Six years ago Arthur Brooks published Who Really Cares (which has gone through several subtitles, from America’s Charity Divide to Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters to The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism). This book is still triumphantly cited by many conservatives and libertarians as proving various dubious things, but especially two in particular: that atheists are less charitable than religious believers, and that privatizing all social welfare would improve social welfare.
But this book is largely a sham. It cooks the numbers and uses devious logical tricks to make it seem as though its conclusions are true, when in fact they demonstrably are not (or at best are demonstrably undemonstrated). A good skeptic doesn’t just believe what she reads; she checks the facts and the logic to make sure she’s not being snowed. Sadly, libertarians (usually men) who cite this book at me (as happened last year in a private communication) are bad skeptics. Because they don’t treat this book skeptically. At all. It just corroborates their ideology, so obviously it can’t be incorrect about anything, and one shouldn’t even think to check if it is.
This struck me the moment that exchange happened: a notable man claimed to me that data in Who Really Cares proves that “the working poor” give “three times more” to charity than anyone “on public assistance” at the same income level, and therefore public welfare makes people less charitable. Of course, right away I was suspicious, since it seems absurd to think someone who can only survive by receiving charity should be expected to give anything to charity. (Can you imagine badmouthing a disabled homeless person dependent on your soup kitchen and group home for not giving anything to charity…that lousy miser!)
But more importantly to today’s lesson, I was immediately suspicious of the statistic. I mean, what exactly is meant by “on public assistance” and “charity” here, and whose incomes are actually being compared? Where did the number (“three times more”) come from? A good skeptic, I decided to go look at what data Brooks was using, and how he was using it. After all, before discussing such claims or using them, that’s the first thing anyone should do, yes? So that’s what I did.
And what I found fucking pissed me off.
Not because this snowjob of a book is being used to malign atheists and even moderate liberals while making fundamentalists and conservatives feel good about in fact being assholes. I’m used to that. And not just because it was making false claims, supported by dubious means. That would merely be annoying. No, what pissed me off was how egregiously and shamelessly this bullshit was being argued and passed off. What pissed me off is that I had to go and fucking buy this garbage book, locate and parse its specific claims, hunt down the articles and databases it was using, and then, after all that, not actually learn anything I didn’t know, but instead discover how enormous a Kim-Jong-Un-fake-storefront this really was. And how many people are falling for it. Because they don’t act like good skeptics.
So let’s go on a ride today, and see how skepticism should actually work when forming your political and economic beliefs.
First That Bullshit about Atheists
Does church make you more charitable? Brooks claims it does, and throws all kinds of dubious statistics out to attempt to make it seem so. Alas, his entire sham on this count has already been exposed by the sharp and thorough analysis of Roy Sablosky, who has a whole website devoted to refuting this kind of bullshit. His flagship articles on this topic there ought to be required reading: “The Myth of Christian Charity” Part One and Part Two. (For further debunking see Luke Galen and Jim Lindgren and Ed Babinski.)
Among many other things, Sablosky shows (from the very same data Brooks relies on) that in fact atheists who attend atheist meetings and events (or the meetings and events of any group, like a bowling club) give as much to charity (in money and volunteering) as believers who attend religious meetings and events. Thus, social group activity, not religion, correlates with charitable giving. The trickery used to make it seem otherwise reminds me of the cooked studies always cited to “show” that believers are happier and healthier and less insane than atheists. Also bullshit.
Next The WTF
In his book Brooks repeatedly cites his own peer reviewed paper as supporting his thesis that “all the findings on welfare suggest that policy reforms that lower dependency should raise charity” (WRC, p. 87) and that he can “say with some certainty” that reliance on welfare will “lower charity” (WRC, p. 91). So I checked that peer reviewed article of his. In it he concludes:
The [charity] sector as a whole would probably see little change from welfare increases, and these changes would be swamped by increases in giving proceeding from growing income and wealth across the population. In other words, damage to the sector is not a persuasive argument against welfare aid.
— “Welfare Receipt and Private Charity,” Public Budgeting & Finance, Fall 2002, p. 112
Um. What happened to “all the findings on welfare suggest that policy reforms that lower dependency should raise charity”? Even his own (and only relevant) peer reviewed findings showed exactly the opposite. Why is he certain that reliance on welfare “lowers charity” when his own peer reviewed study found that it did not? I didn’t see where he mentions this glaring self-contradiction in his book. WTF? How could someone think they would get away with this? And then, appallingly, get away with it! As he has. Because the fools who cite this study at me, clearly don’t know it refutes the very point Brooks claims it proves. Bad skeptics. Really, really bad skeptics.
