion of the population, most of the time, but the idea that it is even a guarantee is wrong. A basic income can serve everyone all of the time. A Federal Job Guarantee can easily be overwhelmed by a fairly mild but highly contagious disease in less than a week.
What about the cons? If the government gives people free money, they will just quit working, won't they? Nope. Many will quit their current jobs and get new ones. This will be more like shuffling than anything else though. A great many U.S. workers are stuck in jobs they do not like and are not good at. A basic income will allow them to quit those jobs, opening their positions for people who do want them and are good at them. The result will be a shuffling around of jobs that ultimately makes people happier and more productive. Some will not return to work, but most of those will either start new businesses or move to more economically valuable unpaid work, like caring for dependents. The evidence of this is strong, from a number of basic income experiments. The evidence also shows that currently unemployed people are more likely to work when they have a basic income, if work is available, and if it is not, they are more likely to pursue education to become qualified in work that is available. The fact is, the biggest con of a basic income is the cost, and in the long run the economic improvement and lower law enforcement and judicial costs associated with less crime will end up covering most or even all of that. In addition, the cost of a basic income can be easily mitigated with a progressive recovery tax designed to recover most (but not all) of the basic income from those who already have high incomes. In short, a well designed basic income program can actually provide a net gain in the long run.
The main point here is that basic income is a well tested and proven idea, and our current situation has made it very clear that our current welfare is insufficient and a Federal Job Guarantee would be an equally poor substitute. With a basic income, the $2 trillion stimulus package would be largely unnecessary. Yes, a Federal Job Guarantee with as-needed stimulus packages might be able to accomplish the same thing for the majority of those in need, but a system that requires massive government borrowing every time there is some minor global disaster is a poorly designed a system. A well designed system would have been able to handle the economic and financial issues of the current situation without any additional action from Congress. The fact that a stimulus package is deemed necessary is evidence of the weakness and fragility of our economy, including the labor portion. Our current welfare system has utterly failed to handle the situation. A Federal Job Guarantee would fail just as dramatically if not significantly more dramatically. A basic income, however, would already be here, helping the people meet their needs, without any additional government intervention. A basic income is the enlightened solution to our current problem and many future problems we are bound to encounter. The only true weakness it has is that it cannot be implemented any faster than the recently passed stimulus bill. Had we concerned ourselves just a little bit more with future, instead of deluding ourselves into believing we were too big and powerful to fall, perhaps we would already have one. It is not too late to start though. Yes, we will suffer for our refusal to look beyond the current moment, but we will recover, and with a basic income we will recover faster and be more resilient in the future.
The Real Math Behind a Federal Job Guarantee
The estimated cost of a Federal Job Guarantee is $543 billion a year. This number makes a lot of assumptions though, most of which are invalid, and it ignores substantial additional costs.
The current Federal Job Guarantee proposals promise to provide a job for anyone who wants one, at $15 an hour up to 40 hours a week. The above estimate assumes 81% of unemployed people want full-time work and 19% want part-time work, but basing the budget on the assumption that these will stay the same forever is unwise. Also, it really does not make a huge difference, once you add in other factors.
An estimated 5.9 million people actively seeking jobs were unemployed last year. Full-time, at $15 an hour, their wages would cost $184 billion a year. That is not a whole lot, compared to the ~$800 billion we are spending on other non-medical welfare. That ignores 400,000 who were recently considered unemployed but have quit looking, call "discouraged workers" by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Include those, and you get a net wage cost of $197 billion. What about the claim that there are 95 million U.S. adults who could be working but are not? It turns out a lot of these people do not want jobs. Over 44 million are retired people. Most of the remainder are going to college or caring for children or elderly relatives. A small portion either just do not want to work or are not working for unknown reasons. It turns out that around 7.9 million able bodied adults in the U.S. are not working either because they cannot find work or because they are just not motivated to work. A $15 guaranteed wage might be able to convince all 7.9 million to work though, at a wage cost of $246 billion a year. What about the rest of the 95 million people though? Would some of them be convinced to work as well, by this? Many college students do work part-time or even full-time in addition to school, but it is generally difficult for college students to find flexible jobs that can accommodate their class schedules. Many retired people work part-time for the medical benefits and for a little extra spending money. Even some people who take care of family members find time to work around that care, when flexible jobs are available. No Federal job program could reasonably be considered a job guarantee, if it did not do everything it could to work with people who need specialized or flexible schedules. It would be unreasonable to expect that a Federal Job Guarantee offering $15 an hour would not be taken advantage of by a significant portion of the 87 million people who are not working, because they are doing other, more important things that few employers are willing to accommodate. What if this demographic takes advantage of the Federal Job Guarantee for an average of 15 hours a week? (Many retirees will just go for 10, but many will take 20 to 30 hours, if schedules are sufficiently flexible.) Now we are looking at a $1.27 trillion program, just for wages.
