It is insane to give money to people and expect that that will solve all their problems. Particularly if it is a one time thing (much like just handing a homeless person a dollar on the street). If you really want to help people it takes time, patience, and compassion. Poverty is a hard problem with no easy solution.
That depends on the level of poverty. There's poverty and there's poverty.
There's poverty where you grow up on one box of macaroni and cheese per day and your parents are never home but you have a roof over your head and at least free school lunches. You're not actually dying or being exploited into human impotence. You just lack avenues to grow into a full and complete person who can escape poverty.
And then there's poverty once that same child grows up and the welfare system has been dismantled and there's no more public housing, so he/she is working two or three jobs just to afford a roof over their head, real food of any kind is unheard-of, and you'd kill for a good night's sleep or just one Sabbath meal -- if you had the energy to kill.
The latter kind, you can solve just by giving people money. At the very least, it raises them up to the former kind, and from there, all you might need to really improve their life might be a decent library or a community center or a good source of stable jobs.
My effective income tax rate is 50%, and then there is an additional 25% VAT on everything I buy. How much more of my income does the all-knowing Eli Gottlieb suggest I "contribute"? Perhaps I should give away the remaining 25% and go live on the streets as a declaration of solidarity?
Aside from the general tone of this, that's not how taxes work.
You can only pay VAT on the 50% of your income that you keep (and that is presuming you spend all of it). So you have 50% * 75% = 37.5% of your income left to give to charity.
I also find it a bit interesting that you are OK (presumably) with giving away 63% of your income to the government, where you have hardly any say in how it is spent, but offended at the idea that you should give anything else away when you can choose where it goes.
I don't think he was OK with giving 63% of his income to the government. In addition, some part of that 63% is going to another form of charity: welfare. I can understand how someone, after seeing how a non-trivial part of their income is given away to local poor people, might not want to also give money to foreign poor people.
Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor.
Now, for some reason, people tend to be averse to outright cash transfers, because they think that pre-tax income has a special significance in that it is somehow "natural". Matt Bruenig explains this better than I could, e.g. here: http://mattbruenig.com/2013/07/21/tm-scanlon-is-wrong-about-...
The essence is that pre-tax income is not in any way "natural", but also results from more or less conscious decisions made by society. So the reason that you think solving poverty is hard is that you assign a specific significance to the difference between pre-tax and post-tax income.
> Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor.
For a while at least. In many cases, they just spend that money and go back to being poor. It's not universal though.
Let's say you give a poor man enough money to start a business. Starting a successful business requires some basic business/economics knowledge and insights, a market and a lot of work to make it succeed. In addition, they might have to struggle with local corruption and bureaucracy. Because of all these difficulties, you have no guarantee they'll actually break out of poverty. Also, they might just take the money and spend it on leisure (buy a car, TV, clothes).
I think what helps people is education about economics and legal systems. If you have a free society in place with rule of law, people break out of poverty on their own.
> > Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor.
> For a while at least. In many cases, they just spend that money and go back to being poor. It's not universal though.
You missed the point, though I have to admit that it is a subtle one and not well known. So let me continue playing devil's advocate.
The not-poor are only not-poor because they receive money through some already existing mechanism of distribution. If that mechanism ceases to operate, they will likely become poor by spending all their money.
So, yes, if you make the currently poor not-poor by changing the existing mechanisms of distributions, and then change those same mechanisms back to how they are today, then quite likely many of them will revert to being poor.
That is not an interesting point, yet somehow people think it is. Why?
Probably they think so because they have an unconscious and implicit belief that the currently existing mechanisms of distribution are somehow "natural". Frankly, that is a bizarre proposition.
Just consider how many laws affect the distribution of wealth in society, many of them largely arbitrary. This holds for laws of commerce, laws governing corporations, it holds for a lot of regulation, it certainly holds for things like patent law and copyright law.
> The not-poor are only not-poor because they receive money through some already existing mechanism of distribution. If that mechanism ceases to operate, they will likely become poor by spending all their money.
> Probably they think so because they have an unconscious and implicit belief that the currently existing mechanisms of distribution are somehow "natural". Frankly, that is a bizarre proposition.
That strikes me as an un-natural way of looking at things. If a farmer grows potatoes and sells them for money, he's not "receiving" money, he's trading for it (he's receiving money as much as the other guy is "receiving" potatoes"). That seems very natural to me (you give something, you get something).
Even in situations where this trade is illegal, it still happens; for example, drug dealers. They sell you heroin/cocaine/marijuana, you give them money. That transaction is highly illegal, yet it still happens because addicts want drugs and dealers want money (that they then use to buy other stuff with).
On the other side of the spectrum, you have the completely legal and moral transactions, like the potato example I gave. Laws have some impact on the basic natural tendency of people to trade for what they need, but they can't make trade go away (look at alcohol prohibition for another example).
I think the main cause of poverty is that poor people don't have much to trade (skills, labor, resources, even ideas or art). In other situations, trade is simply made difficult (for example, if you live in a warzone, it's pretty hard to be a hairdresser or grow potatoes).
It looks like you haven't read the article at all. The people involved in GiveDirectly never claim that their grants will "solve all their recipients' problems". Besides, the Kenyans that are getting those grants aren't at all like your average homeless person living in a developed country. These are completely different use cases.
Actually, the one-off nature of the thing may be very well what can makes this kind of charily work. If the donations were regular, a system of extracting the money (by usury, direct violence etc.) would quickly emerge.
I'm not sure that there is any due process issue here. He was killed on the battlefield. I believe there was several instances of this happening in WW2 in Europe. Yes, the american citizens weren't directly targeted in WW2, but there wasn't really much in the way of directly targeting anyone in WW2. In the new world where we target individuals in war, it was only a matter of time before an american national was found on the battlefield to be fighting against his or her own country. He should have expected to have the same amount of attention as any other AQ operative.
However, if he was given more attention or captured and executed without trial, we would have a different conversation on our hands. But again, this my personal opinion.
He is wrong in that all money in existence is borrowed from the central bank. Actually a very small portion of U.S. Dollars in circulation are earning interest for the Federal Reserve. Most of the U.S. Dollars being printed by the Federal Reserve today is loaned directly to the U.S. Government.
There are many problems with the Federal Reserve, but bitcoin isn't the solution. The biggest problem with bitcoin is that it puts computer users in the position currently held by bankers. You have to realize that most people in the world aren't computer users. Bitcoin further stratifies that difference.
A very sad story. I find it interesting that Bush is still brought up without noting that the policy of rendition started under Clinton and was largely replaced under Bush with Gitmo.
Also, calling Kuwait a puppet of the U.S. is a vast over simplification of the situation. Though, the FBI agent and other officials who visited this young man should be severely disciplined if they showed the disregard that is alleged here.
