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from the suppresion-of-the-proletariat dept.
Analysis of a study (PDF) carried by UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education shows that isn't the poor people won't work but the work they do can't sustain them. As a blog on WaPo puts it:
We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. [...] We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven't tried to help themselves — they haven't bothered to find work.
The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses. According to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs in the U.S. live in a working family where at least one adult earns the household some money.
This picture casts the culprit in a different light: Taxpayers are spending a lot of money subsidizing not people who won't work, but industries that don't pay their workers a living wage. Through these four programs alone [food stamps, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, income supports through welfare], federal and state governments spend about $150 billion a year aiding working families, according to the analysis (the authors define people who are working here as those who worked at least 10 hours a week, at least half the year).
The workers relying the most on social programs: Fast Food (52%), Home Care (48%), Child Care (46%) and Part-time college students (25%).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Fauxlosopher on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:44AM
A simple-minded person like myself can easily calculate the highly-visible taxes that are typically paid by the average working Joe and realize that such a Joe is living on, at best, half of the proceeds of their labor. (Federal income tax, along with FICA/SS, etc.; State sales and/or income tax; property tax which even renters DO pay via their landlord; the myriad of so-called fees for "registration" and "licenses", ad nauseum.)
Once the costs of compliance and other taxes on the supply-side of the production chain are added to the burden, some smart-seeming folk have made the claim that working stiffs live on a mere one-eighth of their production.
After that, it's not a stretch to understand why it's hard for a lone worker to get anywhere in the USA.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kromagv0 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @02:26PM
A simple-minded person like myself can easily calculate the highly-visible taxes that are typically paid by the average working Joe and realize that such a Joe is living on, at best, half of the proceeds of their labor.
If you fall into this category then you are exceedingly well off or live in an exceedingly high tax state with very high property values and taxation. I live in a fairly high tax state and with all of the taxes (except sales tax included) the tax for my household was about 25% (maybe 30% if including sales tax if I spent every dollar I took home which I didn't ) of household income. Granted I could probably fudge the calculation so that my next marginal dollar of income would look as if it was taxed at 50, 60, or probably 70% but that isn't honest. Also considering that my household falls into the top 10% of households income wise it seems disingenuous to say that the average Joe would be paying a higher rate unless they way overbought on their house given that their actual and marginal income tax rate would be lower likely fairly substantially. If they did buy too damn much house then it is their own problem and I really don't feel sorry for them. It similar to when everyone was saying to my wife and I that we should buy the biggest most expensive house we could get and we looked at people like they were nuts. We even got approved for a 3/4 million dollar loan and then told the mortgage agent what we were willing to spend monthly and made them work backwards from that. Then the shit hit the fan in 08 and while our mortgage ended up underwater even if one of us lots our job we would be able to keep the house and eat with out worry. By following simple age old sane advice like put 20% down, only have your mortgage consume at most 1/3 of your take home income, make sure you have some money put away for unexpected expenses, that everyone said didn't apply anymore we avoided the problems caused by stupid choices. All of our friends at the time thought we were dumb but when things go slightly bad we were able to shrug it off while it wiped a lot of them out.
Also since my household falls in the top 10% nationally in income so there are a lot of people who would classify it as wealthy or the rich. I sure don't feel rich nor does it appear to most people that my household would be in the middle of the top quintile. Apart from my nice but 13 year old car, I like driving BMWs and they seem to hold up well with age, we live a much more modest lifestyle than most people. I mean my wife and I both own older but reliable vehicles, live in a sub 2000 sq. ft. house, aren't buying new electronic gadgets and stuff all the time.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:05PM
And the reason you, who is still scraping by despite being in the top 10% of earners, have such a high tax burden is so that the top 1% of earners can get refunds. Unfortunately this is a problem created by your income group, because they wish they were making enough to count in the 1% or 0.1% and support giving those earners tax breaks while dreaming that one day they'll qualify for them. You are paying higher taxes so multi-millionaires and multi-billionaires don't have to.
(Score: 1) by dr_barnowl on Thursday April 16 2015, @08:01AM
Just yesterday I was reading how the GOP is trying to push through a repeal to an inheritance tax law that will give ~ $270 B over the next decade to the top 0.2% of the US population.
No taxation without representation? In this case, it's no taxation for those with representation in the nicest parties in Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-push-for-a-permanent-aristocracy/2015/04/14/aa434f82-e2e5-11e4-81ea-0649268f729e_story.html [washingtonpost.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:09PM
> some smart-seeming folk have made the claim that working stiffs live on a mere one-eighth of their production.
Poor working stiffs who have to pay for roads, and garbage collection, and police and stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:04PM
The claim that the proper cost of that is anywhere close to 7/8ths of a working stiff's production is ludicrous. You will note that, generally speaking, competition in the areas you refer to is largely prohibited and enforced at gunpoint. Thus, while I cannot easily give you market prices for such services, I can easily point out that such gunpoint monopolies are themselves repugnant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @05:44PM
Once the costs of compliance and other taxes on the supply-side of the production chain are added to the burden, some smart-seeming folk have made the claim that working stiffs live on a mere one-eighth of their production.
I don't think this is true, but even assuming it is it is horribly misrepresentative. These working stiffs also don't need to do things like find clean drinking water and guard their possessions from theft. They would be living off of 1/8 of their production because they don't need to meet 100% of their living needs.
Personally I'd also increase this to include things like growing food or mining for iron that people pay far less than they would due to specialization, but that's just me.
(Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:22PM
A critical examination of the services offered at gunpoint by governments will note that in all cases, the services as presented do not live up to the provider's claims (and/or the implication of claims, popular opinion what such services provide, etc.)
- Police are not personally responsible for the safety of any body (nor any property): see the horrific details of Warren vs DC [gunowners.org]
- Drinking water is drugged, both intentionally via materials intended to fluoridate water and also because most monopolistic water treatment services are unable to remove the increasing amounts of drugs/medicines that humans excrete and send down the sewer.
- The vaunted roads violence-supporting people usually point to as an example of something that cannot be provided without the use of force are regularly in a state of poor repair, and the nature of such roads is that they are places where ~40,000 Americans in any given year are killed.
- The gunpoint monopoly of the practice of medicine has produced an environment where, among skyrocketing costs, mistakes by government-approved practitioners cause the deaths of ~200,000 people every year.
In short: the price is too high, the service is lousy, and even if such things were not true, forcing the unwilling to participate and pay at gunpoint is an immoral practice no different in principle from banditry or slavery.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @05:49PM
If you tax a population at 50% of their income, then they have much less than 50% of their spending power left. Not only can you only spend half of your earned labor, your customers can only spend half of their earned labor as well, lowering your before tax income and having a cascading effect on the economy.
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:43PM
Well, if it makes you feel any better: if you tax your population 50% of their income, it means the government has that 50% to spend more efficiently than you can! (For various definitions of "efficient", of course.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @06:22AM
Which is why flat taxes are totally retarded. If you have a flat rate, it has to be much higher than it needs to be in order to bring it enough just to fund the basics. Lets put that number at 50% just as a hypothetical; if you take 50% of $20,000/year, you're basically condemning that person and their family to death, but for somebody who earns $1billion/year, even if you take 90% through taxation, they're still left with $100million, far more than anyone could spend in a year short of simply throwing it away. Flat tax rates (including sales taxes) unfairly punish the poor because those few dollars are the difference between life and death for them.