Differing assumptions that are the basis of liberal and conservative positions

Great Debates
181

Firstly, in some cases it does, in the short term. If you take that first step above the cutoff level for a given program (not all programs have the same income eligibility levels) then you could very well lose money on a net basis. I personally know many many people who have been careful to ensure via working fewer hours or the like that they did not lose eligibility for various programs, since it would have cost them money on a net basis.

One thing for you to consider is that though you’ve insisted that “it could be fashioned so it never does”, if in actual fact it frequently does, then perhaps there are reasons for that and your confidence may be unwarranted. Reasons that suggest themselves offhand (though I’m unsure what scheme you have in mind, so I can’t be sure) include the fact that there are, as noted, dozens of these programs, each with its own eligibility rules, and addition what you suggest would probably be more complicated.

[One thing that always sticks in my craw about social program eligibility rules is that social benefits themselves don’t count as income. So that a guy out there working hard and making some $$ has that $$ counts against his income for eligibility purposes. Meanwhile another guy making the exact same $$ from sitting on his duff and collecting social welfare payments does not have that $$ count against his income limits - he’s considered poorer than the other guy and more deserving of assistance simply by virtue of the fact that he’s not working.]

And even leaving aside all of the above, what’s the difference what “could be fashioned”? What’s relevant is what’s there and what the realistic alternatives are. It’s not like there are hordes of liberals and progressives clamoring to make the current scheme less of a disincentive for work than it currently is. They just want more and more of it.

For our purposes there’s not much difference. Because there’s already a disincentive to working. It’s hard and boring. So in order to encourage people to do it anyway, it’s not enough to have the disincentive to be poor simply exist. It needs to be enough to overcome the counter-disincentive to working.

182

I recognize that there are a lot of poorly-fashioned assistance programs with cliffs and the like that actually do disincentivize working for certain levels – I strongly support those being fixed, as (I believe) most liberals and progressives who are aware of the issue do. I think what’s holding it back is politics – not that politicians don’t want to fix it, but that (in general) progressive/liberal politicians are afraid of modifying it because they worry that might open the door to eliminating it, and conservative politicians (whose motives I’m less confident in accurately describing) are similarly motivated against it, and both sides are unwilling to work with each other for political reasons. So no one (generalizing – some states probably have succeeded) can put together a bill acceptable to both sides, since the left will generally push for increasing the overall assistance level, while the right will do the opposite. Or something like that.

But it shouldn’t be hard to fashion assistance in this way – stepped assistance levels can be created similar to income tax brackets (which are structured such that increasing gross income never results in less net income due to taxes), so that working and earning more money never results in a decrease of total income, assistance included.

I agree, but we probably disagree on how strong that actually is. I think that everything that comes with being poor, even with (properly structured) assistance, is probably a strong enough disincentive for the vast majority of people.

183

Partly that, and partly because any single revamp of any system will produce winners and losers, and if you’re not willing to accept any poor person losing anything ever then you can’t ever do anything that’s not a straight-up enhancement.

But it makes no difference what the reason is. Bottom line is what the currently feasible alternatives are.

I think we probably do disagree. In addition, you also need to consider that it obviously varies a lot by person and circumstance, and also that it varies a lot between the long and short term impact and many people (particularly many poor people) tend to have a pretty short term view, which is one reason they are where they are. (For example, partying at night is more fun than studying. If you told someone he had a choice of consistent partying and ending up a deadbeat or consistent studying and ending up a middle-class professional, a lot of people might opt for the second option. But that doesn’t mean that facing one night right in front of them, with the two choices available, that some of these same people wouldn’t opt for the first choice.)

184

Fair enough – sounds mostly reasonable.

By the way, despite our differences in the past, you are now my Doper buddy. Isn’t it great how a good thread can bring people together? :smiley:

185

Since this discussion seems to have mainly centered on the poor…

I think that everyone has different opinions about poor people because we’ve all observed different things, all had different experiences. And everyone’s situation is unique, so it’s hard to draw broad conclusions. So yeah, there’s going to be a lot of different worldviews.

