Well first of all, it has to be feasible, which your proposal isn't.
how so?
it's perfectly within financial reason - the amount we spend on police militarization and the prison system is enough that it could be converted into free money for the poor to fund my notion.
what's the part that isn't feasible?
Second, it's not about "behavior I don't like" it's about crimes such as theft and robbery that, yes, should be punished and not rewarded.
that is the definition of "behavior you don't like" considering you have a solid and consistent posting history of either being indifferent to or openly supporting criminal activity - you just pick and choose what 'crime' you decide gets your hackles up.
Now, you will no doubt be happy to know that Bill deBlowjob had a similar idea.
NYPD Mayor to pay criminals $1000 per month to not commit violence
that is not even remotely a similar idea, and i don't know if you know that and are trying to come across as an idiot, or if the two are actually equivalent in your mind.
Is it paying criminals or poor people now? Because those are separate proposals and both have their own problems. If you only pay criminals, you are basically rewarding crime.
the overwhelmingly vast majority of the type of crime that you shit your pants over is done by a particular socio-economic class (the poor), and the reasons that it happens is because a myriad of issues inherent to that socio-economic class - issues both in how our culture is structured in terms of values and philosophy, and in terms of how it treats those people in comparison to others within our society.
so in this specific tangent the two are pretty much synonymous, since at issue is the crime that happens when people are poor.
having said all that... here's my basic premise:
assumption A: there is a minimum standard of living wherein nearly all humans existing within that standard will be pretty content with their lot. they will not experience a material or existential lack of access to goods or services, and will not experience a cultural anger at their inability to acquire goods or services which are outside of their economic means, but simultaneously marketed as an important aspect of their cultural existence.
(for example and being extremely simplistic: if culture makes a pair of nike shoes morally equivalent to personal virtue, and then puts the nike shoes outside of your capacity to acquire them within the confines of your economic system, this creates an impetus to go outside of your economic system to get the nike shoes... IE, crime)
assumption B: in my personal experience, this is around the equivalent of 50k per year based on the cost of living in Denver, Colorado - that's where i've spent most of my life and so my concept of how money you need to live a reasonable first world life is based on conditions here. the number would be lower in say Kalispell, Montana where you could probably have the same equivalent lifestyle on 25k-30k, or higher for one of the coastal cities.
assumption C: if everyone has the minimum standard of living from assumption A, which assumes both the economic resources to cover all basic necessities (housing, food, utilities including internet and phone, medical, transportation, misc "walking around" money, and personal savings) then the impetus to commit petty crime will effectively vanish.
petty crime happens when you spend your life having to choose between getting to have a nice thing you want and getting to keep your apartment, and people get fed up with it.
remove the social construct that leads to this situation in the first place and you remove the situation.
assumption D: the cost of providing anyone who has less than this minimum standard of living with a pay check that gives them this minimum standard of living is within the means of our national resources.
if you have a substantive disagreement with any of those assumptions, please feel free to note them. however, bleating "it's not feasible" and making unsound and illogical comparisons to thoroughly incomparable city experiments is not doing so.
If you are paying "every poor person" $50k, that quickly becomes prohibitively expensive
i'd quibble that '50k' is actually variable per region but i didn't really specifically explain that until this post so i'll let it stand, but it's also entirely beside the point because i completely disagree with the characterization of it being "prohibitively" expensive.
it's expensive, sure - all social programs are, by their definition. but not unreasonably so.
if there are ~30M people below the poverty line in the US, then paying each of them $50k would cost $1.5T each year.
ok, and? i'm not seeing the problem here.