As mentioned above, the initial estimate also ignores substantial additional costs. The wage cost of a Federal Job Guarantee is very likely to be at least $1 trillion a year. What about administration though? Someone has to manage hiring, job placement, human resources, project logistics, acquisition, and a ton of other things. This is not like running a company. This is like running a hundred or a thousand companies, and it will require administrative management capable of running that many companies. We are talking administrative costs on the order of another $1 trillion a year. To be clear, this is a low ball estimate. The Federal government currently spends $800 billion a year on non-medical welfare. Somewhere between $500 billion and $600 billion of that is going into administrative costs, and that is mostly just paying people to check work verifications, look up tax records, and check bank accounts, to make sure applicants actually meet the requirements. The actual administrative costs for a Federal Job Guarantee would probably be several trillion.
Another major cost of a Federal job guarantee is going to be materials. The intent for the Federal Job Guarantee programs suggested is to provide jobs where people will work on government infrastructure projects. The low hanging fruit here is maintaining and expanding the interstate highway system. Other suggestions include the construction of a transcontinental bullet train system, ecological restoration (ie, cleaning up Federal parks and highways), care giving (nursing home jobs), and "community development projects" (whatever local governments want, probably including creating new parks, building new government and community buildings, and "beautification" projects). None of these are free, and most require a lot of materials. Obviously roads and bullet train systems are going to cost far more in materials than labor, especially at only $15 an hour for labor. Ecological restoration will vary dramatically. Mere highway cleanup will incur transportation cost and cost for garbage bags and dumping. If the effort also includes removing vehicle by products from nearby soil, the non-labor cost could skyrocket. Care giving often appears to be a very labor intensive job, and while it is, labor is still not the biggest expense. The expenses also include food, medication, and shelter, which can easily outstrip a $15 an hour wage. This is especially true for nursing homes where there may be only one caregiver for up to 5 or 10 people. Community development projects will also almost certainly cost more in materials and such than in wages. Again, let's lowball this and say the average materials cost comes out to about the same as wages, for another $1 trillion.
We cannot just hire as many as 30 million people, tell them what projects they are on, and expect them to complete them. Each project is going it need its own project planners, which will likely expect a number of experts working together. In addition, each project will likely need a few highly trained people on-site as well as supervisors to manage the unskilled laborers. These people are not going to be getting paid only $15 an hour, and some will demand compensation far greater. Road repair crews tend to have between 5 and 10 people. At least one of those is trained well enough in road construction and repaid to instruct the others. Road construction crews can be a bit bigger, but with modern equipment, they do not need to be much bigger. Construction crews typically also need additional people trained and experienced in the use of the heavier equipment. We are looking at 10% to 20% of laborers on road infrastructure projects being well trained, with wages running at least $20 an hour. Supervisors for bullet train systems will cost far more than even that, and they will also require some engineers to manage the construction and to assemble the electrical components, who will have to paid more than five times what the "job guarantee" people are getting. Clean up crews could have much less supervision, but other ecological restoration projects will require supervisors and managers with far more training and far larger salaries (on the order of two to four times what the "job guarantee" employees are being paid). Care facilities generally require a number of trained CNAs to be on staff, who may cost as much as $25 an hour, and government run facilities are likely to require at least one (and as many as four, if full shift coverage is required) registered nurse or certified nurse practitioner on staff, with a salary between $60,000 and $120,000 (two to four times what the "job guarantee" people are getting paid). Community development projects will vary dramatically. Building construction will require foremen, contracting services, and trained specialists. Electrical and plumbing cannot legally be done by anyone who is not licensed to do those. While jobs like insulating do not generally require licenses, it is still going to be necessary to have experienced supervisors to make sure the work meets building code requirements. Beautification projects will require landscape architects (1.5 to 4 times the cost), horticulturalists (1.5 to 2 times the cost), and other trained and experienced people to manage the work. Most of this is just the on site stuff, as well. There will also need to be significant office management to manage budgets and to work with on site experts and supervisors to make sure everything is following the plans and to adapt to unforeseen events. All of these additional supervisors, managers, and experts are in addition to the people working under the job guarantee program. This is probably going to cost around another $1 trillion.
So far, the cost is already up to $4 trillion, and this is a lowball. This estimate also does not include a large number of fairly small costs that will likely add up to something on the order of at least another trillion dollars, nor does it take into account the cost of benefits. Current proposals also include healthcare benefits as part of the package, and those are unlikely to scale much with work hours. This means that retired people who only work 10 hours a week, so they can get the healthcare coverage are going to cost the same for that coverage as full-time workers, and they are more likely to need to use it, making them a greater cost for healthcare benefits than full-time workers. On top of that, the $15 wage and healthcare benefits will likely draw far more people to the program than just what we have considered above. Currently, 54 million workers are being paid less than $15 an hour, and at least several million more making up to $18 an hour or more working part time do not have healthcare benefits. That is another $2 trillion or more just in wages and benefits the government will end up spending on the program, as well as similar amounts each for administration, materials, and managements. The reality is that the minimum cost for a Federal Job Guarantee program will almost certainly be more than $4 trillion, and it could easily cost as much as $15 trillion or more.
