Welfare Shouls not Be Abolished

Because of the importance of the arguments he made in Round 2, I'm going to hold off on his round 3 material right now to make sure I address his key concerns I didn't have space for before. I would just like to note It appears to me Pro did drop a majority of my Round 2 arguments. I hope he chose to address them soon otherwise he will have dropped those arguments. --------------- 1. ) Welfare Reduces Poverty Con lists a 1999 Study of various OECD Countries that implemented various welfare programs and saw a drop in their poverty level between 1960 and 1991. Going off the Wikipedia numbers, the decline in poverty is very impressive. If we could fight poverty this fast, we could go from Zimbabwe to Luxembourg in a few hundred years or less. But correlation does not imply causation. The fact that poverty declined between 1960 and '91 does not mean welfare programs solved the problem. I looked at some of the studies you cited and while I was reading through one of them, namely "Do Social-Welfare Policies Reduce Poverty? A Cross-National Assessment" (Lane Kenworthy) And the author described how it's difficult to measure the effect of Social welfare policies because most studies concentrate on just the United States, and that to get a balanced approach, one must include a trans-national approach. The study includes data on several different countries after implementing various Welfare programs, and reported how much welfare they did by compiling a number, the "Government transfers" ratio, and also listed the poverty rates, both relative and absolute, with baselines of 50% 40% and 30% of the US baseline poverty level by PPP. I took some of these numbers and threw together a few charts. I posted them on facebook, and hopefully they should be visible here: . http://www.facebook.com... While other charts were in the original report showing a clear decline in the poverty level among all countries studied over time, when different countries are compared at the same time are compared, the amount of transfer payments to the poor do not seem to have any major effect on the poverty level, and even a slightly negative effect on the GDP per capita. The other graphs showing the drop in poverty among every single one of these countries is showing progress over time, namely from 1960 to 1991. But tremendous progress was made in the western world in that period of time, from the expansion of medicine and slow improvements in technology to the rise of telecommunications and higher fuel efficiency, all these advances would surely improve productivity and help any society better care for its poor. -------------- 2. ) It provides Basic Human Rights (that people would otherwise be unable to get) While welfare programs do provide a minimum survivor level for the poor, keep in mind my perspective. Poor people may truly be unfairly excluded in some cases. I believe the only person who knows how to best spend his or her own money is the individual, and that a myriad of regulations and interventions raise the cost of some kinds of business, prohibit others, are often directed by politically connected elites and without the input of the poor. Such interventions ultimately turn out to be for their detriment. For example, the department of Labor sets numerous different rules for employers on a large number of things, from conditions of employment to safety standards, paperwork requirements and anti discrimination issues. These interventions fundamentally take away choices. In a perfect world, and I know we don't live in a perfect world, if some working conditions or other requirements make sense, then it will be in everyone's best interest to follow them anyway. If employers reasonably can provide working conditions or benefits or guarantees, then in a free market, (which we do not have) they would in theory be best off to provide it. But sometimes these rules actually prevent useful work from being done. For example, what if a DoL rule requires employers and employees to have a standard of service to customers as defined by some rule, when someone discovers a new way to do business cheaply? If someone finds a way to run the business at a lower cost and still provide what customers want but it doesn't comply with DoL requirements, they can't even set up shop. This is a difficult kind of thing to prove or back up, but I'm convinced that there are a lot of jobs that could otherwise be available to the poor and the minorities in this way that are not available today. ------------------ 3. ) Welfare Reduces Crime I must say I'm not an expert in crime or criminology, I don't have the resources to do much more than a Google search on the topic, but despite that there is a better explanation for crime, in general, than poverty: child abuse. How children are raised can mostly determine their morals and how aggressive they will be. Children with hypocritical and abusive parents tend to be more violent and antisocial, weather rich or poor. Obviously, this kind of behavior will not breed a very successful life and so imaginably most people who are raised like this are disposed to crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy and imprisonment, but it is the behavior they learned from their parents as children that determine their views towards respecting others. If they are taught to respect others, then weather they are rich or poor, they will be cooperative and will peacefully pursue their dreams with no ill will to anyone. If they are taught to be hypocrites, if their parents lie to their children or appeal to force frequently, then they will learn might makes right, and that they will never reach their dreams no matter what they do. These feelings can kill a persons chance of applying themselves and succeeding, no matter what they do. If this aggressive person grows up to have unreliable jobs and often no job and receives some welfare, it can give him the fish for a day but it can't teach him to fish. That can only come from his or her parents or other people he or she look up to. For example, one study has 63 pages worth of information filled with citations about the effect of child abuse on crime. For example, individuals with any abuse were 14% more likely to commit some crime than individuals who were not abused at all. (Currie, Tekin, 27) It goes on: "They are also significantly more likely to commit burglary (by 4.4 percentage points), assault (by 6.4 percentage points), theft (by 4 percentage points), damage property (by 9.4 percentage points), and use drugs (by 8.6 percentage points). Maltreatment not only increases the probability that an individual will engage in crime but also increases the probability that he will be a victim of a crime (by 7.9 percentage points) as well. " (Ibid, 27) "We find that child maltreatment roughly doubles the probability that an individual engages in many types of crime. " (Ibid, 27-28) This study has almost 8 full pages of references, and I don't have time to review all 63 pages of it, but the point is clear that there are a lot of studies that show the connection between crime and child abuse. So while the desperation factor may play a role in a prospective criminal's decision, it's pretty clear that the overwhelming factor in influencing the decision is how abusive the parents are and if they have a stable environment for the child to grow in while he's young. --------------- --------------- I didn't really respond to Con's round 3 arguments, but again I felt it was more important to address the concerns he raised first, since in round 3 I couldn't make out too much in the way of what he was arguing and why. I thank everyone for following along and I await Pro's next response. Janet Currie, Erdal Tekin Does Child Abuse Cause Crime? Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, April 2006 . http://aysps.gsu.edu...