And giving every formerly poor person $50k would maybe eliminate some crimes, but hardly most of them. So you'd still need most of the police and prisons.
i both disagree with your assumption here and find that the data disagrees with your assumption as well.
since we're talking about "street crime" which is your obsession in this case, there are a number of factors to consider.
firstly, to ensure we're on the same page, you seem quite pre-occupied with this kind of crime:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_crime
street crime exists because it's a quick turn-around short term economic boost to the individual - somebody steals from a store, or mugs someone, or burgles a house, in order to get a small amount of economic resource quickly.
house robbers and thieves are looking to get small infusions of cash for immediate needs: either basic necessities like food or rent money, or cultural needs like a pleasure item that marketing and peer pressure informs them that they must have, but can't afford.
street criminals do not mug folks in alleys or steal your stereo out of your car to fund their commodities exchange habit, or to amass the wealth for another yacht.
street crime is
always about the lack of ability to maintain a basic minimum standard of living.
if you eliminate the the inability to maintain a basic standard of living, you eliminate the need to use crime as a stop-gap to cover shortfalls.
sure, if a program were instituted nation-wide tomorrow you'd still have A. people committing crime because they like it or are excessively greedy, B. people committing crime because they're maladjusted either physically or emotionally, and C. people who are just nuts.
but, petty crime would practically vanish overnight and within a generation (say 40 years) the cultural iconography of crime would go away along with the romanticizing of it.
take away the need to commit crime to survive and take away the cultural factors that glorify crime and that is how you eliminate crime from a society before it happens.
Besides, people who actually work for a living and make say $40k would be shafted. And what is to prevent them from quitting their jobs, becoming "poor", passing Go and collecting their $50k? So the ranks of the poor would swell up. As would inflation.
well i'd say if you work and make 40k you're making under the minimum standard so you should be getting money anyways, so that's not an issue to me.
as for inflation swelling up, well... it probably would, because the entirety of the concept of economy is built from the ground up to benefit the wealthy at the exclusion of all else, so the system as it stands would indeed react negatively to people who aren't wealthy gaining economic advantage.
i'd say that would be a problem that just needs to be weathered until reality forces the lie that is US economic policy to adjust, or else get ahead of it and regulate it as part of the original initiative.
They are not perfect, but they are far less retarded than your proposal.
nope, you're wrong about that.
yes, we do.
in the US alone we have trillions and trillions of dollars sitting around doing absolutely nothing.
If everybody can rest on their social hammock, who will generate the economic activity to produce all those excess resources? You have succumbed to utopian thinking.
not in the least, at least not rhetorically.
ok so there are no stats on this because it's never happened, so for the purposes of a hypothetical discussion that we're having i'm falling on anecdotal evidence which i confess up front is weak. but, it's literally all that we have for this since no stats or data in the real world exists.
it is my opinion based on anecdotal evidence for the people i've known in my life across a broad swath of socio-economic strata that if everyone were given the resources required to live a minimum first world existence, most people would choose to work in some capacity anyways.
not all of them, but *most* people i know could not live within a moderate lower middle class means without going totally batshit insane within a couple weeks out of boredom and listlessness.
i've had this conversation with basically everyone i know and perhaps 1 out of every 10 people will end up stating confidently that they could never work again and kinda chill out at home without much money and be OK with that for the rest of their life.
so i have no reason to think that in the event of a "social hammock" that economic activity would cease.
you'd probably see a vast shift in the lower rungs of the economic ladder - for example the food service industry in general and big box retail outlets both have a business model that is specifically predicated on exploitation of those who are desperate and have no other options to prevent homelessness, so i'd expect those sectors to either collapse and not exist anymore or have to change quite a bit from what we know of them in order to continue existing.
and i don't consider that to be an issue - one thing i know about you from your posting history is that if you had your druthers, you'd make it legally required for every business that exists to make profit at all times, and that if a business was flagging people should be forced at gun point to frequent that business to support it.
but personally, i don't give a shit if a store manages to stay open or not, and don't think that anyone or anything is entitled to profit simply because they wish they could have it.
So now you want the giveaway to everybody, not just the "poor" like you stated previously. Hard to keep up with all the versions of the proposal, as the original one was to give $35k to burglars and robbers so they don't burgle and rob any more (that one is similar to the Bill deBlowjob plan), but has since morphed to a universal giveaway.
the point was that it doesn't matter if you only give to some qualified bottom rung of society or to everyone universally - we have the excess resource to cover it at the most comprehensive, so it only gets easier from there.