A Federal Job Guarantee can hardly guarantee anyone a job, and the price tag is not some measly $500 billion. The math suggests a cost somewhere around $10 trillion, and even a $15 minimum wage to remove incentive for lower paid people to switch would not be enough, because $15 an hour jobs do not generally include healthcare benefits. Federal welfare programs do not cost only what beneficiaries get. They typically cost several times that, and a Federal Job Guarantee is no different. Again, the math shows a net cost between $4 trillion and $15 trillion, with the most likely cost being around $9 trillion and $10 trillion. A Federal Job Guarantee is a bad idea.
The current Federal Job Guarantee proposals promise to provide a job for anyone who wants one, at $15 an hour up to 40 hours a week. The above estimate assumes 81% of unemployed people want full-time work and 19% want part-time work, but basing the budget on the assumption that these will stay the same forever is unwise. Also, it really does not make a huge difference, once you add in other factors.
An estimated 5.9 million people actively seeking jobs were unemployed last year. Full-time, at $15 an hour, their wages would cost $184 billion a year. That is not a whole lot, compared to the ~$800 billion we are spending on other non-medical welfare. That ignores 400,000 who were recently considered unemployed but have quit looking, call "discouraged workers" by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Include those, and you get a net wage cost of $197 billion. What about the claim that there are 95 million U.S. adults who could be working but are not? It turns out a lot of these people do not want jobs. Over 44 million are retired people. Most of the remainder are going to college or caring for children or elderly relatives. A small portion either just do not want to work or are not working for unknown reasons. It turns out that around 7.9 million able bodied adults in the U.S. are not working either because they cannot find work or because they are just not motivated to work. A $15 guaranteed wage might be able to convince all 7.9 million to work though, at a wage cost of $246 billion a year. What about the rest of the 95 million people though? Would some of them be convinced to work as well, by this? Many college students do work part-time or even full-time in addition to school, but it is generally difficult for college students to find flexible jobs that can accommodate their class schedules. Many retired people work part-time for the medical benefits and for a little extra spending money. Even some people who take care of family members find time to work around that care, when flexible jobs are available. No Federal job program could reasonably be considered a job guarantee, if it did not do everything it could to work with people who need specialized or flexible schedules. It would be unreasonable to expect that a Federal Job Guarantee offering $15 an hour would not be taken advantage of by a significant portion of the 87 million people who are not working, because they are doing other, more important things that few employers are willing to accommodate. What if this demographic takes advantage of the Federal Job Guarantee for an average of 15 hours a week? (Many retirees will just go for 10, but many will take 20 to 30 hours, if schedules are sufficiently flexible.) Now we are looking at a $1.27 trillion program, just for wages.
As mentioned above, the initial estimate also ignores substantial additional costs. The wage cost of a Federal Job Guarantee is very likely to be at least $1 trillion a year. What about administration though? Someone has to manage hiring, job placement, human resources, project logistics, acquisition, and a ton of other things. This is not like running a company. This is like running a hundred or a thousand companies, and it will require administrative management capable of running that many companies. We are talking administrative costs on the order of another $1 trillion a year. To be clear, this is a low ball estimate. The Federal government currently spends $800 billion a year on non-medical welfare. Somewhere between $500 billion and $600 billion of that is going into administrative costs, and that is mostly just paying people to check work verifications, look up tax records, and check bank accounts, to make sure applicants actually meet the requirements. The actual administrative costs for a Federal Job Guarantee would probably be several trillion.
Another major cost of a Federal job guarantee is going to be materials. The intent for the Federal Job Guarantee programs suggested is to provide jobs where people will work on government infrastructure projects. The low hanging fruit here is maintaining and expanding the interstate highway system. Other suggestions include the construction of a transcontinental bullet train system, ecological restoration (ie, cleaning up Federal parks and highways), care giving (nursing home jobs), and "community development projects" (whatever local governments want, probably including creating new parks, building new government and community buildings, and "beautification" projects). None of these are free, and most require a lot of materials. Obviously roads and bullet train systems are going to cost far more in materials than labor, especially at only $15 an hour for labor. Ecological restoration will vary dramatically. Mere highway cleanup will incur transportation cost and cost for garbage bags and dumping. If the effort also includes removing vehicle by products from nearby soil, the non-labor cost could skyrocket. Care giving often appears to be a very labor intensive job, and while it is, labor is still not the biggest expense. The expenses also include food, medication, and shelter, which can easily outstrip a $15 an hour wage. This is especially true for nursing homes where there may be only one caregiver for up to 5 or 10 people. Community development projects will also almost certainly cost more in materials and such than in wages. Again, let's lowball this and say the average materials cost comes out to about the same as wages, for another $1 trillion.