Oh, and by the way, yes, for the pages in which he claims people on welfare are less charitable, his cited sources consist solely of just one article…that article by Brooks himself. And one unpublished manuscript…by Brooks. The book does not stick to the same methods and results as in the paper for PB&F. He reports instead getting his new data from a state database, but doesn’t show how he derives his results from it. I checked that database myself. Against what Brooks claims in his book. Guess what…
Then The Asshat Conflation
I checked Brooks’s “people on welfare give less” claims (WRC, pp. 80-85) and found right away that people on social security and unemployment assistance and food stamps and public housing were all excluded from “people on welfare.” Seriously? That is sham methodology, and pretty much an act of deliberate deception, since if you don’t carefully catch this (as people citing his book at me didn’t), you will think when he says “people on welfare” he means people on fucking welfare; not people who aren’t on hardly any of the things we normally call “welfare.” Social security and unemployment insurance and food stamps (an anachronism I admit; the actual stamps have been replaced with SNAP cards) and public housing are together the mother of all welfare programs. Indeed, even people receiving Medicaid and other forms of medical welfare are not included in his set, either.
So who does he actually mean by “people on welfare give less” when he didn’t measure the giving of hardly any “people on welfare”? When we look at who actually is in his extremely narrow (and thus conceptually bogus) category of “welfare,” Brooks names just two groups, recipients of TANF and SSI. Holy fucking shit. Do you know what SSI is? It is for the disabled. People who have greater income needs due to medical costs and working around their disability, and who in fact to qualify for it they literally can’t work because of their total disability. So comparing them to the “working poor” is shockingly disingenuous. And to malign them as “giving less” is just appalling. And using this mass insult to the disabled to malign all other people on welfare as if they were found to give less to charity (even though evidently they weren’t, because Brooks conspicuously doesn’t discuss what he found for them…and again, “them” meaning by far most people on welfare) is disgusting.
Basically, this is compassionate conservatism: “Fuck those fucking cripples, lazy ungenerous moochers the lot of them! I don’t want any of my dollars going to those stingy assholes!” And yes, mere dollars. At about $53 billion annually against a $3.5 trillion budget, SSI is about 1/66th of your tax dollar, or about ten dollars a month, if you are paying a 21% rate on a $38,000 income, or about $8000 (and that’s if you have no deductions). Just to help feed and house people too badly disabled to work and who can only barely take care of themselves (or in some cases not even that). People you could at any moment join the ranks of, and thus need this assistance for. I’m calling it like it is. Bitching about a tenner a month for this makes Brooks a monumental dick. And likewise anyone who cites this book as evidence we should ditch SSI.
The only other program he includes is TANF. Weirdly, his peer reviewed paper actually recommends expanding TANF (p. 113) and cites evidence that doing so is good for the economy and will help people escape poverty (and thus reduce the need for welfare). His book meanwhile appears to do nothing but insist TANF should be abolished. Try to figure that one out. What is TANF? It is a special temporary emergency poverty aid. Which means: anyone claiming it, is therefore at the end of their rope, and thus not at all comparable to a stable working family. So for Brooks to compare these groups is again deceitful. And to use this sham comparison to argue for abolishing TANF is sickening.
TANF, by the way, is successful by every actual outcome measure. Indeed even Brooks himself concludes (in his peer reviewed article), “My estimates suggest that, in addition to the primary incentive effects that these programs have on wealth creation and self-sufficiency, they should have a positive impact on social capital and the nonprofit economy.” So anyone citing the book as saying the opposite is faced with a problem. When under peer review the author supports conclusions exactly the opposite, what should you conclude? Hey. You do the math. I’m just asking questions. (Snark.)
The only other welfare program clocked in the database Brooks used is AFDC but that was discontinued in 1996. Note that Brooks says “such as” TANF and SSI, when in fact those are the only programs his data track for the year he is speaking of. Thus he implies there are other programs in his compared group when in fact there are not. I should also add that at no point did Brooks control for cost of living. Yet he admits most welfare recipients (in his extremely narrow category of “welfare”) live in cities, and most (by his standards) comparable working poor live well outside cities, and thus their incomes are not in fact at all comparable. Because they have vastly different costs of living. (So do the disabled, BTW. And people reduced to poverty by medical expenses.) That’s not just bad methodology. That’s a shit methodology. (And, of course, he also didn’t check the data for countries other than the U.S.)
Even Under Peer Review it Collapses into Nonsense
The methods Brooks deployed in his PB&F paper are also confused and hosed, but in a different way (using different data). There he finds (more or less credibly, although he does use some questionable finessing) that the more your income comes from welfare (here he counts all cash and food), the less percentage of income you give away (e.g. “A 10 percent increase in welfare payments in the form of cash and food stamps corresponds to a 1.4 percent decrease in giving,” p. 110), which is not a surprising finding, since the more you are taking from welfare means you are falling farther on hard times, which is precisely when you should be expected to give less. Brooks also doesn’t control for differences in cost of living (a fatal problem as I already explained).
