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from the better-than-growing-up-to-be-a-sink dept.
Scientists at Kings College London performed a longitudinal study to test the 'Pareto principle' and found that adults who were greater users of public services were most likely to have had a low score on the intelligence and impulsivity test administered at age three.
"About 20 per cent of population is using the lion's share of a wide array of public services," said Prof Terrie Moffitt, of King's College and Duke University in North Carolina. "The same people use most of the NHS, the criminal courts, insurance claims, for disabling injury, pharmaceutical prescriptions and special welfare benefits.
"If we stopped there it might be fair to think these are lazy bums who are freeloading off the taxpayer and exploiting the public purse.
"But we also went further back into their childhood and found that 20 per cent begin their lives with mild problems with brain function and brain health when they were very small children.
"Looking at health examinations really changed the whole picture. It gives you a feeling of compassion for these people as opposed to a feeling of blame.
"Being able to predict which children will struggle is an opportunity to intervene in their lives very early to attempt to change their trajectories, for everyone's benefit and could bring big returns on investment for government."
Full Paper: Childhood forecasting of a small segment of the population with large economic burden DOI: 10.1038/s41562-016-0005
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday December 15 2016, @03:38PM
Yes, but at least as far as the US goes, we're nowhere near the point where we can't afford more welfare for the needy. If we cut the DoD and DHS budgets down to something proportional to the actual need, we could easily fund all the welfare we need. What's more, if we actually taxed the greedy bastards at the top getting rich off the backs of the underpaid recipients of welfare, we'd have no problems funding it either.
The issue here is that we have politicians cutting taxes to those that have no need only to cut funding to programs that enable the poor to work their way up in society.
Parts of Europe OTOH, where they have much more generous social programs could hit that point eventually, but none of them have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @04:56PM
You have people that are 4th and 5th generation welfare recipients who, despite measures to the contrary, just can't seem to get over that hump of graduating from school, getting a job, and making some meaningful contribution to society. It's an exponentially growing black hole where you will never have enough resources to sated the needs.
Welfare alone doesn't address this (although, to be fair, something like BI might be cheaper overall), and simply throwing money at the problem... well, we've already had nearly half a century of that, and the numbers continue to increase.
Hand-wavy appeals to Europe are trite, especially when you have situations like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6h7fL22WCE&t=1s [youtube.com]
it is pretty damn obvious it isn't only the rich making money off of the poor. I don't suspect government will solve much of anything unless you address corruption first.
You'll also note the right-wing sentiment rising in Europe. They are sick of paying for it as well, and having little to show for it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:34PM
You'll also note the right-wing sentiment rising in Europe. They are sick of paying for it as well, and having little to show for it.
Actually, we have plenty to show for it. Everything was fine and dandy(ish) until the (deregulated) banks caused a massive global economic crash and got the taxpayers to hand over insane amounts of money to help prop up their cocaine and megayacht habits. To cover the hole in the balance books, the various governments had to embark on "austerity" programs, which resulted in lost jobs, slashed services and massive regional inequality.
A bunch of right-wing demagogues then took the opportunity to blame all this misery on immigration and foreigners.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:46PM
Ah, so you're an idiot with no sense of history. Gotcha.
However, from the 1970s and onwards Sweden's GDP growth fell behind other industrialised countries and the country's per capita ranking fell from 4th to 14th place in a few decades.[172] From the mid-1990s until today Sweden's economic growth has once again accelerated and has been higher than in most other industrialised countries (including the US) during the last 15 years.[173] A report from the United Nations Development Program predicted that Sweden's rating on the Human Development Index will fall from 0.949 in 2010 to 0.906 in 2030.[174]
Sweden began slowing the expansion of the welfare state in the 1980s, and even trimming it back, and according to the OECD and McKinsey, Sweden has recently been relatively quick to adopt economic liberalisation policies, such as deregulation, compared to countries such as France.[144][175] The current Swedish government is continuing the trend of moderate rollbacks of previous social reforms.[144][176] Growth has been higher than in many other EU-15 countries. Also since the mid-1980s, Sweden has had the fastest growth in inequality of any developed nation, according to the OECD. This has largely been attributed to the reduction in state benefits and a shift toward the privatisation of public services. According to Barbro Sorman, an activist of the opposition Left Party, "The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. Sweden is starting to look like the USA." Nevertheless, it remains far more egalitarian than most nations.
The story has been the same through Thatcher's England to even Reagan in the US.
Social programs DO NOT create wealth, and instead of creating more dependents to satisfy your ego, maybe you should look towards actual reforms to help their lot in life than tax the rich.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:52PM
You're looking at things backwards and ignoring evidence. The austerity type folks undermine all social programs because they think as you do, "if only those lazy bums would get a job!". Hating on people in need is dumb. Sure there will always be some who just live off the system, just like there will always be some murderers and corrupt politicians. Thing is, the austerity proponents kill the systems, make them less effective, then point to the results and say the system doesn't work.
It is the worst kind of logic, and it is malicious. So when you parrot that bullshit expect a lot of anger to come back your way.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @05:56PM
Constant growth is actually a cancer, its part of why we've lost thousands of species, polluted the earth and water systems we depend on, and changed the climate. Its the corporate greed at work, and is not something to be proud of or to aim for. Sustainable living is the answer for today, maybe once we get our tech set up to live efficiently then we can go back to growth.