We cannot just hire as many as 30 million people, tell them what projects they are on, and expect them to complete them. Each project is going it need its own project planners, which will likely expect a number of experts working together. In addition, each project will likely need a few highly trained people on-site as well as supervisors to manage the unskilled laborers. These people are not going to be getting paid only $15 an hour, and some will demand compensation far greater. Road repair crews tend to have between 5 and 10 people. At least one of those is trained well enough in road construction and repaid to instruct the others. Road construction crews can be a bit bigger, but with modern equipment, they do not need to be much bigger. Construction crews typically also need additional people trained and experienced in the use of the heavier equipment. We are looking at 10% to 20% of laborers on road infrastructure projects being well trained, with wages running at least $20 an hour. Supervisors for bullet train systems will cost far more than even that, and they will also require some engineers to manage the construction and to assemble the electrical components, who will have to paid more than five times what the "job guarantee" people are getting. Clean up crews could have much less supervision, but other ecological restoration projects will require supervisors and managers with far more training and far larger salaries (on the order of two to four times what the "job guarantee" employees are being paid). Care facilities generally require a number of trained CNAs to be on staff, who may cost as much as $25 an hour, and government run facilities are likely to require at least one (and as many as four, if full shift coverage is required) registered nurse or certified nurse practitioner on staff, with a salary between $60,000 and $120,000 (two to four times what the "job guarantee" people are getting paid). Community development projects will vary dramatically. Building construction will require foremen, contracting services, and trained specialists. Electrical and plumbing cannot legally be done by anyone who is not licensed to do those. While jobs like insulating do not generally require licenses, it is still going to be necessary to have experienced supervisors to make sure the work meets building code requirements. Beautification projects will require landscape architects (1.5 to 4 times the cost), horticulturalists (1.5 to 2 times the cost), and other trained and experienced people to manage the work. Most of this is just the on site stuff, as well. There will also need to be significant office management to manage budgets and to work with on site experts and supervisors to make sure everything is following the plans and to adapt to unforeseen events. All of these additional supervisors, managers, and experts are in addition to the people working under the job guarantee program. This is probably going to cost around another $1 trillion.
So far, the cost is already up to $4 trillion, and this is a lowball. This estimate also does not include a large number of fairly small costs that will likely add up to something on the order of at least another trillion dollars, nor does it take into account the cost of benefits. Current proposals also include healthcare benefits as part of the package, and those are unlikely to scale much with work hours. This means that retired people who only work 10 hours a week, so they can get the healthcare coverage are going to cost the same for that coverage as full-time workers, and they are more likely to need to use it, making them a greater cost for healthcare benefits than full-time workers. On top of that, the $15 wage and healthcare benefits will likely draw far more people to the program than just what we have considered above. Currently, 54 million workers are being paid less than $15 an hour, and at least several million more making up to $18 an hour or more working part time do not have healthcare benefits. That is another $2 trillion or more just in wages and benefits the government will end up spending on the program, as well as similar amounts each for administration, materials, and managements. The reality is that the minimum cost for a Federal Job Guarantee program will almost certainly be more than $4 trillion, and it could easily cost as much as $15 trillion or more.
A Federal Job Guarantee can hardly guarantee anyone a job, and the price tag is not some measly $500 billion. The math suggests a cost somewhere around $10 trillion, and even a $15 minimum wage to remove incentive for lower paid people to switch would not be enough, because $15 an hour jobs do not generally include healthcare benefits. Federal welfare programs do not cost only what beneficiaries get. They typically cost several times that, and a Federal Job Guarantee is no different. Again, the math shows a net cost between $4 trillion and $15 trillion, with the most likely cost being around $9 trillion and $10 trillion. A Federal Job Guarantee is a bad idea.
24 March 2020
Next Level Trolling
Trolls are often considered the scum of the internet. They deliberately incite arguments and other hostile communications. They argue just to argue. They make the internet a worse place, for their own personal amusement. Only, this is not universally true. Not all trolls make it their goal to incite hostilities so they can sit back and watch the world burn. The trolls described above are merely the common, vulgar trolls. While the vulgar troll is certainly the most common kind of troll, there is another level of troll that is more sophisticated, that trolls for a purpose other than personal entertainment.
The most common purpose of trolling is to cause contention for personal entertainment, but trolling can have a higher purpose. Trolling can be used to extract information. It can be used to learn people's motivations and how they think. It can be used to find out the sources of their information and the biases that they use to support their opinions and beliefs. It can be used to drag false beliefs into the light, and it can even be used to teach. Higher level trolls do not use their powers for personal entertainment, though it can be entertaining. They use their powers to help others and to learn more about people.