But the silliest thing of all is that the differences he is actually talking about in this paper are in the range of only a hundred dollars a year. Yes. His whole paper is about whether a family gives, say, thirty dollars to charity or sixty. In a year. In fact the average he finds to be $72 vs. $150. That’s the average annual giving for a welfare family vs. the working poor at the same income (p. 108). (Again, no control for variance in cost of living.) He also concedes his methodology was incapable of determining if the lack of ready cash was replaced with greater willingness to volunteer services or other non-cash gifts (p. 111). An omission that is also kind of fatal to the conclusion. One’s givingness could even be increasing (e.g. the unemployed having more time to help others) and his method wouldn’t know. But what I find funny is that this is all about a difference of a mere seventy dollars a year.
In other words, these are insignificant numbers. If you didn’t know that, you might think he was talking about differences that were actually substantive. This isn’t about whether welfare recipients would double their giving if they weren’t such moochers. It’s whether, when they are so strapped that they have to live on charity, they will think it’s safe to give away an extra seventy dollars a year (the cost of a single ticket to a football game; but also a month’s worth of groceries for one person). When they need to get out of the hole they are in so as not to be on charity anymore? There is no sound reason to expect that of them. Much less to “blame the welfare” for it.
Conclusion
In actual fact, even the American welfare system is remarkably efficient (and that’s saying something, since it almost consistently sucks across the board in comparison with most other Western democracies). Mike Konczal, in “No, We Don’t Spend $1 Trillion on Welfare Each Year,” finds we spend closer to $212 billion a year on what people usually mean by welfare, which means exclusive of, for example, Social Security pensions and medical programs: the latter we pay for with tax-based premiums, so we earn them (unless we are too poor to); while to maintain the former costs an average working class household only forty dollars a month. Seriously. Conservatives are bitching about forty dollars a month. Forty fucking dollars. Oh, wait, my bad. #NotAllTaxpayers. If you are earning $76,000 a year, then it’s eighty dollars. Yeah. That’s rough. Just one grand a year. Out of $76,000. But hey, when it means you are stuck taking home only $60,000 instead of $61,000, who can afford to lose a single grand? Amiright? Bueller? Bueller?
Welfare systems can be improved and made more efficient in a variety of ways. And made more effective. Their most important outcome measure should be the proportion of recipients becoming independent of the aid. (Except in cases where that’s impossible, e.g., SSI, and standard Social Security, which is just a secure retirement insurance policy the recipient has paid the premiums for their whole life already). And TANF, by the way, has been more effective at doing that (in the U.S.) than any other welfare program yet deployed. Maybe with improvements it could do even better. But even then, and either way, the solution to bad government is better government. Not turning the U.S. into the Third World. (Although it’s worth noting that as of recently even Mexico has free national health care for all its citizens.)
Most secular charity is effected through the state. Our charities are not churches. They’re governments. Rather than give arbitrarily to unaccountable private and prejudiced charities (though of course we do vet some private charities as reliable vehicles of emergency additional voluntary aid), most secularists would prefer, for the most essential and universal needs, an accountable and reliable and legally neutral system paid for by a market-and-infrastructure use fee on the people who benefit the most from the existence and stability of that market and infrastructure. In other words, the wealthy have benefited the most; they should give the most. And this should be contractually agreed to. And is. Our nation is just one big corporation, in which each citizen is a shareholder. The shareholders (through their elected board of directors: i.e., Congress) democratically voted that each shareholder shall either invest a certain amount into the company every year in order to keep reaping the benefits of that country (and to pay for the benefits already received), or else surrender their share of ownership in the country (in other words, their citizenship).
Which is fair. Because they, too, are and have been mooching off this country. So they owe a use fee back, for the services and insurances they get out of it. If they don’t want to pay, they can reject the services. Get out of the country. But if they want the benefits, they have to pay for them. And by the way, even for this point I mean mooching in the appropriate ways, too, e.g. a legal system and road system and sanitation and fire stations and an educated populace and so on, all the things that make getting and staying rich even possible in this country (even though, yes, the rich also take more in outright state welfare than the poor, and that is indeed appalling). This is a democratic corporate shareholder agreement that would be binding and legitimate even in a Libertarian dreamverse. So there can be no valid ideological basis for objecting. Unless you intend to object to democracy. And the very idea of corporate ownership. And the very idea of paying for the services and insurances you rely upon, when you have the means to.
The point I’m making, though, is that when Christians want to compare charitable giving to somehow claim who is more compassionate, they are lying about the numbers if they don’t also count who is voting for tax-based state charity. Because the fact is, no private charity is even a fraction as successful as state charities have been. The Christian Church, even if all sects united again to serve the Vatican in one great unit, would not be able to produce a significant fraction of what we atheists have achieved through the more reliable method of charging use fees on the system. Could the Vatican take over SSI and TANF? Much less all health care aid, citizen pensions (Social Security), unemployment insurance, federal disaster insurance, housing and food assistance for the poor? Nope. Too many hundreds of billions. If they did that, they couldn’t afford expensive digs for the Pope and his fancy Cardinals anymore.
