Blog Action Day
Today is Blog Action Day and all good bloggers are supposed to write about poverty. I thought I’d direct attention to CAP’s report from last year about how to cut the poverty rate in half over the next ten years. It’d cost money, but at the same time the report notes that:
Poverty imposes enormous costs on society. The lost potential of children raised in poor households, the lower productivity and earnings of poor adults, the poor health, increased crime, and broken neighborhoods all hurt our nation. Persistent childhood poverty is estimated to cost our nation $500 billion each year, or about four percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
This kind of human capital calculation isn’t the reason to try to fight domestic poverty (it’s the right thing to do!), but it’s an important part of understanding why the admittedly high price of effective anti-poverty policy isn’t too high a price. Accepting a sky-high poverty rate winds up burdening our education system, our public health system, and our criminal justice system and ultimately harming most everyone. There’s no good reason to be complacent about this.
81 Responses to “Blog Action Day”
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October 15th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
thanks for posting and giving your time to this issue of poverty. good for you.
i do hope your readers are moved to donate to the charity of their choice.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
It’s also Global Hand Washing Day, so I hope you practiced good hygiene before typing this post.
On a less flippant note, hygiene is, of course, an important factor in reducing disease in the poorest parts of the world.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Actually, the human capital calculation is the reason to fight poverty.
Simply fighting poverty because it feels good or is a charitable thing to do, without any rational metrics, quickly degenerates into moral and labor gangsterism.
This is one reason it’s so hard to get clients to support welfare programs. They know better than anyone that the welfare of the client is not the object of the program and that usually giving the agency more power just results in more money being wasted.
The general public may only suspect that most of the ‘caseworkers’ and administrators are politically appointed hacks, and that most of the money is wasted. In this case, however, their general suspicions are so well-founded that evidence almost never emerges to the contrary.
The simple fact is that Americans don’t really care about doing the “right thing” and, considering some of the looney proposals advanced under that heading, I can’t say I blame them.
We’re always being told that spending 1% of our GDP to fight global warming would cripple the economy, but spending 4% to stock our cupboards with new nuclear bombs would be about right. The best antidote to this poison is to develop a firm understanding that we could save 5% of our healthcare spending by adopting universal care and save 4% by realistically ending poverty.
Heck, with a few realistic progressive initiatives carried out, we might actually be able to afford our insane idle rich. Putting them on the dole actually would save us a lot of money.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
What? No talk of the MattY/MexicanGovernment/Bush/Cato/BHO-approved way of fighting poverty by letting a few billion people move to the U.S. and send part of their earnings back home?
As for the CAP link, everything from CAP is corrupt: they support IllegalImmigration by hiding it behind opposing “xenophobia”. Somewhere on their site there’s a cute little graphic showing that “xenophobia” isn’t a “progressive” virtue. The link fails to note that role that past IllegalImmigration has played in importing poverty. And, even if we implemented everything they ask for and even if it worked (yeah, right), their plans would be scuttled through new What? No talk of the MattY/MexicanGovernment/Bush/Cato/BHO-approved way of fighting poverty by letting a few billion people move to the U.S. and send part of their earnings back home?
As for the CAP link, everything from CAP is corrupt: they support IllegalImmigration by hiding it behind opposing “xenophobia”. Somewhere on their site there’s a cute little graphic showing that “xenophobia” isn’t a “progressive” virtue. The link fails to note that role that past IllegalImmigration has played in importing poverty. And, even if we implemented everything they ask for and even if it worked (yeah, right), their plans would be scuttled through additional IllegalImmigration, something that they’d support and then come up with a magical new plan to deal with the effects of.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Great post, I myself wrote one at: http://www.guruofsales.com/general/427/fight-poverty-its-blog-action-day-today and the action has not stopped. Would you share your thoughts by a comment there as well?
October 15th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
The single most effective way to not lower the human capital of America is to not let in immigrants who aren’t college graduates.
When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
The single most effective way to not lower the human capital of America is to not let in immigrants who aren’t college graduates.
I suppose that if I offered Mr. Sailer a $20 bill, he’d decline it–anything less than $100 would lower his capital.
October 15th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
It’s also Global Hand Washing Day
Alas, all too appropiate.
What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”
When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”
October 15th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
What? No talk of the MattY/MexicanGovernment/Bush/Cato/BHO-approved way of fighting poverty by letting a few billion people move to the U.S. and send part of their earnings back home?
You forgot John McCain-approved. Let’s not let that S.O.B. off the hook just because you (presumably) want him to defeat Obama. (Not me. I’m voting Chuck Baldwin, but I’d rather see Obama in there than that pseudo-conservative back-stabbing sphincter).
I suppose that if I offered Mr. Sailer a $20 bill, he’d decline it–anything less than $100 would lower his capital.
You are assuming that every immigrant is simply a producer and not a consumer (and more importantly, that they do not have children who consume more than they produce).
By the way, children are one of the reasons that all these claims about how good unskilled Mexican immigration that rely simply on looking at the statistics of immigrants are bunk. We are told that they use no public services and that they pay a lot in taxes (particularly Social Security) without getting anything back. What isn’t mentioned is that their kids are more crime-prone than the average, and do use a lot of the government services that their parents are not eligible for.
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