As a personal example, I once trolled in the Google comments, in a thread discussing the health implications of GMO foods. If you are familiar with my articles, you may be aware that I wrote a few articles on GMOs a while back, and if you have read them, you will also be aware that I am strongly pro-GMO, because GMOs are important for increasing crop yield and nutrient content of foods, which are going to grow in importance as Earth's human population continues to grow. In this thread, there were a handful of anti-GMO people spreading lies and misconceptions about GMO foods, but there were also a lot of legitimately curious people who wanted to learn more. Due to the loud anti-GMO people, it was impossible to engage with those who wanted to learn. Thus the trolling began. I started by engaging the anti-GMO. I expressed my opinion that GMOs are generally harmless and that the FDA already does a good job of making sure all GMOs going into human food are tested rather excessively for safety. This was, of course, met with many examples of places that GMOs had caused harm to people, the most prominent of which was a case where GMO baby formula harmed many babies. I responded by demanding sources for these claims. Before that, I Googled each of the claims and verified that they were all false. They were lies made up by poorly educated anti-GMO authors to demonize GMOs, since there are actually no cases of GMOs harming humans. I did not want to call the anti-GMO people out on this though. I was fishing deeper, for bigger fish. Merely asking for sources verifying claims was enough to send most of the anti-GMO crowd into hiding. Only one person was brave enough (or foolish enough, perhaps) to respond. This person began making additional claims of instances where GMOs had caused harm, none of which were verifiable. After each claim, I demanded sources. At one point, I specifically said that I wanted sources who are well educated in genetic engineering and well researched on the impact of GMOs on human health. I specifically said I was not interested in journalists or fanatics who do not know the science. After many demands for sources, this person finally gave me a name and the title of a book. I instantly looked up the author on Wikipedia. He was a journalist who mostly writes about oil economics, who was hired by an anti-GMO activist group to write a book attacking GMOs. His credentials were a degree in journalism with some classes in economics. He had no background in genetics or health. He was exactly the kind of crummy source I had explicitly stated could not be considered a reliable source, and I immediately pointed this out. I explained that the incredibly low quality of the source made anything the author wrote on GMOs suspect, and at this point I also pointed out that I could find no evidence supporting any of the claims of harm caused by GMOs. The final anti-GMO commenter never responded again, but some of the people who actually wanted to learn more about GMOs did start to respond. I went through the comments looking for specific concerns about GMOs, and then I wrote a couple of blog articles (the ones I referenced before) answering those questions and clearing up a lot of misconceptions about GMOs. The final comment I left in that thread contained the links to those articles, for anyone interested in learning more about genetic engineering and GMOs. Without the trolling, it would have been very difficult to identify specific, legitimate concerns people had. The trolling allowed me to identify and push out of the conversation those who were more interested in arguing than learning. Trolling was a critical element of providing a potentially very valuable public service.
I have also used trolling to shut down argumentative people (vulgar trolls) in discussions on religion, by leading them into a trap, where they made some absurd and invalid argument in an attempt to discredit a religion. I have a friend who was trying to tie a person in a martial arts forum who was slandering his practice group on Facebook to a person in real life who had been badly beaten by members of my friend's group during sparing. My friend used expert trolling skills to make the other guy angry enough to accidentally reveal bits and pieces of information that ultimately verified it was the same person. I have used milder trolling just to see how people would respond to something, to learn more about how they think.
Vulgar internet trolls, who are just trying to entertain themselves, can be pretty annoying and can cause all sorts of problems and contention, but trolling does not have to be used for evil. Trolling can even be used for noble pursuits, like shutting down vulgar trolls and learning what kind of information people need and want so you can provide it. Trolling can even be part of a valuable public service.
The most common purpose of trolling is to cause contention for personal entertainment, but trolling can have a higher purpose. Trolling can be used to extract information. It can be used to learn people's motivations and how they think. It can be used to find out the sources of their information and the biases that they use to support their opinions and beliefs. It can be used to drag false beliefs into the light, and it can even be used to teach. Higher level trolls do not use their powers for personal entertainment, though it can be entertaining. They use their powers to help others and to learn more about people.