In my experience, the poor need help but we need to avoid enabling destructive behavior. Barack Obama seems to get this on a better level than a lot of liberals(perhaps he learned from his community activists days?), observing that a lot of poor minority kids spend more time watching TV than doing schoolwork, and in his convention speech in 2004 he said that we need a country where a black kid with a book isn’t accused of acting white. So he’s obviously seen how poverty works on the ground. So his solutions make more sense than a lot of past liberal activists. he wants to make it easier for former prisoners to get jobs. That’s a big deal that often gets overlooked. There are a lot of poor people who would like to work but actually can’t because they made a mistake when they were 19 years old. They can’t get a professional license either. Heck, professional licensing is a huge problem for poor people without a record given that the requirements are often extremely steep for no good reason other than that the industry incumbents want a cartel to keep prices up. So step 1, poor people that want to work shouldn’t have unnecessary barriers placed in their path to a job.

As for poor people who don’t want to work, or have about fifty higher priorities other than work, that’s what welfare time limits are for, or actively barring able bodied adults with no children from getting aid.

Another thing that would work wonders is fewer people on welfare, but much higher benefits for those who truly need it. Disability payments should be higher than they are(for the truly disabled, the expansion of eligiblity has been a disgrace). Temporary welfare payments should be higher. Unemployment should be higher(at least in the short term. Longer term should be lower). Relocation assistance should be a big part of the welfare system. “Hey, there’s no work where I live but I can’t afford to move!” Okay, here’s $5000, and you’re allowed to spend it wherever there’s a worker shortage.

My point is that a lot of liberal intellectuals are operating from stereotypical assumptions about poor people that are just as wrong as many of the conservative assumptions. The things that would help the most aren’t really much of a priority, but enabling people’s worst instincts is.

186

I think oversimplification here is a bit generous, although I see what you were going for.:smiley:

It’s assumed that any program that doles out cash is going to give cash to people who don’t really deserve it. I think the issue with welfare is that such a high percentage weren’t deserving before welfare reform. I read a study of welfare recipients a few years back that said that two thirds were able bodied and unemployment in their area was not high enough for them to have trouble getting work. When asked, about half of those admitted that they’d rather not work. No cite, so no one has to believe it, but I mentioned it because it summarizes the way many of us conservatives see welfare: as an alternative to work, rather than a hand up out of poverty or a way to tide people over in tough times. Maybe I misremembered the study or the study was wrong, but that’s what we tend to believe about welfare recipients, which is why we get kinda pissed off about it. When the undeserving are not a small minority of cases but are as much as a third or even two thirds, then we see a big problem.

This I think is fairly accurate, although we’ve been pretty dumb in our responses to the problem. Liberals have an advantage here because we know how to give people money. We don’t know how to get them to marry good men. And we’ve tried with our rather stupid marriage promotion programs.
Plus we tend to oppose abortion, which is probably the most efficient way to reduce the number of single mothers.

187

If I understand you correctly, you want cites wherein my satirical caricatures are plainly stated as policy by mainstream conservative organizations? :smiley:

I’ve noticed before that you react badly to satire and sarcasm and try to deflect it by pretending to interpret it literally and then expressing great dismay that anyone could say such things. I guess you never watch the Bill Maher show, or the Daily Show, or John Oliver, or SNL. Please don’t, you wouldn’t enjoy it.

I’ve already said that they are caricatures, but they are indeed caricatures with a purpose and with important elements of truth. And it’s not hard to see those truths. Allow me, on the two subjects I touched on in that quote, social assistance and the EMTALA program for emergency care.

Social assistance
The US has not only one of lowest overall rates of social assistance among developed nations, especially when ancillary benefits like affordable housing are factored in, but the most degrading. For much of the history of the food stamp program (now “SNAP”) the program was administered by distributing physical “stamps” which were essentially booklets of welfare currency, immediately shaming the grocery purchaser as such to everyone around whenever a purchase was made. They’re no longer used but AFAIK the replacement is a special EBT card which carries the same stigma, and which likewise allows the issuer to control what items may and may not be purchased. Some states have advanced the idea that, this shaming apparently being insufficient, they want welfare recipients regularly drug-tested. The only thing that hasn’t been tried (yet) is forcing welfare recipients to wear little badges to denote their lowly status in society so they can be accorded the appropriate scorn. But there I go with my sarcasm again.

