An overlooked anti-poverty strategy: Giving money to poor people
Kevin Milligan of the University of British Columbia and Mark Stabile of the University of Toronto asked themselves "Can income transfers to poor families help children?" Here's a summary of the answer they got:
This sort of scholarship makes me despair of the Canadian Left. Instead of focusing attention on targeted transfers, it wastes its time on arguing for higher minimum wages (a policy that is at best pointless), or on making the case for universal programs that favour the well-off. ([1], [2], [3])
When the Canadian Left does consider the idea of targeted income transfers, its response is invariably dismissive. A typical reaction to the Working Income Tax Benefit (our equivalent of the US Earned Income Tax Credit) is to describe it as a handout "so that employers can continue to pay poverty wages." Not all reactions on the left are so negative, of course. But if this piece is anything to go by, the Canadian Left's support for the idea of giving money to poor people can be at best characterised as 'tepid'.
It's getting harder and harder for me to come up with charitable explanations for the disconnect between the policies that the Canadian Left advocates and policies that serious scholarship says will actually help reduce poverty and inequality.
Selling workfare?
Oh, don't be coy. Say it loud, say it proud: "Giving money to poor people is a dumb idea!"
That would your interpretation.
If the debate over cap and trade versus carbon taxation can be compared to tackling persistent child poverty in Canada, then David Suzuki and other experts have said we need both in order to effectively deal with the situation and meet our environmental obligations to the rest of the world. Similarly I think both social transfers and a higher minimum wage are needed if Canada is to come good on promises to eliminate child poverty in our own backyard.
[edited out the Soviet in size post for readability]
And so I have only one question for stop subsidizing the rich advocates: What about Hugh Mackenzie's position for taxing PS students at the backdoor instead of the front? If and when they start earning wages that reflect their level of education, then they will be able to pay more taxes on their higher incomes over their working lives. Free tuition for first technical ed diplomas and degrees up to a three-year B.A./BSc.? No more student loan debt sentences over a quarter century or more though. The current situation is ridiculous to outrageous.
If the minimum wage article is an example of your scholarly analysis I am sure glad I had a way better economics Prof. That was one of the biggest pieces of tripe passed off as quasi-scholarly I have read in awhile.
The Saskatchewan government gave Weyerhauser, a logging company, millions of dollars to log our north and provide jobs. Weyerhauser logged the north, then split. I'm not sure how many jobs were ever created.
I always thought the government would have been better off giving the money straight to the people in the north. We'd still have the trees, too.
Canada is, like the U.S. and the UK, a low-wage country One in six men and one in three women working full-time earns less than two-thirds of the national median wage, roughly double the level of most continental European countries, and almost four times the level in the Scandinavian countries. Countries with relatively equal wages and low levels of low pay tend to have low levels of family income inequality and poverty This is unsurprising at one level, because the task of topping up low wages from transfers to promote family income equality is easier if wages are relatively equal. More surprisingly, it is because countries with high levels of wage equality also tend to spend relatively more of their national incomes on social transfers and on public services (Jackson 2005: Chapter 11).
Social democrat governments in Sweden have pushed social spending to about a third of GDP's. Here in Canada after decades of second-hand neoliberal ideology now on the wane, social spending is about 18% or so of GDP. And "stubborn" levels of child poverty persist under old line party rule in Ottawa.
I thought this was interesting since it's an argument to do the opposite - provide services rather than money. I'll have to go find her paper to get a full idea of what she proposes, but I have to say I'm skeptical. Child poverty is really just adult poverty as it affects children, so I don't think you can fix the effects of the first without fixing the second.
Economist Claire de Oliveira thinks children growing up in poverty could use some old-fashioned paternalism.
She has just written a paper for the C.D. Howe Research Institute urging policy-makers to shift their emphasis from raising the incomes of poor families to providing disadvantaged children with child care, school breakfasts and lunches and access to medical professionals.
More money will have a modest impact on the health and well-being of children, de Oliveira says, whereas proper nourishment and a stimulating preschool environment can directly affect their development and raise the nation's productivity.
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/638470
I did read the CD Howe paper, but there wasn't much in the way of details. It references the literature that show why in-kind services are less efficient than cash transfers, but it doesn't actually explain why the results of that literature are wrong.
92% of Canadians want poverty reduction
The results are similar to surveys taken in former Soviet satellite nations since they were dragged through more than a decade of neoliberal economic reforms. Neoliberal ideology and democracy are incompatible.
Canada's Quiet Bargain
The Benefits of Public SpendingNow ask if they want their taxes to increase to do it. I suspect that this is where things get dicey.