So you really want government to give out a universal not-so-basic income worth 2/3 of the GDP?
two completely absurd and false implications in this sentence.
firstly, i want civilization to fulfill its function of increasing the standard of living of everyone living within it - that is the purpose of civilization in the first place, and if it fails to do that it is failing in its most basic reason for existing.
i want civilization to fulfill its function because that is how you maintain social order and stability, that is how you guarantee the long term viability of a capitalist economic structure.
having a systemically downtrodden underclass in an opulent society has always, ALWAYS resulted in the upper class being mass executed and the fabric of society going through massive upheaval.
there are zero incidents in the recorded history of the human species where this hasn't happened, and as a member of the white land owning male class i'd prefer not to be one of the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
so calling it a "not-so-basic" standard of living is absurd and idiotic. in this country, the most economically wealthy in the history of the human species, we have the spare resource laying around in the couch cushions to raise everyone to a minimum standard of living, which would both improve upon our social model as well as ensure its long term survivability.
that's what i want.
secondly, if it means giving away 2/3rd of the GDP... fuck it, sure why not, what the fuck else are we going to do with it?
How? By having very high tax rates?
"taxes" seems very antiquated in this context, but i suppose it's the closest there is to a system which facilitates this sort of thing, so why not.
And note that with that system there is no real incentive for most people to produce, so the GDP would not stay $21T but would shrink, if not in nominal terms then certainly in real terms. I.e. hyperinflation.
i fundamentally disagree with the assertion that losing the ability to horde literally
all the money would mean that nobody would ever want to make
any money.
i would posit two assertions:
1. there is a point at which for all practical purposes one has more money than makes any difference, where having more no longer makes any actual difference to their life.
2. as a society we can choose that it is our value that the excess money sits in their bank account and does nothing, or we can choose to utilize that money for the benefit for civilization.
if we were to softcap personal wealth, it wouldn't stop people from being psychotics who scramble to amass more, or to generate more.
i think that you have a valid point in that if we had a universal standard of living for everyone, enough people might opt out of the economic system that the whole thing collapses.
but i also think that i have a valid point that they might not.
and the thing is, nobody has ever tried it to find out, so it's purely hypothetical anyways.
Because it rewards crime.
no it doesn't, it removes the circumstances that leads to people feeling compelled to commit crime in the first place.
And it would not even reduce crime.
yes it would.
It is the basic idea that you get more of behaviors you reward. You pay robbers and thieves and you will get more robbery and thievery. Why shouldn't I steal something if, instead of being punished for it, I get a nice stipend out of it?
it is the basic idea that you get less of behaviors that have no functional purpose to exist.
you give people without resources access to resources, and instead of stealing to get the things they want they can now just buy them.
why should i steal something if, instead of being without resources and desperate, i have the resources available to me to purchase it?
It's not about race, but nice of you to have revealed your racism so clearly.
you are one ironically hilarious individual.
Then they'll commit the crime to get something else. Like steal a car. Ok, give them a car too, you'd say. So why should anybody work for what they have if government will just give it to them if they try to steal it.
why should anybody work, period?
but yes, i would indeed say that giving everyone access to a moderate lower middle class american life is the solution to basically all the causes of petty street crime.
And what percentage of those do you think you could eliminate with your stipend idea?
most, for sure.
Because it's not going to be most. Most crime is not even purely gain-motivated.
this is demonstrably false.
not *all* crime is gain motivated, but most street crime and most white collar crime is.
the very definition of a crime that is perpetuated in order to attain gains is that it is gain motivated, what are you even thinking here?
And even those that are purely gain-motivated will not be satiated by you giving them a stipend, but will still do crimes to get even more stuff.
well that may be - this would be true IF the compulsion to commit low level crime is not motivated by a lack of economic flexibility, but both my personal anecdotal experience and the crime stats pretty strongly suggest that crime of that variety is indeed due to that.