As a personal example, I once trolled in the Google comments, in a thread discussing the health implications of GMO foods. If you are familiar with my articles, you may be aware that I wrote a few articles on GMOs a while back, and if you have read them, you will also be aware that I am strongly pro-GMO, because GMOs are important for increasing crop yield and nutrient content of foods, which are going to grow in importance as Earth's human population continues to grow. In this thread, there were a handful of anti-GMO people spreading lies and misconceptions about GMO foods, but there were also a lot of legitimately curious people who wanted to learn more. Due to the loud anti-GMO people, it was impossible to engage with those who wanted to learn. Thus the trolling began. I started by engaging the anti-GMO. I expressed my opinion that GMOs are generally harmless and that the FDA already does a good job of making sure all GMOs going into human food are tested rather excessively for safety. This was, of course, met with many examples of places that GMOs had caused harm to people, the most prominent of which was a case where GMO baby formula harmed many babies. I responded by demanding sources for these claims. Before that, I Googled each of the claims and verified that they were all false. They were lies made up by poorly educated anti-GMO authors to demonize GMOs, since there are actually no cases of GMOs harming humans. I did not want to call the anti-GMO people out on this though. I was fishing deeper, for bigger fish. Merely asking for sources verifying claims was enough to send most of the anti-GMO crowd into hiding. Only one person was brave enough (or foolish enough, perhaps) to respond. This person began making additional claims of instances where GMOs had caused harm, none of which were verifiable. After each claim, I demanded sources. At one point, I specifically said that I wanted sources who are well educated in genetic engineering and well researched on the impact of GMOs on human health. I specifically said I was not interested in journalists or fanatics who do not know the science. After many demands for sources, this person finally gave me a name and the title of a book. I instantly looked up the author on Wikipedia. He was a journalist who mostly writes about oil economics, who was hired by an anti-GMO activist group to write a book attacking GMOs. His credentials were a degree in journalism with some classes in economics. He had no background in genetics or health. He was exactly the kind of crummy source I had explicitly stated could not be considered a reliable source, and I immediately pointed this out. I explained that the incredibly low quality of the source made anything the author wrote on GMOs suspect, and at this point I also pointed out that I could find no evidence supporting any of the claims of harm caused by GMOs. The final anti-GMO commenter never responded again, but some of the people who actually wanted to learn more about GMOs did start to respond. I went through the comments looking for specific concerns about GMOs, and then I wrote a couple of blog articles (the ones I referenced before) answering those questions and clearing up a lot of misconceptions about GMOs. The final comment I left in that thread contained the links to those articles, for anyone interested in learning more about genetic engineering and GMOs. Without the trolling, it would have been very difficult to identify specific, legitimate concerns people had. The trolling allowed me to identify and push out of the conversation those who were more interested in arguing than learning. Trolling was a critical element of providing a potentially very valuable public service.
I have also used trolling to shut down argumentative people (vulgar trolls) in discussions on religion, by leading them into a trap, where they made some absurd and invalid argument in an attempt to discredit a religion. I have a friend who was trying to tie a person in a martial arts forum who was slandering his practice group on Facebook to a person in real life who had been badly beaten by members of my friend's group during sparing. My friend used expert trolling skills to make the other guy angry enough to accidentally reveal bits and pieces of information that ultimately verified it was the same person. I have used milder trolling just to see how people would respond to something, to learn more about how they think.
Vulgar internet trolls, who are just trying to entertain themselves, can be pretty annoying and can cause all sorts of problems and contention, but trolling does not have to be used for evil. Trolling can even be used for noble pursuits, like shutting down vulgar trolls and learning what kind of information people need and want so you can provide it. Trolling can even be part of a valuable public service.
20 March 2020
Children Aren't Important?
I keep seeing this come up, and I do not understand why there is not more public outcry over it. It started with Trump's tax reform. Now, Trump's tax reform helped a lot of people. It increased refunds for a lot of lower income working Americans. Unfortunately, however, it also neglected children. In a sense, it counted adults as worth more, reducing the total amount of refund for lower income working families with more children than average. (We saw more than a 10% decrease in our refunds, despite getting a little more back from the EITC.) After Trump it was Yang, with a Freedom Dividend plan that would have given adults a basic income worth around half of a living wage but just plain did not even count children as people. Now we have plans for an economic stimulus package with a relief element for individuals, and yet again, children are being treated as unimportant.
Trump suggested an initial relief check for all American adults, with some kind of cutoff to avoid giving a lot of money to people who do not need it. This is not a bad idea, except for the fact that children are rapidly increasing in value in the U.S. (as fertility rate decreases), and this plan straight up neglects children. Of course, others immediately pointed this out, and Trump agreed with plans that provide smaller amounts for children. Now, I am not complaining about the fact that the amount for children is smaller in some of these plans. Household dynamics work fine this way, as the biggest cost for most families is rent or mortgage payments, and this scales much slower with family size than other necessities. But now Mitt Romney has proposed a plan to the Senate that has reverted back to this adults-only thing. Is it just Republicans or wealthy politicians, or do Americans in general consider children to be unimportant? This is ironic, given how much resources state and Federal governments put into oppressing parents for even the most trivial things that might be disadvantageous for their children.
There are a number of potential excuses for denying children disaster relief when it is being provided to adults, but they are all wrong. The first is that the relief given to parents will help their children. This is not untrue, but unless everyone has the same number of children, it is overly simplistic and punishes larger families while rewarding single people and couples without children. Punishing larger families right now is a really bad idea, and it happens to be the next topic of discussion.