And if anybody thinks I’m just kidding about this stuff, here’s a nice conservative website where the conservatives are free to speak their minds among themselves, and this one summed it up with succinct accuracy:
*Should We Make the Poor Uncomfortable in Their Poverty? *
We should not only make them uncomfortable, we should make them miserable and ashamed of themselves for being beggars.

The EMTALA program for emergency care
What needs to be dispelled here is any notion that this was done with any compassionate motivation and anything other than political expediency in mind. Patient dumping by hospitals was allowed to escalate for decades with nothing being done about it, until in the 80s hundreds of patients a month were being evicted from emergency rooms in America’s large cities.

One case that was widely publicized in the media involved an uninsured man who had severe burns on over 95% of his body. When his doctor requested that he be admitted immediately, over 40 hospitals with separate burn centers refused to treat him. EMTALA was enacted, not to provide meaningful health care to the poor, but as a political reaction to the fact that the patient dumping situation was becoming a shameful human rights emergency that was making international headlines, shaming the US internationally, and threatening the foundation of the conservatives’ much prized for-profit private health care system.

The system is notoriously ineffective because of the enormous costs of ER care and because the hospital is motivated to do the minimum possible stabilization just get the patient out of there. I saw a documentary about a year ago about the horrors of patients trying to get EMTALA care in the Los Angeles area, and ironically this was a hospital and a dedicated team of doctors and nurses that were altruistically trying to make it work, out of a sense of basic human decency, and they could still accomplish very little. (Can’t remember the name of the film but I’m sure I could find it if anyone wants to know.)

And yet there were, and are, alternatives, namely any of the health care systems seen in all other civilized nations. At an absolute rock-bottom minimum, they could have opted to fill the gaps in Medicaid, so that everyone below a certain income level could have affordable ongoing health care. But they went for this abomination instead. And even today, with the ACA in force, and federal subsidies available for the Medicaid expansion program, many states have rejected it. Every single one of those states has either a Republican controlled legislature or a Republican governor.

188

There hasn’t been a private market for health care in the US since the advent of Medicare/Medicaid at least.

189

The best health outcomes actually come from systems where patients have options. Only a very few countries have true single payer, and only one as far as I know actually runs the health care system itself(Britain). And Britain’s outcomes are actually not very good compared to France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, etc. So you can go too far with the government aspect of it. I don’t know that public/private matters so much as choice. Bad actors have to be allowed to go out of business due to failure to serve customers. That only happens if patients can say, “I don’t like that hospital, I’ll go to this other one instead.” But if they are both under the same management, you’re kinda screwed.

But that’s another example of liberal/conservative differenecs in assumptions that need to go away. Government is not always the right option and private enterprise is not always the right option. But we as conservatives tend to have a visceral dislike of government and a respect for private actors, whereas liberals often see things in opposite terms.

190

Don’t want this to turn into another massive health care debate, but this is just wrong and poorly informed.

I’ll cite Canada as an example, which has single-payer health care administered by the provinces with federal assistance and federal guidelines. Most hospitals are independent non-profits, run by a board of trustees with a variety of sources for their revenue, including service-based fees paid by the single-payer system, and government and private capital grants. Hospitals are held to high standards but they are, in fact, different in culture, expertise, and many other ways. Hospitals actually compete for patients and for ratings on patient quality surveys and on medical outcome ratings. And anyone is free to use whatever hospital he or she likes, and I can assure you that the managements of different hospitals can be radically different in exactly the same way as in the US.

I don’t know about “liberals”, but speaking for myself I just look at these actors in terms of past behaviors and probable outcomes. It’s not “liberal” or “anti- business” to regard corporations as entities that will always be motivated by profit, for instance. It’s just a basic truth, and it’s a truth that should lead to a particular set of expectations. With respect to government, liberals tend to have a bit more faith that governments will serve the best interests of the people that elect them, perhaps because liberals tend to vote for the kinds of people that actually do.

191

Speeding up the process would lead to innocent people being executed. No doubt about it. And that is horrible, but beside the point. I’m not saying a more expeditious death penalty would be fair, just more effective.