And do you know how we know removing those things won’t result in private charities stepping up to replace them? Because that’s why we fucking created them. No one stepped up to do any of these things. So much for Christian charity. Free medical care? Fuck you, sick people. No Christian charity or collection thereof was doing it. So we stepped up and fucking did it. And now they are complaining about this efficient charity we created, which we created because they refused to create it themselves. And then they have the gall to boast of how much more charitable they are than us. Seriously.
And what about keeping the disabled from becoming homeless, destitute, starving, and dead? Christians refused to do hardly anything about that, too. So we did. Protecting the elderly from volatile markets, corporate bankruptcies, fraud and greed by guaranteeing them a stable buy-in pension fund? Solved by Christianity? Nope. Solved by the secular state? Yep. Feed the starving? Reduce homelessness? In the U.S., Christians help maybe a few million scattered about. The state helps tens of millions, everywhere there is need. It is precisely because soup kitchens don’t cut it and never did, that SNAP exists at all. If Christians were actually feeding “the poor,” no one would need SNAP.
So all you Christian conservatives who think private charity should replace public welfare: if you care so much about that, then fucking do it. Replace all welfare with your own private charities. Then we will talk about whether to cut public welfare programs. Until that happens, shut up, and fuck off. I’m tired of your lies and petty selfish greed. And especially your sham boasts of being more charitable than us. Because we know you aren’t. In fact, by and large, you are the most stingy and heartless demographic of any considerable size in this country.
-:-
See also:
- Greta Christina, “Here Are 7 Things People Who Say They’re ‘Fiscally Conservative but Socially Liberal’ Don’t Understand.”
- Debbie Goddard, “American Atheists’ Outreach at CPAC: Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Conservatives? I Am.”
- David Hoelscher, “A Movement That Makes a Mockery of Its Conventions: How the Humanist Movement Fosters Economic Injustice.”
No, Richard, tell us how you REALLY feel! 😀
There was an article I read a while back (I can’t find it just now, and I really should finish writing this presentation I’m working on), the upshot of it was that comparing religious charitable giving in the US with international aid given by the Swedish government and taking into account relative populations of believers and non-believers, the Swedish were by far and a way more giving, as one of the most atheistic western nations, than the US as one of the most religious. It seems germane here.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the kind mention. I really identify with your anger at the shameless lies of Arthur Brooks. I was also angered by Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace, which although less appalling than Brooks’s book makes some of the same mistakes. Putnam and Campbell are highly respected social scientists. (Putnam is the author of the best-seller, Bowling Alone.) They present themselves as deeply caring observers and meticulous data analysts. Maybe they care deeply, I don’t know. But in their comparisons of believers to non-believers, the data analysis is bad, shockingly bad. Like most writers in sociology of religion, they start by assuming (though they apparently do not notice that they are assuming) that religion helps people. That’s not how you do science. (It’s how you do theology.) It made me angry, and I hated having to buy a copy of this garbage to write a careful refutation of it.
* The social utility argument for religion was irrelevant all along. Even if it was true that the religious give more money to charity, that doesn’t in any way confirm the claims of religion, anymore than Farrakhan claiming that he gets young black men off of drugs exempts him from being a racist demagogue, or Hamas providing assistance to needy Palestinians absolves them of being murderers.
* Welfare isn’t really the largest problem, since right now Federal Disability payments outpace welfare and food stamps spending. NPR did a long story on this a couple of years ago, and calling the welfare system “remarkably efficient” is highly subjective, considering:
“The reserves in the [Federal] disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016, said Steve Goss, the chief actuary at Social Security”, and that money will probably then be taken from the “Social Security retirement fund. Of course, the retirement fund itself is on track to run out of money by 2035.”
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work
I think a lot of this comes down to ideology. Whether you’re secular or not, either you believe that charity can be compulsory, or you believe compulsory charity is an oxymoron.
You do know why those funds are running out, right? It’s not for want of income. Those funds have always been solvent. Republicans keep taking money out of them to pay for unrelated things, usually wars, and leave IOU’s in its place (an enormous portion of the national debt you see adding up is actually owed to the Social Security fund: in other words, owed to ourselves). This accounting trick allows them to make the claim that the fund is running out of money. No. They are stealing the money. To help them claim social security doesn’t work. When you include the debt Congress officially owes the fund, it is more than solvent.
Blaming Republicans is a little silly, considering both parties are agents of the spending lobby, both parties spent us into trillions in debt, and both parties vote for endless war. They’re not stealing the money, since the Social Security Trust Fund doesn’t exist. It’s paid out of General Revenue just like everything else. Social Security would be classified as a Ponzi Scheme in the private sector, as it’s illegal to pay out someone’s future returns with another person’s investments. Most people (accurately) look at Social Security as just another tax, not an investment in a future retirement fund.
