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re: How do we change the culture of bad decision-making?
Posted on 2/13/17 at 7:05 pm to SlowFlowPro
Posted on 2/13/17 at 7:05 pm to SlowFlowPro
Let them suffer the consequences of their poor decisions.
0
Posted on 2/13/17 at 7:13 pm to Nuts4LSU
quote:
Oh, well now that you typed it in all caps, it makes so much more sense.
They are facing consequences. The consequences they are facing right now is that they have less money, more work to do, less free time, more stress to their bodies than they would have if they had gotten a part-time minimum wage job instead of having kids to get a government check. If they had gotten a job instead of getting pregnant, they'd make more money, have fewer expenses, have way less work to do, lots more free time and a lot less strain on their bodies
You have no clue how this works. The system reduces benefits for increased income, and rewards having children.
There are no more costs associated with having kids for the poor that aren't compensated with a bigger house, more food, etc...Unless you have a huge brood.
These people understand the system better than you, and game it. Working more isn't something they wish to do.
This post was edited on 2/13/17 at 7:14 pm
Posted on 2/13/17 at 7:23 pm to SlowFlowPro
Yeah there is 0 connection between circumstance and station in life....folks born into the middle class are no more likely to be middle class themselves than a man in the moon...it is all about "decisions" one makes when they are 8 or 9 years old....
Posted on 2/13/17 at 7:25 pm to Nuts4LSU
If you truly believe that then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of just how lucrative our entitlement system is.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 7:42 pm to kingbob
quote:
There is an easy way that typically always works: let it hurt.
Why do big banks and investors make risky decisions that ultimately resort in the collapse of the economy? Because they know they are too big to fail. They know the government will bail them out. If they knew that no one would catch them if they failed, they would be much more cautious.
Why do developers keep throwing up apartment complexes everywhere when there is already a massive glut of empty housing? They know the government will bail them out with section 8. Section 8 acts as an artificial price floor and a lifeboat for residential developers. If they cannot get enough tenets at the market rate, they can turn to section 8 for a garanteed check to fill their vacancies.
Why do irresponsible people have so many kids while responsible people do not? They're not paying the same price per kid. Having children, feeding them, schooling them, and paying for their healthcare can be very very expensive, unless you're poor and dependant, then it's free.
We pay these mothers more per kid, creating an incentive to have ever more kids!
We not only pull benefits from people who work too many hours or save too much money, but we then confiscate what they saved and make them pay it back to the government.
WE ARE PAYING PEOPLE TO MAKE BAD CHOICES BY INSULATING THEM FROM NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES!
There are some children who are born without the ability to feel pain. This is terrifying to parents because they can injure themselves, but the lack of a pain response means they are unlikely to react to their injury in a way that limits it. For example, if you touch a hot stove, it burns you, so you pull your hand away before it gets injured particularly badly. A child who cannot feel pain touches the hot stove and leaves it there. He cannot feel that he is being damaged, so he does not stop the damage. His hand burns until it is injured potentially beyond repair because there is no pain to motivate him to change his dangerous behavior.
Until people feel the pain of their poor decisions, they will continue to make them.
You basically summed up the exact reason I identify as conservative.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 8:54 pm to Nuts4LSU
quote:I am not disagreeing with this; I'm living through it right now with a 5-month-old. But let's not pretend everybody is putting their full effort in; grandparents are raising kids, children are taking care of kids, etc. Regardless, good parent, bad parent, or absent parent, the system keeps people dependent.
but raising a kid is much more difficult, costs a lot and is nowhere close to being a good money-making alternative to having a paying job since it involves tons more work and expense than a job that would pay the same amount or more
quote:No it's not, regardless of children. That was the crux of Friedman's support for this issue.
I'm not sure what you mean by a 100% tax rate, but I assume it boils down to the idea that they get as much from not working and collecting benefits as they would from working. I don't agree with that, but even if we accept it as true and the money is exactly the same, the incentive is still overwhelmingly in favor of working rather than having kids to get more benefits.
The system is set up so that when one obtain income from working, there is a corresponding offset in the benefits. So it essentially creates a 100% marginal tax rate. We've seen the same phenomenon with unemployment benefits too.
I'm not blaming the people; I'm blaming the system that is meant to help people, when it makes them dependent and continues to reinforce it.
quote:This is simply not true; it's called the welfare cliff.
There is no scenario in which having kids to get more money from the government is anywhere near as beneficial to the person in question as working for the same amount of money would be.
Welfare Cliff
quote:It makes no sense to influence behavior with incentives? That's the whole basis of behavior influence. People are responding to incentives; some financially, others socially. BUT the incentives which are supposed to help people, often do the opposite in the end.
No, which is why when dealing with a population that is already not responding to incentives, it makes no sense to try to influence their behavior with more incentives.
quote:You're posting on the PT board, and you're talking about rational behavior?
Of course they are. The vast majority of people do act rationally and do respond to incentives. Those people are not the ones who are supposedly having children to get more money from the government. The ones who do are the population we're talking about, and we've already established that they don't respond to incentives. Trying more incentives is not going to get through to them.
I don't know who you think isn't responding to incentives, but the incentives are both social (become independent) and financial (welfare cliff) and often competing against one another. Rational or irrational, the system has a flawed incentive structure.
quote:Well it was a policy pushed by Friedman and Hayek (theories are central to libertarianism today).
Oh I agree with that, but I've just never heard of a conservative who does.
Here is a good Freakonomics podcast on the various ideological reasons for support. Is the World Reading for a Guaranteed Basic Income
quote:I'm talking about entitlements. They are the ultimate coercive relationship, with the government maintaining the control and dependency.
I'm not sure what you're referring to as the "coercive relationship".
Again, the major problems with entitlements are not with those who use them, it's the inefficient system and government control that are the primary problems.
This post was edited on 2/13/17 at 8:56 pm
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