192

Yeah, we need to try to go off on tangents only as it relates to highlighting our different assumptions. Liberals have an incorrect assumption, IMO, that government tries to do good because it’s accountable to the voters. I say that’s wrong due to the layers of bureaucracy that politicians put between themselves and actual implementation of policy, which prevents direct accountability. I think it’s a major defect in the liberal worldview, the assumption that government is by, for, and of the people, and therefore the people can hold it accountable. This is only true for a limited set of circumstances. Consumer preference, most of us conservatives believe, is how the market enforces the convention of good service.

Absolutely. That’s why Canada’s single payer system is superior to Britain’s. In Britain, the hospitals are run by the NHS. In Canada, they usually are not, plus Canada’s getting more truly private hospitals which is only going to enhance the health care system. Some liberals in Canada seem very worried about having a two-tiered system, but that’s an ideological issue. As a practical matter if health care stays the same for the majority but some people get better health care than they did before, that’s not actually a problem.

Which only works if you don’t make excuses for government failures or scapegoat a low level official, or complain about lack of funding, which will always be less than ideal given limited resources and literally 1000 different priorities the government wants to address. If a government program is deficient, it’s either because the program is actually deficient as designed, or because the political leadership is incompetent. If other excuses are cast about for, democratic accountability is lost. As of 2016, the functioning of the government is 99% a partisan issue. If something fails, then half of us say it was the administration’s fault, and the other half make excuses for why it’s not. The incentive that is created in that situation is to make actual government functioning less important than motivating supporters with grand gestures.

What makes government work better than business or vice versa are the incentives. The same kinds of people work in both entities. They just respond differently based on the incentives of their jobs.

193

Maybe not, but if push came to shove, and you had a limited amount of money to spend, either on unwanted pregnancy prevention programs, or on stuff like helping existing single mothers, but not both, which would you spend it on?

I suspect most liberals would spend on the latter, and most conservatives would pick the former. That’s kind of a distilled version of what I’m gettin gat.

194

Unsurprisingly, each side tries to explain a difference in a way to make “their side” look good! But the above is ridiculous.

First of all, it can be paraphrased as “Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but liberals aren’t smart enough to know that.” Very helpful.

Moreover, it often seems to be the conservatives that need to relearn the “ounce of prevention” message:

Unwanted pregnancy is prevented by sex education and condom availability. Which side is more willing to spend on those?

Financial crises like the derivatives-bust of 2008 are avoided by improved regulation. Health crises like the Flint water contamination are also avoided with improved government oversight. Anyone who thinks conservatives are those actively seeking to prevent problems is under-informed. :smiley:

195

A few of the items below are embellished just a bit for effect but I honestly belief that most conservatives believe most of what is below, though perhaps worded a bit less directly.

What this liberal believes that conservatives believe:

Every person makes every decision based on taxes. If their state taxes go up, they’ll move. If US taxes are increased, they’ll move overseas.

Taxes must always be lowered. Raising taxes in any way will always result in more unemployment. Lowering taxes always creates jobs. Tax cuts pay for themselves in economic growth and more revenue is the result.

There is always waste and fraud to cut in government, and that will more than justify any tax cut. It is never necessary to actually point out specific cuts, those will come later.

People are poor because they are morally inferior. We should drug test them before we give them a nickel, even if it means their innocent children are the ones that will suffer.

Government can’t do anything right, except for [heavenly choir ON/] the military [\heavenly choir OFF]

It is good policy to deny government aid to 1000 needy people in order to prevent one person from abusing the system.

When the choice must be made between corporate profits and preserving the environment, the corporate profit MUST always prevail.

Unions are the instruments of the devil and serve to usurp corporations’ God-given right to pay their employees as little as humanly possible.

The only legitimate function of higher education is to train workers to serve the corporation.

Voter fraud is a pervasive problem and probably accounts for every Democratic victory. It is well worth disenfranchising 10,000 people by voter ID requirements so to eliminate a single fraudulent vote.

The nation was founded for the benefit of straight white Christian males. All others have no basis for complaint as they shouldn’t be here in the first place.

Democratic presidents are illegitimate and should no longer exercise their duties once an election year begins. If counting slaves as 3/5 of a person was good enough for The Founders, then a black president should only get 3/5 of a term. Unless of course Ben Carson was president.

