How the US Government Buys Votes

[HappySqurriel]

Rath said:

HappySqurriel said:
Entitlement spending is (typically) voted in with the best of intentions, and makes the problems it was designed to fix dramatically worse over time. The reason for this is that these programs are designed to address the symptoms of a problem and there is almost no consideration of the reaction the social program will have.

If we stopped paying people not to work, subsidizing companies for paying employees below living wages, increasing costs on companies for paying reasonable wages, and taxing efficiency and success all the people who currently receive government handouts could be working to achieve as high (or higher) standard of living.

 Even in a very healthy economy there is 5-6% unemployment. Those people would be screwed without government handouts.

Edit: Also several of the economies with the best standard of living in the world have large amounts of spending on things like pensions, public healthcare and unemployment benefits. The fact is that when this spending is well administered it can work very well, when it's poorly administered it works awfully.

At (or below) 5% unemployment you're considered to have a labour shortage because there are always some people who are voluntarily (or not) between jobs but will rapidly find another job ...

Now, social programs can be administered efficiently but this can never happen when the goal of the social program is to produce more equitable outcomes. If a society decides that it is important that every child obtains a decent education then a system can be created to produce good results at a reasonable cost and if the quality is too low or the costs are too high the political will can be found to fix the problems; in contrast, if the programs are designed to eliminate inequality than any questioning of the program will be rejected as an attack on the poor (and the system will steadily grow more expensive and the quality will steadily drop).