Oh look, right there at the end, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. What a great trade off! NOT
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:35PM
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/25/us-department-defence-one-worlds-biggest-polluters-259456.html [newsweek.com]
Somehow the idiots who argue against constant growth never fact government into their equations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:10PM
False flag after false flag on these topics. No one said the government wasn't part of the problem, and most proponents of social programs think we should be reducing military activity. However, that is a pipe dream until the world stops fucking around with who's got the biggest dick and can fuck over everyone else the most.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:22PM
Military was just the most obvious, and I have yet to see an apt explanation of how the government will regulate "capitalism" and all the evil of pollution it produces when it can't even regulate itself.
http://ivn.us/2012/04/18/the-number-one-worst-polluter-on-earth-is-the-u-s-federal-government/ [ivn.us]
No one said the government wasn't part of the problem
And yet the implication is that the government will solve the problem if we could only tax the rich more, have an even bigger welfare state, as if the military wasn't one of the largest welfare projects in the world.
False flag indeed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:35PM
No, we could not. We currently spend ~3/4 of what we take in in taxes on entitlements. We already have very little room for anything else without continuing down the road to utter insolvency.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:11PM
Not true. Most of that budget is social security and medicare, neither are entitlement programs, they're funded by the same folks that use them.
Our budget problems are entirely from not taxing the wealthy, absurd amounts of military spending and economic policies that encourage wealth concentration.
As I said, we have ample money to pay, we're just too shortsighted. We spend a huge amount of money to workaround the problem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by lgw on Thursday December 15 2016, @10:41PM
they're funded by the same folks that use them.
Only in the sense that they're funded by the American taxpayers, and used by Americans (many of whom still pay taxes).
Our budget problems are entirely from not taxing the wealthy, absurd amounts of military spending
Did you want to start taxing wealth, or did you mean taxing people with high income. The highest 1% of income already accounts for 1/3rd of income tax revenue.
"Absurd" is subjective, but 15% of the budget doesn't sound absurd to me for military spending. Compare to the 52% we spend on Social Security and Medicare, plus 8% on various forms of welfare and 7% on federal pensions.
Not worth debating definitions of "entitlement", but 2/3ds of the budget is "mailing checks to people". After defense and interest on the debt, that leaves only 11% for what the government should focus on: building roads, keeping order, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @10:54PM
Social security is paid for by the taxpayers, using that as some sort of welfare example is just disingenuous at best. Wealth should be figured into taxation, unless somehow an income tax can bring the wealth disparity back in check. When the tax brackets on the rich were way higher we magically didn't have these problems, even after a major depression and then war.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lgw on Friday December 16 2016, @12:09AM
Social security isn't paid for by the people receiving it. It's a transfer of income from the young to the old, so on average from the less wealthy to more wealthy. I think there are better ways to help people retire, but regardless we should be honest about the current system.
Taxing wealth leads very quickly to capital flight and the destruction of the economy.
Note that "when the tax brackets on the rich were way higher", the rich paid a smaller share of taxes, as loopholes abounded.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 16 2016, @04:36PM
"When the tax brackets on the rich were way higher we magically didn't have these problems"
Yes, we did have those problems. Some of those problems were just swept under the rug - that is, without huge government agencies to keep tabs on everything, hungry children weren't seen. Some of those problems were addressed by charity, then, but less so now. The poor just weren't seen or heard from. Pride prevented many from even asking for help, or reporting their true situation. Starvation was never common in the US, but malnutrition was, most notably in Appalachia.
Society has changed since those days. Today, few if any are to prideful to accept a government check. Hell, the richest sumbitches in the nation have their hands out, why not me? An ever growing government, coupled with activist groups, pry into everyone's lives, to ensure there are no starving children. The poor are easy to find, if you bother to look for them. 100 and more years ago, almost no one looked for them.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 16 2016, @02:06AM
How, precisely, do you figure Medicare is anything but an entitlement?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday December 16 2016, @07:55PM
People pay into it, then they get to use it. The people who aren't paying for it are a minority. It's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Every pay stub I get has lines for both medicare and social security.
Those alone cover most of the "welfare" spending. It's a lie to suggest that 3/4 government is welfare when the defense budget is larger than the total of all welfare programs combined
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 17 2016, @03:35AM
You're in fact wrong. Medicare money pulled from your check does not go to a fund like SS. It is simply a tax and goes to generic government coffers.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:11PM
Facts and figures matter little in these types of discussions. In ALL instances, the response is to tax the rich more.
Except the rich always have the option to leave, to which the burden falls upon the middle class, and liberals are left wondering why they are despised by large segments of the country.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/01/news/millionaires-fleeing-france/ [cnn.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:19PM
There's no evidence that they would leave. They didn't leave when taxes were above 70%, so why would they leave now.
Additionally, you make it sound like other people with money would be uninterested in investing here. Again, no evidence for that. Lastly, with their parasite class gone, we could focus on actually fixing our problems and there would be incentive to work as working would lead to actual prosperity for the worker.
That also ignores the fact that moving isn't always desirable. You lose friends and most areas that are cheap are also undesirable to live in.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:30PM
Every corporation that leaves the US due to taxes isn't proof? Do you know how many companies have their corporate headquarters in Ireland?
THEY ALREADY LEFT.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/05/ireland-attracts-soaring-level-of-us-investment [theguardian.com]
And you are mistaken about entitlements.
http://www.mlive.com/opinion/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2012/09/are_social_security_and_medica.html [mlive.com]
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:40PM
And yet they still do business in the U.S.
It's almost as if you're deliberately missing the point. Of they want to do business in the U.S., they should be taxed. If they don't want to be taxed here, they should exit the market. There's plenty of smaller businesses ready to take their place.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 16 2016, @04:48PM
That is the corruption that people are bitching about. In effect, Ireland tells corporations, "If you want to cheat on your taxes legally, pay us a pittance, and we'll give you a semi-legal loophole to jump through."
The world is beginning to close some of those loopholes. The EU, and the US are leading that little parade. If you do $100 billion in business in $country, then you should pay taxes on that $100 billion to $country.