Also, it was Republicans who spearheaded TANF through Congress, and it was an almost exclusively Republican idea. It was designed to be a replacement for the bloat and inefficiency of the Great Society programs. In the 90s TANF was the final product of the “welfare reform” debate, and opposition to welfare reform (and TANF itself) was exclusively on the left.
For example, Clinton vetoed TANF twice (before signing it a third time), 23 of the 24 Senators who voted against TANF were Democrats, 165 of the 170 House Reps who voted against TANF were Democrats, and to top it off The Atlantic called Bill Clinton’s signing of TANF “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done”:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/03/the-worst-thing-bill-clinton-has-done/376797/
I’m very glad that you consider TANF “successful by every actual outcome measure”, but then blaming Republicans for all of the country’s safety net ills is historically anachronistic.
I wish Republicans today were even half as mature as the Republicans of then. But that ship has sailed. This is no longer the party of Goldwater. This has become the party of fucking lunacy.
And Social Security is not a ponzi scheme. Unless all insurance is a ponzi scheme. (Spoiler: it’s not) Learn some economics. If you don’t understand how insurance works, you don’t understand how Social Security works. You definitely can’t have ever actually bought life insurance, or didn’t pay attention when you did (because it will have similar conditions of in-life payouts).
Also, I don’t know if “enormous portion” is the right term for the amount of bonds held by Social Security. The most recent number I can find is $2.8 trillion, which against $18.26 trillion in national debt equates to just over 15%.
http://crfb.org/blogs/general-revenue-social-security-trust-funds
$2.8 trillion is an enormous number, but 15% is not an enormous portion.
Anything would be better than having politicians running the thing. I’d accept a compulsory investment requirement of a certain percentage of income in an FDIC insured private account (that can’t be touched until the SS retirement age) in futures of my own choosing (metals, bonds, etc.) over Social Security any day. You can even let those wonderful Washington politicians regulate the associated fees. Imagine having that monkey off of our back, and taking away a massive political football from the political class.
Social Security does not hold bonds. Congress holds bonds that it owes to Social Security (because they stole money from it to pay for wars, and owe money back to it at interest: had they not done that, there would be no bonds issue with respect to Social Security; it would function like any insurance program and solvently function like any insurance program should).
You should certainly know that high interest rates only acrue to unstable investments. Stable investments have low interest. But they are fucking stable. That’s what people need: not risky high payouts for the few and disaster for the many, but reliable payouts for all. That is what Social Security provides, based on standard insurance actuarial planning.
Go learn some economics before making arguments like this.
Here’s a good explanation of the SS trust funds. http://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/understanding-the-social-security-trust-funds
Both you and JMo are mixing up some things.
What that doesn’t discuss is how Republicans omit the part about how the Social Security Trust fund relies now on the paying down of annual debt, and then complain about our high debt payments as reason to cut Social Security, when in fact they raided the cash fund to create that debt (debt owed to themselves, practically a fiction). Had they not done that, the fund would be in cash and well ahead and not dependent on debt service to maintain. That site also bases projections on current economic projections, but those are unlikely to stay so low (we are in a recession, and coming out).
But it is true that a 1.33% SS tax increase would cover the expected increase in proportion of population in old age.
The Republicans who passed TANF were inarguably more conservative than Republicans in office today, who’ve long given up on Social Security privatization, abolishing government departments like Energy and Education (part of the ’94 platform), and have voted for things like the Patriot Act and Medicare Part D. Yet I proved to you that opposition to TANF was exclusively on the left, and you ignored it. So your criticism is inconsistent and juvenile. No serious student of policy and politics thinks everything is the fault of a single political party.
I’ve never seen anyone compare Social Security to a whole life policy, but it’s an interesting stretch. Considering that whole life is a horrible investment for most people, and rarely delivers on it’s payouts, I think the comparison is apt and is a great argument against Social Security.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303296604577450313299530278
However, Social Security as a retirement fund operates like a Ponzi Scheme, period. It pays out returns for one group of people using current contributions from another group. That’s illegal in the private sector.
“Social Security does not hold bonds.”
Your whole argument is irrelevant here. My point was to refute your statement that “an enormous portion of the national debt you see adding up is actually owed to the Social Security fund”. The portion is not enormous. I proved that point incorrect, and it stands unrefuted. It’s 15%.
“That’s what people need”
Sure, if you’re a paternalist. However, reasonable and rational people normally don’t make blanket economic decisions for all 330 million people based on cursory economic knowledge. Everyone’s life, goals, and needs are different; they don’t need to be told by the government what types of returns they need or want.
However, I offered an alternative to Social Security that would be just as reasonable, solve the same problems, and offer more flexibility and freedom to citizens, and your response was to insinuate I’ve never “learned any economics.” It proves you’re an ideologue, not someone interested in dialogue. Quite clear you’ve never read anything outside the modern-Keynesian sphere.