The second excuse is that counting children will reward larger families for having more children. I have two responses to this. The first is, that is straight up false. I heard the same argument when I lived in Alaska. I once overheard some of my coworkers complaining that certain Russian families had large numbers of children, so they would get more money from the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. The largest payout I have ever seen from that is around $2,000 per person, and it pays out once a year. (It has hovered around $1,600 the last two years.) No offense to my coworkers, but anyone who thinks children cost less than $2,000 a year to provide for either has not had to provide for children or is in serious need of remedial math. Even at the maximum payout, children do not turn a profit from the Alaska PFD. (Note that I was one of 7 children, in my teens, living there. My parents made enough to live comfortably but nothing more, and the PFD definitely did not cover all of the costs of 7 children, let alone turn a profit.) The $500 per child suggested by some is only a quarter of that. It would take more than $500 a month for most Americans to profit off of children*. My second response is, is it wrong to reward parents for having more children? Raising children is expensive, and it takes a lot of work. If we wanted to be completely fair (especially to women), we would be paying at least $30k a year to stay-at-home moms with one child. That is the long term babysitter average wage though, which only covers 40 hours a week. Moms are more like nannies than babysitters, doing household chores, teaching children basic skills, and so on, on top of supervising and caring for children. If we assume 14 hour days (children are recommended to sleep from 10 to 14 hours a day, depending on age), that comes out to $125k a year (average pay is $19/hr in the U.S.), if we do time and a half for overtime, with overtime being only anything over 40 hours a week. (No, you can't pay babysitters or nannies salary. They are non-exempt employees and thus must be paid hourly wages that comply with overtime laws.) A nanny might be expected to care for one to three children at that pay. $500 a kid, as a one or two time payment, is not actually a reward. It is not even fair wages for services rendered! And even if it somehow was profitable, encouraging people to have more children is not a bad thing right now. The U.S. fertility rate is currently lower than 1.8 (average children per woman, in a lifetime). The replacement rate is 2.1. That means Americans are not having children at a high enough rate to sustain our own population. Those panicked about overpopulation might see this as a good thing, but people who understand the economic impact of a declining population do not. To maintain a healthy economy in the long term, it is important to maintain at least the replacement rate, and while immigration can help make up the difference, it is not a good long term solution, especially when Americans want stricter immigration regulation. Not only is rewarding people for having more children not a bad thing, it is actually something we are going to have to do anyway, if we want to avoid long term economic decline. The fact is, parents with large families should be treated as heroes for doing their part to slow the long term decline of the U.S. economy. We should be happy to make children profitable for them, and they at least deserve some help with the costs of raising children, if not fair wages for the work.
(* I say most, because it might work in the lowest cost-of-living regions, for parents who are already covering a lot of needs through government welfare programs. In this case though, it is not the $500 a month that is turning a profit but the $500 a month combined with the other welfare. The $500 a month will never cover more than 100% of the costs of a child on its own.)
Now, I have never heard anyone argue that children are not as important as adults, as an excuse for only providing a basic income or disaster relief for adults and not children, but actions speak louder than words. Clearly, Mitt Romney considers children to be worthless in comparison to adults. The current House bill being crafted for relief does include children, but it also puts a cap on larger families. A maximum of four children can be counted. Families with more than four children, the true heroes, are out of luck. Their children are counted at a value of four fifths or less of an adult each. My value, as a teen with six siblings, would have been only 57% that of an adult. Even a Democratic House somehow cannot manage to consider children as important as adults. Yes, the House bill does pay out equal amounts for adults and children, but with a maximum family limit, it is still treating children as lower value, second class citizens. It would be better to give children half the payout of adults, without a family cap. (And yes, this would actually result in a smaller payout for my own family. But at least it would treat children as equal, instead of devaluing children in larger families.)
The fact is, children are not just important. They are critical. We often hear the cliche that children are our future, a rather blatant statement of the obvious, but we do not seem to understand the extent of it. Number are important. Shrinking populations are populations in economic decline. And immigration is not a long term solution, because they do not contribute significantly to an increase in the percentage of children. The fact is, children need relief too. If we cannot value our children enough to ensure their well being during this crisis, perhaps we deserve mass death and economic collapse.
Trump suggested an initial relief check for all American adults, with some kind of cutoff to avoid giving a lot of money to people who do not need it. This is not a bad idea, except for the fact that children are rapidly increasing in value in the U.S. (as fertility rate decreases), and this plan straight up neglects children. Of course, others immediately pointed this out, and Trump agreed with plans that provide smaller amounts for children. Now, I am not complaining about the fact that the amount for children is smaller in some of these plans. Household dynamics work fine this way, as the biggest cost for most families is rent or mortgage payments, and this scales much slower with family size than other necessities. But now Mitt Romney has proposed a plan to the Senate that has reverted back to this adults-only thing. Is it just Republicans or wealthy politicians, or do Americans in general consider children to be unimportant? This is ironic, given how much resources state and Federal governments put into oppressing parents for even the most trivial things that might be disadvantageous for their children.
