How to Cut the Poverty Rate in Half (It's Easy)
by MATT BRUENIG AND ELIZABETH STOKER
snip:
So we know generally how to bring folks out of poverty. We have a long list of successful programs that already do so. The question still before us is can we do more?
How hard would it be, for instance, to cut official poverty in half?
Using the dataset from the latest Census poverty report, I determined that if we cut a $2,920 check to every single American—adults, children, and retirees—we could cut official poverty in half. Economists consider this sort of across-the-board payment a “universal basic income.” You can think of it as Social Security for all, not just the elderly.
The upside of giving everybody about $3,000 is that it’s a very easy policy to run and a surefire way to cut poverty in half. But it's a large program: it would require about $907 billion in 2012, or 5.6 percent of the nation’s GDP. (In a real implementation, we might exclude the more than 45 million Americans receiving OASI Social Security benefits from a basic income, bringing the cost down substantially.)
Could we afford it? Sure. For starters, we could raises taxes, first on the rich, who would pay more in new taxes than they would receive in basic income, and then on lower-middle class and poor families, who would come out ahead. There is also plenty of room to cut tax expenditures on homeowners, personal retirement accounts, capital gains exclusions at death, and exclusions on annuity investment returns. This submerged welfare state for the affluent costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year. There is also the matter of the $700 billion military budget, which could take some trimming.
The point is: this could be done.
The rest
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-cut-the-poverty-rate-in-half-its-easy/280971/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm in total agreement with this article, But I really think the wingers would be having all kinds of coronaries over it and will never happen as long as they draw breath, So that brings up some interesting thoughts 
P.S. Thanks for the toons doc u rock
If you are so concerned about money, perhaps you should be concerned about the 1 trillion a year we spend on 'defense' and related spy activities.
"People would have more kids to get more money." Don't you really, deep down inside, want to say "Those People"?
Last edited Wed Oct 30, 2013, 11:33 AM - Edit history (2)
social order we have today, a few at the top, and everybody else is an employee, or ex-employee, or failed employee, in any case a prole.
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Scale-Kirkpatrick-Sale/dp/1897408064
Your point about heuristics is sound too, most of our "thinking" consists in jumbling abstractions, heuristics, and stereotypes around in our heads until they form a satisfying arrangement. And we take the results much too seriously. We aren't that good at it yet, it's a very new thing. And computers are not the answer either, they are much too limited, things like us have to be grown, have to have a body and senses. Your mind is not separate from your body, or vice-versa. They grew up together. Look at your hand, that was not "assembled". That has always been an integrated organ, fully functional, from the bud in the womb. So if you want to understand it, you have to understand it dynamically, as a process, not an object, you cannot just disassemble it and understand what it is. And we are lousy at that, thinking dynamically. I could not number the times when debugging programs the problem would be that the engineer was thinking about the problem statically and not seeing how the program was going to behave over time. The asynchronous and real-time stuff.
But we do have a lot of potential.
here or anywhere else.
Unsurprisingly, this growth in profits has been fueled in part by massive increases in the U.S. defense spending. In the decade since 9/11, the total Department of Defense budget (PDF) increased by about 55 percent in real terms, from $460 billion in FY 2002 to $715 billion in FY 2011. And the portions of the budget most relevant to military contractors -– the money allocated to procurement and to Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation –- kept pace, growing 55 percent from $139 billion in 2002 to $216 billion in 2011.
The defense industry has continued to enjoy this prosperity during a recession that has had a devastating effect on both businesses and families across the country. For example, median household income, a broad indicator of economic prosperity, was hit hard by the recession, with more than a decade of growth being wiped out between late 2007 and 2011. Defense profits dipped slightly at the recession’s start, but unlike household income, they rapidly recovered, rising over 40% between 2008 and 2011 and nearly returning to their 2007 peak.
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/08/13/680481/defense-contractors-profits-cuts/
But why should anyone want to cut the U.S. military budget? This is from 2011 - and, afaik, no cuts have been included in current budget considerations.
Is this really necessary? During the Cold War, the United States confronted far more dangerous and numerous military adversaries, including the Soviet Union. And the U.S. government certainly possessed an enormous and devastating military arsenal, as well as the armed forces that used it. But in those years, U.S. military spending accounted for only 26 percent of the world total. Today, as U.S. Congressman Barney Frank has observed, "we have fewer enemies and we're spending more money."
Where does this vast outlay of U.S. tax dollars—the greatest military appropriations in U.S. history—go? One place is to overseas U.S. military bases. According to Chalmers Johnson, a political scientist and former CIA consultant, as much as $250 billion per year is used to maintain some 865 U.S. military facilities in more than forty countries and overseas U.S. territories.
The money also goes to fund vast legions of private military contractors. A recent Pentagon report estimated that the Defense Department relies on 766,000 contractors at an annual cost of about $155 billion, and this figure does not include private intelligence organizations. A Washington Post study, which included all categories, estimated that the Defense Department employs 1.2 million private contractors.
http://www.hnn.us/article/130258#sthash.CyiLOn46.dpuf