I said the Republicans today are lunatics. O didn’t evaluate their conservatism (a term that barely means anything anymore, beyond being a reactionary against the dominant winds of progress).
But every election cycle Republicans have been rolling out the same nonsense about privatizing social security, the social security trust fund is unsustainable, yadayada. There really isn’t any difference except in regard to what they feel defeated on. They still grumble about it.
Meanwhile, that Republicans are hypocrites has always been true. That they exhibit that hypocrisy differently depending on who is paying them in any given decade is moot to the generalization.
“It pays out returns for one group of people using current contributions from another group. That’s illegal in the private sector.” — That’s how insurance works. And insurance is not illegal. When you pay a premium on your homeowner’s insurance, the company takes your money and uses it to buy a new house for someone else whose house just burned down (the insurance companies even, gasp, skim some off the top and, shock, keep some of it for themselves!). And if your house burns down, they will use the money paid in by current payers that month to buy you a new house (and pocket some of it to buy caviar and yachts). And that’s totally legal! In fact, it’s an essential and ordinary sector of any successful economy.
That is not how a Ponzi scheme works. Google Ponzi scheme and learn what that is.
Also, if you don’t think 2.8 trillion dollars (equal to almost our entire national budget) is enormous, you have weird standards of enormity. (Though in actual fact over a quarter, in fact nearly a third, of the debt is owed to ourselves: combining all the funds that have been looted, we owe 5 billion to ourselves, out of 18 trillion total debt.)
“reasonable and rational people normally don’t make blanket economic decisions for all 330 million people based on cursory economic knowledge.” — Said the man who never saw what happened in the Great Depression and like all who ignore history would be doomed to repeat it, if we didn’t take your scissors away before you poked your eyes out with them (and our eyes, and the eyes of the guy down the street…).
Reasonable and rational people know it is impossible for 330 million individual people to understand how the economy works, and watch everything like a hawk with masterful skill and timely action, so as to ensure they keep a secure pension. History proves that never works. Because it has failed. Always. There has never been a case in history when privatizing pensions created secure pensions. You know what created a stable and secure pension? Social Security.
No one but a fool or an MBA would think they are capable of creating and maintaining as reliable a pension fund for fifty to eighty years as Social Security. And not everyone can be an MBA. And hardly anyone is.
Do you know what other economic decisions we make for people? What cops to hire and how to equip and train them. What firemen to hire and how to budget their departments. How to provide medical care for soldiers. How to maintain a reliable system of roads, bridges, and dams. How to run a court system. How to prepare for and combat epidemics. How to police and reduce pollution. Etc. Etc.
Governments are the community property we elect to take care of all the shit we have neither the skill nor the knowledge nor the time to take care of ourselves. That’s reality. And there is no butting of heads against reality. Reality always kicks you back far harder.
Richard,
I don’t disagree with you on the whole, but a seeming incongruity popped out to me.
First, you call it “sham methodology” to exclude social security from the “welfare” category:
But then later when discussing how much is spent on welfare, you exclude social security:
I’d guess you’d say something like that it is valid to include social security as welfare when saying it reduces charity as it does reflect income that, on a monthly basis, effectively comes from the government, but it can be excluded from the cost since it is self-funded. And I’d be fine with that. I’m merely suggesting that that, or another explanation, should probably be explicitly made, so it doesn’t appear you’re doing the same thing that Brooks does.
Yes, the distinction there is that Social Security is an insurance program, not a handout. As I noted when I made that point. But it is still relevant to his argument that people on a dole are less generous. Because there is no reason why if that thesis were true, being on social security wouldn’t show the same effect as any other dole. Instead he chooses to count only the most desperate people, and generalizes to all dole recipients. That’s invalid.
Some of your criticosns of the book were reasonable and on-point, but at the conclusion your blog post degenerated into nothing more than an angry rant. You seem to be calling all American taxpayers greedy and implying that they should pay more taxes (and not complain about doing so).
You also scoff at and insult the charitable giving of others, especially of Christians. That is really uncalled for. Even if you are completely correct about the book In question, and even if you are right that private charity doesn’t do enough without government programs(a more debatable assertion), you still have no justification for insulting and belittling the charitable giving of others.
After reading your rant , I have a couple of questions for you:
In the past you have claimed an income of $15k a year. In the U.S., income at that level normally qualifies one for an Earned Income Tax Credit, where you pay no income tax and receive a refund check back from the government. Do you even pay a substantial amount of Income taxes? As an independent scholar, do you even pay social security and Medicare payroll taxes? Is it really right for a person who pays very little in taxes themself to rant about how others that do pay taxes should pay more?
Also, your piece is very critical of the charitable giving of others. How much do you donate to charity? (and no, donating to a friend’s Patreon doesn’t count as “charity”)
(1) Sometimes angry rants are deserved. This one is deserved.
