Oh......................
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Oh......................
There is no cure for poverty as long as people, like animals, are driven to reproduce once a minimal set of criteria has been reached.
Ironically, wealthier parents reproduce less on average because their children cost more. Economically, it costs much less for a poor person or person in a (edited) country to have children. (They have no worries about college, proper health care, etc.) The wealthier person also has other options in life which make having (and taking care of) 8 kids much less attractive.
Hear, hear.
Just watch the language in future. I'm telling you, so the mods don't have to.
Holy crap.
That totally just blew my mind. This has got to be the best idea I've ever heard.
To KaneD: Then the family with 8 kids gets more stamps then the families with 2 kids. Easy.
That is not true. Wealth has nothing to do with reproduction rates. The only good indicator of low avg. birth rates is high literacy levels. The more education a person receives, the fewer children they have.Quote:
Originally Posted by KaneD
Ah, but why? Surely with more education, you can get a better job and you can afford to have 4-5 children.
Well...there isn't one all encompassing reason. That's just the way it works.
Google 'demographic transition model'.
Typically, the more education a person has, the better job they get. This leads to less time spent at home on the couch or out in the bush not 'working' and....er, having sex. When you work a lot, you don't have time for children and tend to use protection more often. Also...knowing how to read means you know what birth control is and how to get it. There isn't an across the board reason why higher education leads to lower birth rates, it just happens that way everyplace on earth.
Hmm...interesting plan. I have a few questions about it, and I'd love to hear your answers.
1) How would allowances be made for special dietary needs? There are infants who need special (expensive) formulas. There are people who need gluten-free diets. Some religious beliefs call for special diets. Some children are underweight due to medical conditions and need not only massive quantities of calories each day, but supplemental protein foods just to maintain normal growth. How do you figure these things? Who decides what is necessary/allowed?
2) During WWII, rationing books and ration cards provided a microcosm of your plan. Certain items, such as meat, were available ONLY via rations at an allotted rate. The rich who wanted more meat always did find their ways to get it. Money has buying power, of course. The problem came from the poor people. To explain where I'm going with this, I'm going to give a brief budgetary glimpse of a very average family in my area.
This family has two parents and two or three children, all living in the same household. Dad works full time and mom works part-time until the kids are old enough to be left alone for a while after school. Between the two parents, they are STILL below the poverty level and struggling for daily survival. Chances are they are already receiving food stamps, probably about equivalent to your proposed plan.
Their current budget, therefore, won't change much. They spend 30-40% of their income on housing. That's a roof over their heads, running water, sewage, trash pick-up, taxes, and electricity. Phone and television service are luxuries that they may or may not have. Heat for that house is a sometimes thing, and depends on a lot of factors they can't control. If they have a car, it's either a clunker about to die, or it's one they still owe payments on. Clothes are hand-me-downs or discount-chain. Vacations are a drive to a relative's house or hanging out in the neighbor's pool. There is NO Disney vacation here. They have no savings, no retirement fund, no college fund.
When that clunker dies, and they need repairs, these people have no source of emergency cash to pay for it. They will lose their job if they can't get there. There is no bus out here. When oil prices go through the roof, they have no means to heat their homes. A man froze to death up the street from me two years ago. In his living room. This is real, and this is how they live. Those who fight hard enough will make it through, and those who don't sink down and disappear while their children get shuttled off to foster care.
Now let's factor in your plan. The car just broke down. Without that car, you lose your job and you can't provide at all. But you have no cash. But....you could convert food stamps into cash! So now the whole family goes on the ramen/tap water diet and you eke out repairs to keep the car going another month or two. Next month, it's heating oil you have to have. After that, the electricity is about to be shut off.
It is all well and good to say that people can choose to do without good food for a while when they need/want something that requires cash. It is a whole other thing to factor in TRUE poverty, and the fact that they will always have a dire need for more cash. Now, factor in something else: stupidity and poor judgment. People can now choose to pay their cell phone bill instead of getting their children fresh produce. People can choose to serve rice for dinner every night instead of meat, because then they can trade in food stamps for that case of beer they want for the weekend. And they will. If THEY suffer, who cares? But their children will suffer.
In the current food stamp program, it is actually rather difficult to get cash for stamps. You can go buy something like lobster tails or expensive infant formula and try then to find someone who will buy it for a fraction of the cost. The difficulty of it has greatly reduced the number of people who do such exchanges, and as a result, even the most hard-core drug addicts still usually have food stamps to feed their children with. With your plan, it just got easy as pie. Walk up to an ATM and punch a couple buttons and you just traded a week's worth of food for a couple rocks of crack.
So how do you stop that? What controls would you impose to make allowance for those people who would not have their budget changed substantially by the addition of food stamps, and yet would have more outlets for idiocy?
1) I see no need to allow for special dietary needs. Some families may need slightly higher than average food budgets, but I think that will be addressed by my answer to your other point.
I am not opposed to such considerations being implemented. Just like the farmer issue, I will yield this detail to other experts. My plan is by no means complete and total. But it's a good start.
2) I know families on food stamps. Not one of them lives entirely off stamps. they all supplement the grocery budget with dollars. Generally, for every stamp they spend, they also spend .5 to 1 dollar. A grocery budget twice the size of the current stamp allowance is not uncommon at all.
In my plan I expect an entirely new formula to determine the stamp allowance. Let's assume that it's determined that an average 21 year old needs 100 stamps worth of average quality groceries in order to maintain an average diet. I would expect 21 year olds to get 120-ish monthly allowance.
The extra is expected to be traded off to those with more expensive tastes. The person can by more generic brand foods to increase the surplus more than $20. The excess also allows the purchase of specialty items if desired or needed, rather than selling it off for dollars.
Also, keep in mind, that even if everyone only got 20 stamps a month, it would be okay. Don't lock into your mind that 1 stamp equals 1 dollar. The food economy of stamp prices will adjust to fit supply/demand. If we all get 20 stamps, then we will simply see prices like the apple costing .01 stamps. And each stamp will probably be sellable for $25 each on the exchange.
I only used the 1 to 1 ratio in my examples to make math easier on the reader. I guarantee that ratio will change the instant this plan is implemented and will fluctuate wildly for the first few months until people figure out how this works in their lives.
3) I talk directly about the drug seekers in the plan. I don't deny that it will happen. Honestly, I don't think that behavior can be stopped. But, I doubt it will happen much more than it already does. If you re-read the "problems-crime" section you will see that this plan generally leaves the dealers worse off than they are now.
Drugs will never be on a 1vs1 ratio with any form of money/stamps/cheetos/whatever.
Case/Point/Closed.