Should we get rid of food stamps, Medicaid, etc, for families, and just give the poor lots of money?

But he can still grow up to be President!!!

 

Just a little fixing needed...

http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Decision_3012

 

Hasidic Jews do something similar. Marriages are done religiously in temple but no official marriage certificate is ever filed with local government. Mothers will then claim single status and open up the benefit services for them and their kids.

 

Shit don't tell the Muslims. IMO a lot of this would be fixed if we males were made responsible for the children, it may make it less possible to have a bunch of baby mamas if you are the one that has to raise the children.

 

We might be open to it. You are in charge of convincing the LDS church and the hasidic jews.

 

The rule is dumb, but shit naming a father would make it easier for the state to go after dead beat fathers. Maybe free DNA testing?

 

Well the Illinois stupid law sounds less stupid and less racist if it can also be applied to the Mormons and Jewish. Naming the father in the certificate should allow the government to go after the fathers (in theory).

 

Another aspect of these fundamentalists that puzzle me is how good they are at getting government assistance. And they don't seem to understand that their livelihood will be deeply affected if they ever overthrow the federal government.

http://www.sltrib.com/home/3523346-155/federal-agents-across-utah-raid-offices

 

Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Cherokee...

 

Fyp

 

This may be the future, but I don't think it will be pretty. While some enlightened minority might still pursue productive tasks, humans evolved as predator apes driven by incentives. Remove the incentives, and societal growth will stall. People will become depressed. There's a reason why we see links between retirement and earlier death.

 

Too bad the Boomers aren't retiring fast enough

 

Now here's something we can agree on. Greedy boomers need to retire.

 

That's a pretty simplistic description of the nature of human evolution. #1, it's not entirely true (predation was only one particular aspect of our behavior, alongside more creative activities like art and music), and #2, evolution is still occurring, and we have the capacity to go beyond earlier evolutionary imperatives.

This book is a good read on the subject, it's all about the tendency to idealize some particular aspect of our evolutionary past as being the "right" one for human beings (usually one that aligns with a person's disposition or ideology, i.e. a paleo diet, or an exclusively raw food diet, etc) and the fact that most people don't understand just how quickly evolution can occur (the latter fact was very eye-opening to me).

 

fyp

 

Yes, the family's economic status is the best predictor of a child's academic performance.

 

Yeah yeah, nice sentiment. Now I'm gonna go watch ICE round up some immigrants in New Brunswick. That'll fix the schools.

 

Speaking of which. From the No Shit Sherlock wing of Thinktankia:

Does the American dream exist? Or has the middle class ruined it by hoarding opportunity on a scale that makes even the infamous one-percenters appear harmless and ineffectual?

That’s the question economics professor and Brookings Institution fellow Richard Reeves has set out to answer, and his findings are worrying: the top echelons of the US middle class – those earning over $120,000 – are separating from the rest of the US, and pulling up the drawbridge behind them.
The result, Reeves writes in a new book Dream Hoarders, out this week, “is a less competitive economy, as well as a less open society”.

“The upper middle class families have become greenhouses for the cultivation of human capital. Children raised in them are on a different track to ordinary Americans, right from the very beginning,” he writes.

The upper middle class are “opportunity hoarding” – making it harder for others less economically privileged to rise to the top; a situation that Reeves says places stress on the efficiency of the US economic system and creates dynastic wealth and privilege of the kind the nation’s fathers sought to avoid.

“The US labor market is mostly meritocratic and not some kind of medieval cartel,” Reeves told the Guardian, “but it’s what happens before that that is unfair.” The problem, he says, is that people enter the race with very different levels of preparation.

“Kids from more affluent backgrounds are entering the contest massively well prepared, while kids from less affluent backgrounds are not. The well-prepared kids win, and everybody pretends to themselves it’s a meritocracy,” he says.

Reeves believes we have to think much earlier about equality of opportunity, including the way the education system, labor and housing markets work. Without reform, society continues with a system that replicates inequality, he argues.

For proof of enduring discrimination that starts in the cradle, Reeves, a former Guardian journalist, looks to the persistent inequality of wealth distribution. He observes that there has been very little change in income distribution of the bottom 80% over the past 30 years.

The action, he says, takes place in the upper 20%, who “are pulling away”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/04/american-dream-economics-uppper-middle-class-study

 

Finland is running a test for basic income.

http://www.economist.com/news/busin...ing-unemployed-new-form?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/

 

We've all seen this. I've been arrested (thrice!), I've been a shitty student, I've abused alcohol and drugs, and I've wasted countless hours on a soccer message board. But I'm smart and hard-working and my personal hygiene is generally above reproach, so I keep getting chances. And far more than I probably deserved, I'm basically living the dream.

Meanwhile, the poor kids got one chance and if they blew it, or somebody else blew it for them, they're done.

 

Keep Medicare, but providing a universal basic income (UBI) to families for basic of food & shelter child care is a good idea. The red tape created to get SNAP, Section 8 are onerous. Unfortunately, trying to pass a UBI in the current political climate, won't be able to come the "the poor will spend it on <insert vice here>"

 

And the extra cost to fund it.