(2) You overlooked the fact that I said my annual income varies from 15k to 25k. And that’s after deductions. I have in all previous years been filing jointly with my wife so there is no EIC applied. Whether it will apply to me this year I won’t know until next year. There is also the matter of the HCA subsidy (unless I start qualifying for Medicare).
(3) Yes, all self-employed persons pay Social Security on their income. It’s a substantial part of my annual tax payment. I have to save thousands of dollars through the year to be sure I can pay it at tax time.
(4) You ignored my point about the poor being less able to give and the rich owing more to the system. I didn’t say anything against the fact that the poor people he measures can only give a hundred dollars a year. In my view, charity has to be based on a percentage of surplus, so if you aren’t earning a significant surplus, you shouldn’t be expected to give much to charity. And as I also noted, the poor can be giving without cash (helping neighbors and friends more, sharing things, etc.). My giving is under a thousand a year, and I think that might be too much, since I ride so close to poverty. But it is illogical to claim that those who aren’t earning a surplus should give the same as those who are. The reason the rich should pay more is that unlike the poor, they can afford to. That’s the point.
A good resource to look at concerning welfare and how much it costs is by looking directly at the tax payer reciept, under “Job and Family Security”: https://www.whitehouse.gov/2014-taxreceipt
This comes in very handy when you need to correct the ignorance of people who think that welfare is the source of America’s problems.
Oh that’s awesome. Thanks for that link. I didn’t know the White House had created that application!
(Although it doesn’t look like it includes Social Security.)
Social Security is paid for via the payroll tax, not federal income tax.
Which is an income tax. Legal terms are irrelevant to philosophical reality.
When you take a look at all the little shell games the politicians (and Republicans in particular) play with tax money, don’t you wonder exactly what it will take for people to do something about it? The information has been available for some time now, and internet access has only exhausted that point rather than enlightened it. Usually you can count on fiscal concerns to rouse people from their slumber when they should have been reading the writing on the wall long before. It won’t be long before their isn’t much fiscal left to be concerned about if this keeps up. What am I missing here?
Excellent post. In my experience, conservatives and libertarians (both atheist and Christian) are evil, greedy scumbags. They want nothing more than for poor people to all drop dead.
You are so right about how much more effective government programs are than private charities at fighting poverty. In the area I live (west Baltimore) , goverment programs have done so much to lift people out of poverty and to improve the community as a whole. The ONLY reason there are still problems here is because conservative Rethuglicans have had a stranglehold on the City and.State governments here for decades.
Not only are conservatives greedy and evil, but they also lack an understanding of basic economics. There is a simple and effective solution to poverty that conservatives oppose. The government can simply pay every single person a decent and liveable income, This lifts every single person out of poverty, and allows everyday people to do the things that they enjoy instead of toiling at jobs that they hate. Since the formerly poor people will now have ample money to spend on consumer goods and services, businesses will increase sales, and the economy will grow. The government will then be able to very note taxes from corporations and the rich. The proposal pays for itself. Greta Christina wrote a superb article on this economic proposal just a couple of months ago.
Another effective way to eliminate poverty is to have the government subsidize the prices of essential goods and services, so that they are affordable for everyone. Of course, the greedy conservatives oppose this too. This is another area where foreign countries do better than America. For example, President Nicolas Maduro has made the prices of goods and services in his country affordable to everyone. Some economists say he has created an economic miracle. The U.S. can learn a lot from the policies of other countries.
Great post. I hope you do more posts on the same topics.
#NotAllLibertarians.
I concur with your first point generally, but I know some Libertarians with saner and more informed views than the pop Libertarianism we generally encounter.
I suspect you are trolling. But assuming you actually believe everything you just said…
As to your policy suggestion (referencing Greta Christina’s case), I think any state wage, if we were to enact such a thing, must still be tied to services, e.g. a minimal living wage for ten hours a week or community cleanup and neighborhood watch and beautification and tree planting or data processing (the state has a lot of need for paperwork processing), or what have you. It is then just a government job, that funnels excess wealth into driving the economy and improving its infrastructure and reducing crime (as, e.g., beautification projects are known to do). And that would compel businesses to offer a livable minimum wage to compete, although one could certainly be set as well (it should be criminal to pay a worker a wage that one cannot live on, since that is barely any better than slavery). The economics aren’t as simple as you depict. But they also aren’t as simple as the contrarians claim either.
Subsidizing goods/services is not a viable tack, and we have tons of historical data to verify that. The idea has been tested thoroughly. It does not test well. There are exceptions, but they are so peculiar that one has to track what makes the difference between a successful subsidy and an unsuccessful one. Nicolas Maduro, meanwhile, is actually overseeing one of the most corrupt, impoverished, unsuccessful, and fascist nations on the planet. So that is obviously not a successful test of concept.
