Has Poverty Been Made "Too Comfortable"?

[LadyTevar]

5 questions for Michael Tanner -- a policy expert who says we've made poverty too 'comfortable'
In Plain Sight - Thu May 16, 2013 7:37 AM EDT

What if, instead of operating a variety of anti-poverty programs, the government simply mailed every poor person in America a check big enough to lift them out of poverty? That, says the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, would make more sense than what we do now – and, he says, we’d still have money left over.
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Here’s Tanner’s math: By his count, the federal government spends more than $668 billion a year on a total of 126 anti-poverty programs, including those that address housing, hunger, health care, and cash assistance. They range from TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), which most people associate with traditional welfare, to much smaller programs for Indian tribes, at-risk youth, and others. If you divide Tanner’s total by the roughly 46 million people with incomes below the poverty line, you get nearly $15,000 for every poor man, woman, and child in the U.S.

Tanner acknowledges that poor individuals don’t receive that much money, and that’s his point: government spending isn’t laser-targeted to those most in need. In fact, he says, “throwing money at the problem has neither reduced poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient. It is time to re-evaluate our approach to fighting poverty.”

You’ve taken a fair amount of heat for saying that America should “focus less on making poverty more comfortable.” What do you mean by that? Is poverty ever comfortable?

Poverty is never a good thing. But most of the programs we have to combat poverty are based on taking people who are in poverty and giving them a little more income so their poverty doesn’t feel quite as bad. Instead, we should be focused on how to we get more people out of poverty.

What do you think we are doing wrong?

The problem is that our welfare programs aren’t targeted at the right things: education, pregnancy prevention, and job creation. They’re targeted at giving people who are poor the resources to live in poverty.

We know that if you drop out of high school you’re likely to be poor. If you graduate from college, your chances of escaping poverty are much greater.

We know that if you’re a woman, don’t get pregnant if you’re not married. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s an economic one. It’s simply more difficult to raise a child if you have one income rather than two.

And get a job, any job, even a low-wage job, and stick with it. Even a low-paying job is better than no job at all. People are more likely to move out of poverty if they have a low-paying job than if they are on welfare.

And we need to create more jobs. The fact is, we still have an anti-job atmosphere. Too many taxes, too many regulations. We don’t do a very good job of creating an environment that’s going to create more jobs.

What do we do about the millions of people who are in poverty right now? They are poor, they don’t have skills, they don’t have a good education, they don’t have or can’t get a job. Do we pull the safety net out from under them?

We should target our aid to those people who need the help the most. We have created a situation in which there are a certain number of people who are not going to be able to become an economically viable family unit anytime soon, and we probably have to support them in the short term. In the long term, however, we want to give people in the future more of an opportunity to avoid poverty and to get out of poverty.

It’s unfair to compare my approach to utopia. Let’s compare it to the real world and in the real world, the approach I’m talking about would mean fewer poor people than there are today. Would there be zero? No. I don’t know if a society in the history of the world has ever had zero. Poverty in many ways is the natural condition of man. Throughout most of mankind’s history, most people were poor. The question is, how do you create more prosperity?

People on my side of this have often appeared to be hard-hearted, by arguing on a dollars-and-cents basis. But you shouldn’t measure compassion by inputs. You measure by outcomes. And by that measure, we’re failing. And the burden is on the poor, who are the ones suffering in poverty.

So you think it would be more compassionate to blow up and restructure the system?

It’s not fun to live in poverty. Poor people don’t want to be poor. Most poor people would like to work. Most poor people would like to be non-poor. But we’re not giving them that opportunity. The goal should be that each person gets to achieve their full potential. Most people trapped in the welfare system are not getting to do that.

It was Ronald Reagan who said, we fought a war on poverty and poverty won. Do you agree with that?

Let’s put it this way: We are certainly not beating poverty. We may have had a draw but that’s not where we want to be.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed.

[Josh]

Couple of problems with this concept:

Jobs are going away and they're never coming back. The trend is toward maximum automation, and while temporary reversals occur in that trend, long-term we're getting rid of as many workers as we can. For example, there are empty offices all over this country because the number of people that used to be necessary to deal with the sheer volume of paper a company creates are simply no longer necessary. No more typist pools, etc.

Trucking is a prime example of an industry that is marching toward its doom, with three million drivers directly employed and fuck knows how many people in the support services. Once automation becomes routine there, that's millions of jobs that will just vaporize. Fast food is another- once 3D food printing becomes a common thing, a lot of Mcjobs go away overnight, and eventually most of them.

There'll always be some amount of paid work available, but it'll be service jobs and highly skilled specialties. It won't be this decade or the next, but barring major changes in our present conditions it will be by the end of this century.

