Do people actually understand how welfare in America works?

[mrstickball]

richardhutnik said:

mrstickball said:

The problem with your analogy is that if the towns are in the same state the taxes are going to generally be similar, because welfare payments generally come from the state. The rich town with little crime, good neighbors, and so on will be paying their taxes to help out the other town with the higher rate of poverty, and more problems. That is what is generally happening with most welfare payments - You take from people and areas that are doing well, and give them to areas that aren't. More often than, not, the bad areas do not improve. You see this with the wealthier blue states and the poorer red states in the US - New Yorkers are paying federal taxes to pay for the poor person in Mississippi and so on.

 

Point is, which Huckabee brought out was, costs are lower when social problems are lower.  You don't make problems go away merely by cutting funding, is my take on that point.

Costs are indeed lower when social problems are lower. But adding funding doesn't make the problem go away, either. A good example would be Detroit's public school system. Its one of the most expensive in the nation, spending over $13,000 per student. The graduation rate is below 40%. They clamor for more money being the cure-all, despite the fact that its clearly not the problem.

Additionally, due to the history of America and its slow adoption of the social welfare state, we've also been the leader in charitable giving as far back as I know. We've generally supplemented increased welfare taxes with charitable giving being twice as high as anywhere else in the world.

The real challenge is deciding if the social spending is incentivizing the poor behavior (e.g. welfare queens), or is actually being used to solve the problem. If its not, then the costs really aren't useful.