"get more stuff" gratuitously and for its own sake seems to largely be a product of the upper class. it's rich people who psychotically never accept enough as enough and commit any and every crime they can in order to claw out another few cents.
it's my experience that most people, if given enough resource to be able to reasonably acquire any trinket that catches their attention within their socioeconomic station, will be perfectly content with what they have and what they can get and not spend all their time obsessing over the next thing that is just out of their reach.
It would not reduce crime and it would not be cheaper either.
yes it would, and yes it would.
So nobody should work a job that pays less than your stipend?
nobody in the US should have a standard of living lower than that.
whether one works a job or not should be up to the individual.
And why work 40 hours a week for $55k when you can get $45k form Uncle Sam for working 0 hours.
why indeed.
It would discourage work, other than black market work, i.e. work and still get the stipend. It would also necessitate a VERY high level of taxation, deficit spending or money printing.
yes, it would discourage work, which is a good thing. 'work' is a soul crushing, humanity destroying abomination and finding a way to eliminate it should be the primary goal of the entirety of the human race.
but i also don't think it would actually reduce participation in the workforce by as much as you predict, though i'd concede it would result in an economically catastrophic reduction in labor for the kinds of jobs that no human should ever be subjected to in the first place, IE. retail or food services.
and that would change society a bit i'd imagine, and that's OK.
yes, you can.
So you are saying this guy killed a man because Uncle Sam did not give him his $45k in "free" money?
A South Beach tourist was shot to death. Suspect told police he was ‘high on mushrooms.’
I guess we should just give him more money and make him promise not to do it again instead of locking him up.
if you want to try to make the argument that every single time any crime or otherwise 'anti-social' behavior is engaged upon that it is always for the exact same psychological and external factor reason, you are welcome to go ahead do that but i'd find it one of the dumbest thing ever uttered out loud.
otherwise, i'll do you the courtesy of pretending you didn't post something so stupendously disingenuous and benightedly stupid.
No it is not. No military would use that gear against another military. It would only be used to control riots by a civilian population.
yes it is. it is gear the military used against civilian populations, and then started handing down to the police force.
The are law enforcement, which means they are there to enforce the law. Any unjust laws are the fault of the lawmakers, btw.
true, but that's... a whole other conversation that is outside the scope.
As to "land owners", as you said one purpose of police is to protect. Including property of people you despise.
wait, why are we talking about the property of wiggers and evangelicals? how did that come into this?
If a violent mob is looting and vandalizing businesses, it is the role of police to control the crowd and apprehend the criminals.
it's also the role of the police to protect people from domestic abuse, to enforce the law fairly and evenly, to advocate for all citizens equally, and to protect and serve the community.
they fail horribly at most of those things most of the time, so i don't see how failing to prevent looting or vandalizing is really any different.
So January 6th rioters should not have been arrested and prosecuted? Their issues should be addressed how exactly?
Or does this only apply to left wing rioters like #BLM and Antifa?
i mean that's changing the goal posts rather suddenly, but sure - the best way to deal with the january 6th riot would be to have corrected the issue that caused it to happen in the first place.
also not sure where this 'not have been arrested and prosecuted' bit is coming from since it's both apropos of nothing and in no way consistent with any of my opinions, but sure.
(don't make the mistake of thinking i'm any of the other posters here and blanket accusing me of positions i don't have, or else this is going to devolve into you dick-jousting with your own imagination)
Of course they should, whenever necessary. National Guard should be deployed if local police cannot handle the riot by themselves.
yes, police should not handle a riot, and thus can't handle a riot, and thus the national guard should be deployed.
bringing politicians into a conversation with me in an incredibly ineffective waste of your time.
I agree most crimes are investigated after the fact although police presence can have a deterrent effect. But if you don't investigate after the fact or if the prosecutor refuses to prosecute cases, that gives the criminals a carte blanche to do it again and again.
mind you, as pointed out in this thread - the deterrent effect is only in the specific area with an increase police presence, as it just pushes the crime elsewhere. that isn't solving the problem, it's just moving it around.