Canada is middle of pack on taxation, below the OECD average, and well below the EU-15 average - 23rd place on the high tax list of developed countries. Corporate taxes in Canada are among the lowest in the world - and Canada's fossil fuel exports are a basement bargain for the most energy dependent, most wasteful economy in the world.
And Canada has some of the highest rates of child poverty among richest countries
I always thought the government would have been better off giving the money straight to the people in the north. We'd still have the trees, too.
That would make sense but how would it benefit corporate interests?
I think a guaranteed annual income is the way to go, if someone wanted it they would simply have to apply and if they earned anything above a certain amount they would be taxed on it. This would dispense with the welfare system which only perpetuates poverty.
I don't see the fundamental difference between a guaranteed annual income and welfare.
I imagine the guaranteed income program to be without judgement. I don't see workers involved in the lives of people receiving a guaranteed income. I don't see people being treated like shit for needing help. Sorry to be so inarticulate, it is late and my brain is not fully functioning.
Welfare doesnt work. And neither does US-style work for welfare. But it didnt stop Mike Harris' uncommon nonsense revolutionaries of the 1990's though.
Guess who pays for Workfare?
GAI would save the cost of, for example, the bloated welfare bureaucracy in place in provinces like Ontario since the decade of the 90s. GAI would allow Canadians living at or anywhere below the poverty line now to be boosted up to the poverty line and give them some incentive to work at jobs of their choosing, or choose job training or even higher education. And it would likely cause many lowly paid and lowly skilled jobs to disappear without a captive army of impoverished Canadian to do them. It could represent real freedom for millions of Canadians.
And GAI/Basic Income because being stuck on welfare, with welfare rates as low as they are in Canada, is an insult to human dignity. And the working poor in Canada arent much better off.
The neoliberalized capitalist system in North America is rust.
I don't see the fundamental difference between a guaranteed annual income and welfare.
A GAI is unconditional; you get it if you don't work, and it isn't taken away if you do. Welfare benefits are withdrawn if you work, so people face an effective income tax rate of 100% - and sometimes more, if non-monetary benefits are considered.
That is not quite correct Stephen.
I agree that a GAI should be unconditional, I would add though that if people worked they would have to pay taxes on that income.
I think most people enjoy work and would find that with an assured income they would be free to pursue the work they want, I think it could lead to tremendous creativity and new ways of building community.
When I have spoken with second and third generations of families that have received welfare I have seen an incredible disempowerment and a pervasive sense of hopelessness. A friend who grew up on a reserve prior to welfare told me that life was better then, people had gardens and there was less drinking, violence and suicide. I do not believe that the problem is that money is being received, it is is the way in which it is delivered. Why should the First Nations not receive the payments due to them in the treaties as rightfully theirs to receive and use in the way they see fit, instead the public is lead to believe, well you know what we are supposed to believe, bullshit.
I think the poor are kept poor as a whip to use on the middle class, it keeps us all so neatly in line, after all would you want to be treated as though you had no rights at all.
Many years ago I worked for a brief time as a social worker, in one situation I was going for custody of a young boy whose mother was alcoholic and had a number of other problems and my supervisor told me to let the woman know that she could get a lawyer but that it wouldn't make any difference. I remember looking at her, she was a popular and friendly individual that until that moment I had liked.
So this is how the system works, it is not enough that you are broken and hurting, it is not enough that we can take your children from you, we can also grind you into your pain by letting you know that you are powerless.
I quit the next day.
Fresh voice stirs up poverty debate
She has just written a paper for the C.D. Howe Research Institute urging policy-makers to shift their emphasis from raising the incomes of poor families to providing disadvantaged children with child care, school breakfasts and lunches and access to medical professionals.
More money will have a modest impact on the health and well-being of children, de Oliveira says, whereas proper nourishment and a stimulating preschool environment can directly affect their development and raise the nation's productivity.
What governments should aim to do is "alter the poor's consumption behaviour," she says. "I find little support for the proposal that cash transfers alone are an efficient way to improve children's health." . .
Anti-poverty activists will find it regressive ... Conservative economists will find it puzzling... The Ontario government will find it ill-timed.
Yes, so much better to install in them a sense of gratitude and respect for the system and not for their parents, you know that society would be so much more productive if we were all grateful little soldiers.
Just the next step in taking the advocated stance that children belong to the state, with some excpetions though...?
I think our stooges could learn something from countries where social democrats have governed at the federal level in Nordic countries - countries which have been successful with child poverty reduction.
There is no one specific policy method used by those countries for reducing child and family poverty. People who say that there is are trying to mislead others for some reason or another.