IIRC, a criticism of Brooks’s book was that he counted as charity all money given to one’s church (or equivalent) when it is more akin to a membership fee or a Netflix subscription.
Partly also Sablosky’s point, although, yes, he goes into even more detail on what that means in practice.
Is it really right for a person who pays very little in taxes themself to rant about how others that do pay taxes should pay more?
Why would that not be right? Are you trying to imply that people in lower tax-brackets have no right to talk about fiscal policy?
But for some reason it does include (as the biggest single line item in “Job and Family Security”, “Federal military and civilian employee retirement and disability”. That’s ridiculous.
Those are costs of employing those military and civilian employees that should be counted wherever their salaries are (were) counted. Given that the data may not exist to split it up that finely, at the very least it should be divided into civilian and military shares on a pro-rata basis of salaries of current employees and listed under “Veterans Benefits” and either “Additional Government Programs” or a separate category.
I also say that “Veterans Benefits” is a subset and not a peer of “National Defense”.
I concur.
Richard, you should have a look at Modern Monetary Theory. The main academic proponents of the theory are Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray and Bill Mitchell. Also have a look at the writings of Warren Mosler and Roger Mitchell.
You will find that, although your conclusion about the solvency of Social Security is correct, the fund doesn’t really function as you suggest. The US federal government does not actually borrow or ‘steal’ from social security to pay for anything, including wars, and the national debt, which you decry, is nothing more than the total amount of dollars deposited in savings accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank. The size of the national debt is of no consequence to ‘taxpayers’.
This is based on the fact that all money is fungible. But precisely because all money is fungible, if we didn’t accumulate debt fighting wars and maintaining an oversized or inefficiently funded military, we wouldn’t need to take the money out of the Social Security trust fund and leave bonds in its place. In effect, we have been using Social Security to buy war bonds. We just don’t call it that. And Republicans use accounting legerdemain to avoid making any of the money move directly from one hand to the other. Because money is fungible, you can disguise what you are really doing, by robbing Peter to pay Paul.
So, notice as explained here: the difference between “investing in the government” (i.e. funding wars and pork, essentially, since we wouldn’t need to borrow so much if we weren’t shifting money to wars and pork) and “investing in the private sector” is that (a) the second option does not leave us in debt but actually results in a net profit raked from the private sector (rather than future taxpayers having to foot the bill–with interest) and (b) the latter would not allow Republicans to deliver stump speeches about the money missing from Social Security and oh whoas us look at all the debt that Social Security is causing us to accumulate.
It’s a scam. And anyone who understands (a) and (b) and the basic principle of the fungibility of currency knows this.
@pixiedust
The idea that giving to your house of worship is de facto charity is probably one of the most deceptive parts of Brooks’ ‘research.’ Even worse because religious agencies are exempt from any transparency in how their funds are used.
If a local church decides it needs a new, louder PA system, I don’t see why this should be considered ‘charity’ spending, any more than a normal music venue investing in the same. If a church wants a new recreation center, why is this any different than a commercial gym expanding? If anything, I think the case is that the religious agencies are less charity than a for profit business, since the use of their facilities is for members.
I disagree only on a single point: there are secular charity gyms, maker spaces, music venues, etc. They subsist on donations and operate as non profit organizations, recognized by the IRS. Churches wouldn’t in practice be any different. If we took away the special exemptions for churches, all that would do is force them to reincorporate as non profits and start opening their records to the public and the IRS to verify they aren’t taking a profit (people would also then know how too heavy their admin is, e.g. how much cash the preachers walk away with, etc.). That would certainly be an improvement. But don’t operate under the mistaken notion that they would be taxed. They would no more be taxed than atheist organizations are. Unless they chose to operate for profit, so as to keep their books closed. And that would be an interesting choice to see them make.
This article is particularly poignant to me, as I try to be skeptical even of beliefs I hold to be true. But it is exhausting to research everything I have an interest in or opinion on, so I’m not surprised when the general public just doesn’t have the interest in spending the time it takes to be skeptical. People have lives to live and often don’t have the time (or willpower) to do skeptical research. It sucks, but I don’t know how we can change this.
@Richard Carrier #5
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Isn’t that the point of Mark 12: 41-44 ?
You probably knew that though and have mentioned it. I’ve heard from an accountant the idea of money being fungible. (a moderate Republican who herself points out that we spend too much on an inefficient military).
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Also, while I am here, can I ask for your input on something? I am curious to hear your opinion on another string of posts,
http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/2015/05/17/open-thread-for-episode-918-matt-and-john/#comments
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Feel free to tell me that you don’t want to get involved. I have listened to some of your lectures on the Historicity of Jesus (among other things) on Youtube. Since readings of yours seem to be the source of the discrepancy I thought that I would go to the source and ask for your opinion directly. Thank you.
Sadly I don’t have time to work my way through threads elsewhere. There are hundreds and hundreds of those. Not enough time in my life.