By SharperIron on
Anything Else
Government
Social Ethics
Poverty
“He actually proposes, over the next 10 years, adding $6.4 trillion to the budget and I think that is, economically, not just unwise, it’s dangerous and I think the president owes us a proposal showing us how we can get to a balanced budget in the next five years.” Ron Sider: Obama, GOP Budgets Both Inadequate

Discussion

Mon, 04/16/12
Sider is deeply confused about what “empowers” the poor.
“Sixty-two percent of all the cuts [House Republicans] want to make in federal spending comes from programs that empower the poor, while at the same time giving millionaires tax cuts. I think that’s wrong.”

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Mon, 04/16/12
I tried to find on several different links from Sider and ESA (Evangelicals for Social Action) what government programs he believes “empowers the poor.” It seemed to be just as general/generic as this article…..

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Mon, 04/16/12
I’m pretty sure he has in mind all programs that redistribute income from people who have more to people who have less.
I think a real debate on whether that really helps the poor would be interesting, but the progressive/liberal-influenced POV consistently assumes the point as a basis for arguing other points (which makes the other points suspect as well).

More specifically, the sentimentalized view of how social programs ought to work seems oblivious to the tension between “what helps in an emergency” and “what helps both individuals and whole groups in the long run.” The two goals have a sort of mutually hostile relationship because what helps in an emergency discourages productive labor over the long run… and, to a degree, vice versa.
So the trick maybe is figuring out how to generously hand out crisis-relieving aid while ruthlessly denying it after the crisis is past?

Maybe it’s better to just pursue policy that leads to long term prosperity because generalized prosperity is very useful in crises as well. (If you have two cars, you can sell one for cash in a pinch… and a prosperous society tends to have better buildings, better health, better everything that is crisis-sensitive—so that even natural disasters like famine are mitigated considerably)

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.