| Rath said:
@Happy. You see I disagree with the entire 'negative consequences typically associated with these programs' part. That is essentially only looking at the USA, where the programs haven't been a grand success, and ignoring the many countries in the world that have implemented social programs succesfully. |
Whether you want to believe it or not, most forms of social spending have negative consequences associated with them ...
Spending acts as an incentive and taxing acts as a disincentive for particular behaviours, because of how social spending operates it tends to create incentives for the negative behaviours they're trying to treat the symptoms of while creating disincentives for positive behaviours they would like to see emerge. This is not only in reference to social behaviours as it also has massive impacts on the economy.
To demonstrate what I mean, in most jobs the total income and benefits received for a particular position that requires similar education and experience varies quite a bit from company to company; and if you plot all incomes for this position requiring similar education and experience it would demostrate a normal distribution with a large standard deviation. The reason for this is simple, some companies try to keep costs as low as possible while other companies try to pay better believing that increased productivity and quality can compensate for higher labour costs. When you introduce subsidies to help low income earners (like food stamps or rent subsidies) you reduce the benefit of paying employees more while reducing the penalty of paying employees less, and create a financial incentive to pay employees less while creating a financial disincentive to paying employees more because the net taxation on a company that has employees receiving subsidies is negative while the net taxation on a company that has employees above the cut off for subsidies is positive.
