The war on poverty was a failure.

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by johnmayo, Aug 31, 2013.

  1. Roy L

    Roy L Banned

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    Land, like all natural resources, has no cost. It is there unconditionally. THAT is Econ 101. The rent paid to the landowner is not a cost of land, but the cost of getting the landowner out of the producer's way.
     
  2. Roy L

    Roy L Banned

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    As the supply of land is fixed, its price -- whether rental or exchange -- is determined solely by demand. And the demand for land is determined by the size of the welfare subsidy giveaway the landowner can expect to receive by owning it.
    Uh, maybe that's because the USA has welfare, and minimum wage laws, and private charity, and publicly provided education, and publicly provided health care for the poor, and publicly provided old-age pensions, and union monopoly laws, etc., etc. Hello? In capitalist countries where land is privately owned but the government does NOT provide those safety nets for the landless -- like Pakistan, the Philippines, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Paraguay, etc. -- their after-taxes-and-rent wages are definitely at subsistence level, and their condition is indistinguishable from that of slaves.
     
  3. Roy L

    Roy L Banned

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    No $#!+.
    If you have the down payment, and don't mind losing your life's savings if interest rates increase, you can't afford the payments any more, and the value of your home tanks. Did you learn NOTHING from what was done to millions of poor Americans in the sub-prime mortgage bubble? Because a lot of them learned from it.
    Maybe because your family has always owned land. Or maybe because you just weren't sharp enough to notice it.
    Yep. Your family has always owned land. It doesn't take a lot of skill to manage your money when government is shoveling it into your pockets for doing nothing. It doesn't take a lot of skill to maintain great credit when you own land. It's the first thing credit companies look for.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Do you understand what welfare, EITC, minimum wages, etc., etc. are?
     
  4. Roy L

    Roy L Banned

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    It does when that's how government chooses to subsidize the poor's landlords.
     
  5. momrobare

    momrobare New Member

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    All I know is that I worked 40 years and now am on Social Security Disability due to arthritic knees and back AND I applied for SNAP and Medicaid two weeks ago. While I am getting both of them ...the SNAP or food stamp I get total a whopping $38.00 a month! My Medicaid comes with a $110 spend down plus I have to pay $104 a month for Medicare! So out of $771 a month...I pay my mortgage, heating fuel, electric, car insurance. (Luckily my brother is a good guy and he pays for my cable and internet.) So if I have a medical emergency and I want Medicaid to pay what medicare doesn't...I will have to give the government $110 before they will help me (and this is if the emergency doesn't last for more than a month). So basically I am living on $670 a month with all the bills and I get $38 a month to eat with. So yes I would say the war on poverty DID fail...or rather it left some awfully big holes in the safety net!
     
  6. Taxcutter

    Taxcutter New Member

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    "...Ditch the Drug War."

    Taxcutter says:
    Meet you half way. Ditch the drug war and all LBJ's "War on Poverty" programs at the same time.
     
  7. geofree

    geofree Active Member

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    Yes, I have had real life experience. I worked for a property management company which managed a large low income apartment complex. I watched as the booming economy of the late '90's and early '00's saw working mens wages rise, I also saw how the owner of the apartment complex kept raising the rents. In fact, at one point a meeting was held to discuss why occupancy was below normal. It was noted by the leasing consultant that the reason occupancy was low was that a number of the tenants had saved enough money to buy homes and that was the reason they had moved out.

    Upon hearing this news, the property owner said: “they have saved enough to buy a home? Well then it is obvious we are not charging enough rent … we will raise the rents”. And that is exactly what they did, raise the rents, in an effort to keep the tenants from saving enough to buy a home of their own. This continued on for a few more years to the point where rents had risen enough that it wasn't even profitable for myself to stay in the area, even with the higher than normal wages, so I packed up my belongings and moved out too.

    I will only add that I happened to be lucky enough to have gotten to that area at the right time, after wages had risen substantially but before the greedy landlords had figured out that they could take all the increased wages in higher rent demands. I made a lot of money in the few years before rents skyrocketed and I didn't leave poor, but a lot of others weren't as fortunate.
     
  8. johnmayo

    johnmayo New Member Past Donor

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    There are other places to live. Why not move across the street.
     
  9. Marine1

    Marine1 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Usually people move out and buy homes not because rent is to cheap, but that rent is to high and it is better to buy a home than rent. So I disagree with what you said.
     
  10. JBG

    JBG Well-Known Member

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    That wouldn't apply to debt rung up from 1973 on though. There was plenty of that and it was hardly wiped clean. And remember the risk premiums for non-U.S. debt was rather high in those days, if you remember Penn Central, UDC, New York City, lots of department store bankruptcies, etc.
     
  11. Roy L

    Roy L Banned

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    You mean, and hope that landlord is stupid?
     
  12. Roy L

    Roy L Banned

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    What a load of nonsense. It is the fact that rents are so high that prevents people from moving out and buying their own homes, duh. They can't save the down payment. High rents not only stop them from saving any money, but indicate that purchase prices are going to be high, too.
     
  13. johnmayo

    johnmayo New Member Past Donor

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    Oh wait. Are you sayi g demand increased and that is why the price went up? I feel like that is everywhere.

    In any event. I am persuaded that a LVT would be better then out current system. But only because it lends itself to far smaller government. So easy to tax dodge and no state would go out of its way for a high appraisal.
     
  14. Natty Bumpo

    Natty Bumpo Well-Known Member

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    Rhetorically declaring a "war" - whether it's on poverty, drugs, or patent baldness - is tantamount to surrender.