That's the big problem with his contention. The other problem is basically a product of our Federalism- it's not that we have too many regulations, but rather the inconsistency of those regulations from state to state. Furthermore, 'too many regulations' is usually Republican code for 'Let us do what we want and we'll throw you some scraps.'

If we had a vibrant, growing economy that was creating jobs he'd have something of a point- the current system does perpetuate a stasis of misery. However, we're going to have to figure out how to support a largely jobless population without descending into dystopia.

[General Havoc]

Technological innovation has been around a long time. People always assume that it will result in no jobs by the end of the century, that's a claim that goes back to the 1600s. The problem with it is that it fails to address the changing nature of workforces. How many people worked in Dot Coms fifty years ago?

We're not going to wind up with nothing to do. We're just going to wind up doing different shit, as we pass repetitive tasks off onto automated systems.

[Josh]

Like I said, there'll be service jobs left, but in terms of physical work most of it is on the way out. A lot of construction equipment already borders on autopilot operation these days- GPS and lasers do most of the work. Similarly, small drones are going to take over a lot of assembly work, with a trend toward modular structures that plug and play.

What it amounts to is a lot of people being dumped back into the common pool. If we set out to build the pyramids today, we'd use a fraction of the manpower the Egyptians did. Fifty years from now, we'll be using a fraction of the fraction we'd currently use.

I'm not doomsaying this at all, I don't see the trend itself as inherently negative. But it does mean that we're going to have to find ways to occupy a lot of idle hands.

[General Havoc]

I know you're not doomsaying. I'm just pointing out that this is a trend long in the making, and that we'll find plenty for those idle hands to do.

And if history's any indication, it'll be far better work than they were doing before.

[frigidmagi]

And if history's any indication, it'll be far better work than they were doing before.

I'm not nay saying, but... What are we gonna find for everyone to do? I mean in the past when we mechanized farming, there were factory jobs. Now we're automating factory and even service jobs... While the internet has made alot more jobs available in the creative industry so to speak, that can't be the new factory job can it? If not that then what?

[Josh]

Which is pretty much it. And even IT work gets automated as much as possible. My best friend works for the school district in IT, and he automated the annual reimaging of the laptops. It used to be a six-week odyssey involving a half dozen techs. Now he's got it down to plug in, power up, press Y, move on to the next one. So it's down to a week-long task for three or four.

In the medical field they're already working their way up to automated surgeries. At the very least even remoting the surgery via waldos cuts down on the number of attendants needed- nobody's got to mop the doctor's sweaty brow.

3D printing is a massive threat, because why would we need silverware from the store when we can print it ourselves, etc.? Those printers will be pretty much automatically produced themselves, taking that production out of the loop.

When the McJobs go away (and good riddance for shitty work), where do they go? We're already seeing this trend at work in our current jobless recovery- the jerb creators realized that they could extend the productivity of less employees over greater distances, thus improving their profit margins immensely.

What's left will be direct service jobs- nannying, waitstaff (for non-automat restaurants) and the like. My gig's pretty safe because there's no machine that can do it and nobody's looking to build one. (And it's a service industry.)

This is a new thing, dude. Saying that things will go on like they have is like saying that the post-industrial revolution family structure would just naturally revert to nuclear-with-grandparents-aunts-uncles all clustered because that's just how things are. Shit does change.

[General Havoc]

Shit does change, but it generally doesn't change away from six thousand year patterns without reason. Everyone thinks they're living at the end of of things, including the patterns of work, and they strictly never are. The mere fact that we can't imagine what kind of jobs these people will be doing between the three of us in ten minutes does not mean they will be unable to find anything to do. I'll remind you all that 90% of the jobs being performed in this country today were equally unimaginable to someone living in 1900.

Let's please have enough humility to recognize that just because we don't know something about the future does not mean that all the rules of macrohistory and human behavior have all ceased to apply. We will make shit up to do if need be, as we have done every single time labor-saving advances have altered our relationship with society. Just because the future will not be identical to the present does not mean that it will be some wasteland of unemployment. That's a prediction that's been made fifty times over the last five centuries and has strictly never come true. But this time it's "different"?

I don't know what everyone will be doing in a hundred years, but I know they'll be doing something.

[Josh]

Well I intend to be alive in 2100, so we'll revisit the subject then.

[LadyTevar]

There's also the Elephant in the Room: OUTSOURCING.

There's plenty of manufactoring jobs available, making clothing, electronics, cars, etc. But they've all been moved overseas, leaving American workers shit outta luck. Cheaper to pay a Bangali 10rupees/week than pay an American worker $10/hr. Especially since there's something like 1000 rupees in a single dollar. No need for insurance, or FICA, or pensions. Fire at will, no unions to protect anyone.