There are a number of potential excuses for denying children disaster relief when it is being provided to adults, but they are all wrong. The first is that the relief given to parents will help their children. This is not untrue, but unless everyone has the same number of children, it is overly simplistic and punishes larger families while rewarding single people and couples without children. Punishing larger families right now is a really bad idea, and it happens to be the next topic of discussion.
The second excuse is that counting children will reward larger families for having more children. I have two responses to this. The first is, that is straight up false. I heard the same argument when I lived in Alaska. I once overheard some of my coworkers complaining that certain Russian families had large numbers of children, so they would get more money from the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. The largest payout I have ever seen from that is around $2,000 per person, and it pays out once a year. (It has hovered around $1,600 the last two years.) No offense to my coworkers, but anyone who thinks children cost less than $2,000 a year to provide for either has not had to provide for children or is in serious need of remedial math. Even at the maximum payout, children do not turn a profit from the Alaska PFD. (Note that I was one of 7 children, in my teens, living there. My parents made enough to live comfortably but nothing more, and the PFD definitely did not cover all of the costs of 7 children, let alone turn a profit.) The $500 per child suggested by some is only a quarter of that. It would take more than $500 a month for most Americans to profit off of children*. My second response is, is it wrong to reward parents for having more children? Raising children is expensive, and it takes a lot of work. If we wanted to be completely fair (especially to women), we would be paying at least $30k a year to stay-at-home moms with one child. That is the long term babysitter average wage though, which only covers 40 hours a week. Moms are more like nannies than babysitters, doing household chores, teaching children basic skills, and so on, on top of supervising and caring for children. If we assume 14 hour days (children are recommended to sleep from 10 to 14 hours a day, depending on age), that comes out to $125k a year (average pay is $19/hr in the U.S.), if we do time and a half for overtime, with overtime being only anything over 40 hours a week. (No, you can't pay babysitters or nannies salary. They are non-exempt employees and thus must be paid hourly wages that comply with overtime laws.) A nanny might be expected to care for one to three children at that pay. $500 a kid, as a one or two time payment, is not actually a reward. It is not even fair wages for services rendered! And even if it somehow was profitable, encouraging people to have more children is not a bad thing right now. The U.S. fertility rate is currently lower than 1.8 (average children per woman, in a lifetime). The replacement rate is 2.1. That means Americans are not having children at a high enough rate to sustain our own population. Those panicked about overpopulation might see this as a good thing, but people who understand the economic impact of a declining population do not. To maintain a healthy economy in the long term, it is important to maintain at least the replacement rate, and while immigration can help make up the difference, it is not a good long term solution, especially when Americans want stricter immigration regulation. Not only is rewarding people for having more children not a bad thing, it is actually something we are going to have to do anyway, if we want to avoid long term economic decline. The fact is, parents with large families should be treated as heroes for doing their part to slow the long term decline of the U.S. economy. We should be happy to make children profitable for them, and they at least deserve some help with the costs of raising children, if not fair wages for the work.
(* I say most, because it might work in the lowest cost-of-living regions, for parents who are already covering a lot of needs through government welfare programs. In this case though, it is not the $500 a month that is turning a profit but the $500 a month combined with the other welfare. The $500 a month will never cover more than 100% of the costs of a child on its own.)
Now, I have never heard anyone argue that children are not as important as adults, as an excuse for only providing a basic income or disaster relief for adults and not children, but actions speak louder than words. Clearly, Mitt Romney considers children to be worthless in comparison to adults. The current House bill being crafted for relief does include children, but it also puts a cap on larger families. A maximum of four children can be counted. Families with more than four children, the true heroes, are out of luck. Their children are counted at a value of four fifths or less of an adult each. My value, as a teen with six siblings, would have been only 57% that of an adult. Even a Democratic House somehow cannot manage to consider children as important as adults. Yes, the House bill does pay out equal amounts for adults and children, but with a maximum family limit, it is still treating children as lower value, second class citizens. It would be better to give children half the payout of adults, without a family cap. (And yes, this would actually result in a smaller payout for my own family. But at least it would treat children as equal, instead of devaluing children in larger families.)
The fact is, children are not just important. They are critical. We often hear the cliche that children are our future, a rather blatant statement of the obvious, but we do not seem to understand the extent of it. Number are important. Shrinking populations are populations in economic decline. And immigration is not a long term solution, because they do not contribute significantly to an increase in the percentage of children. The fact is, children need relief too. If we cannot value our children enough to ensure their well being during this crisis, perhaps we deserve mass death and economic collapse.
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