    All may be well-intended but, ultimately, the best you can hope to achieve, rhetorically or otherwise, is a comb-over.


    [​IMG]


    Still, the people of advanced societies motivated by a democratic, christian ethos, are morally enjoined

    To feed the hungry.
    To give drink to the thirsty.
    To clothe the naked.
    To shelter the homeless
    To visit the sick.
    To visit the imprisoned
    To bury the dead.​


    Noble callings in a shared endeavour to be sure, but not warfare.
     
  15. justoneman

    justoneman New Member

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    How do cell phones, cable TV, computers with internet hook up, fast food and $150 sneakers fit in with your ethos?
     
  16. Natty Bumpo

    Natty Bumpo Well-Known Member

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    Pretty much in the same vein as corporate welfare, record corporate profits, unprecedented CEO salaries, and growing wealth gaps. It's not a perfect world, but one exerts one's modest efforts to achieve what one can.
     
  17. johnmayo

    johnmayo New Member Past Donor

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    Goverment isnt charity. No Christian is called to support a welfare state.

    Since it is surrender like you say, when can we cut our losses and abandon these programs?
     
  18. Taxcutter

    Taxcutter New Member

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    All this talk about landlords and corporate welfare may belong in other threads, but here it is just an attempt to deflect attention from the central issue:

    LBJ's "War on Poverty" has failed. It will always fail. It never has done anything but fail. It cannot succeed.
    Time for the US to cut its losses and eliminate these programs.
     
  19. johnmayo

    johnmayo New Member Past Donor

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    But then we would have no deficit and nothing to complain about. People may ben start to see that the government takes more from them each day then the guy who founded the company they work for. If, like the leftists here, you believe thy take their salaries from their employees. I don't, but they believe that. They will never bother with specifics though because it kills their arguments because of data and all that.
     
  20. danielpalos

    danielpalos Banned

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    Whenever the right becomes more cognitively "sonant" and ditches our drug war as a bad form of public charity in modern times.
     
  21. Roy L

    Roy L Banned

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    Wrong. The "talk about landlords" explains WHY the War on Poverty programs failed, had to fail, will always fail, and can never succeed. And there is no way but by "talk of landlords" to design a poverty reduction program that does, will, and must succeed.
    And to implement a program that will and must work: restoration of people's equal individual rights to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor.
     
  22. geofree

    geofree Active Member

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    The “war on poverty” isn't simply going to go away. It has to be replaced with a better system. The LVT advocates are supplying this thread with a better alternative, an answer, one which would succeed in a natural abandonment of the current welfare system, as the need for the current system would dwindle from existance.
     
  23. Roy L

    Roy L Banned

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    The demand for land only increases because the welfare subsidy given to the owner increases.
    Bingo: if government stops causing problems -- like poverty -- through unfair, harmful and evil taxes, it won't have to spend money futilely trying to fix those problems.
    The only way to dodge repaying the location subsidy you are getting is not to hold a subsidized location.
    Right. The state's revenue is maximized when all location subsidies are accurately measured and fully recovered.
     
  24. justoneman

    justoneman New Member

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    There is no such thing as corporate welfare.

    Are you dissing business trying to make a profit and being successful? I guess you are into socialism then. Should I assume from your avatar that you are a European?
     
  25. geofree

    geofree Active Member

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    This reply was obviously intended to be THE reply to whatever I posted as an answer to your last question: “There are other places to live. Why not move across the street.”

    The answer to that question is that the rent increases were demand driven, so the rents across the street also went up. Moving across the street wouldn't save a tenant any money. The true story was intended to show how the increasing wages of the poor are captured by landlords when those wages rise above subsistence. Actually, in the area where the story took place, the corrupt local government was using stiff fees and regulation to capture a good portion of the land rent, which wouldn't have been so bad except that it lead to other inefficiencies (where governments efforts were not directed to providing goods but rather to building a massive framework designed to justify and collect the exorbitant fees they were charging, and which burdened production). A land value tax would have also prevented the local government from engaging in this corrupt and inefficient method of capturing a portion of the land rent.
    For me, LVT is all about maximizing real (after tax and rent) wages, because I believe that high wages are the key to stimulating even the most lazy among us into productive work (I have seen it work this way). The only way to maximize wages is to minimize the taxes and rents which must be deducted from wages, and nothing else can minimize these costs as much as the LVT.
    In some places government would shrink and in other places government would grow to provide even more services and infrastructure. It would all be determined by governments ability to provide desired services and infrastructure at low enough costs to draw increased population to the area. It would be up to individuals to choose how much government infrastructure and services they desired to utilize and pay for by choosing to live near or far from said services.

    Personally, I prefer a quite lifestyle so I would choose to distance myself (but not too far) from those services and infrastructure, where the taxes I paid would be a bit lower, but where I also would not get the advantages of close access to those benefits.

    Under a LVT the residence who live out in the countryside don't subsidize the cities infrastructure (museums, libraries, parks, etc.), and the city folk don't subsidize the countryside infrastructure (roads, power & communication lines, etc), which is more expensive to provide because of the distances between consumers.

    A LVT would see the countryside resident pay less taxes but more for electrical, natural gas and communication services, as those services would no longer be subsidized by regulation which forced utilities to provide them below cost.
    Land value taxation cannot be dodged. It is all public information. You can see what your neighbor is paying and he can see what you are paying. If there are discrepancies there will be complaints, and a large body of sympathetic fellow taxpayers to make sure justice is served. I have much more to say but this post is already too long, and I have other chores to tend to.
     

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