George W. Bush’s term began Sept 12, 2001 and he kept us safe.

A zygote has all the rights of a fully formed human.

The Founding Fathers were infallible and the views of 18th century agrarian slave-owning aristocrats are gospel even in a 21st century diverse industrialized nation.

There is a war on Christianity and none of us are allowed to say Merry Christmas anymore.

Israel is infallible and we must never question it. The Jews have to be in Jerusalem for The Rapture to occur, at which time they’ll all go directly to hell for killing Jesus.

The Cuban embargo must be maintained in perpetuity because they’re Communists.

The police are infallible and every unarmed black person they kill damn well deserved to die.

The troops are just the most wonderfullest people ever and we must verbally fellate them at each and every holiday. Funding veterans services is another matter altogether.

Guns are the most awesome things ever and the only part of the Constitution worth reading is The Second Half Of The Second Amendment.

There isn’t a problem in the world that wouldn’t be solved by sending in troops and/or turning their land into radioactive glass.

Despite the fact that the US spends nearly as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, the military needs to be strengthened which can only happen with a Republican president.

America is exceptional and is God’s chosen country.

There is a movement afoot to take “Under God” out of The Sacred Pledge Of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” off of currency. These are probably communist in origin.

We must put prayer back in public schools, providing they are Christian in nature.

One of the president’s jobs is to sprint to a microphone and shout “terrorism” whenever more than two people are killed at once. If the perpetrators happen to be Muslim, the president MUST utter the words “Islamic terrorism” as soon as humanly possible. This makes a BIG difference.

There are hordes of scary brown people being sent by Mexico to steal our jobs and go after all the white women. They’re getting free housing, food, education, and health care the minute they step over the border.

It is possible for a corporation to have a religious faith and thus they should be able to refuse to subsidize contraception for their employees, lest these employees think they can have sex and “get away with it”.

196

Yes there is an assumption that benefit levels remain constant. If your argument for not raising the minimum wage is based on lowering other benefits then it seems to me that you have lost your argument on that front.

The “burden” on employers versus taxpayer argument is a reasonable one to have but you haven’t really shown any evidence that taxpayers are a better group to bear the burden than employers who can decide not to hire someone or reduce their profit margin or raise their prices because every single one of their competitors will be subject to the same minimum wage requirements.

OK, then I guess by valid criteria I mean something that has some bearing on ability to perform the job.

Lets say you want to hire firefighters and you decide to test for physical strength and endurance. one fire department makes you carry a 200 pound sack down a ladder, another makes you swim 400 yards. The first station sees a disparate impact on women and the second sees a disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics. I think the first test is valid and the second one isn’t.

On the tax front, I don’t think ANY of them are serious. Supporting a flat tax as a solution to any of our tax issues almost by definition takes you out of the category of serious on tax policy. Its the tax equivalent of an assault weapons ban. It simply doesn’t do much to solve any problems that you might perceive with the tax code other than shifting tax burdens to lower income levels. Once again, I distinguish this from the FAIRTAX which is a flat consumption tax as opposed to a flat income tax.

Yeah, and people supported the assault weapons ban too until it was explained to them.

I don’t understand your objection to spending money to avoid costs, I bet you do it all the time. Why fix flats when you can drive on the rims?

The benefits cliff is not a moral hazard and the subsidy to students is not based on income, it is based on the school you attend. You would have to send your kids to a shitty school to be eligible for the benefit.

I don’t see how justice is NOT being done. What crime is going unpunished?

Its not a bad law any more than any other special carve out for the oil and gas industry is a bad law. It is a loophole because the hedge fund industry contorted their square peg to fit into a round hole that they were never meant to fit into and with all the money they can throw at politicians, there is simply no political will to change it.

I assume you were voting for the lesser of two evils on the gun control issue.

So you voted for Obama? Because not voting for the Republican candidate is not the same thing as voting for the Democratic candidate.

197

If we knew Bernie Madoff was likely to commit this crime the problem would have solved itself, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to defraud anyone. Pick a different example please, or you could just address the actual example of violent felons being paid to stay out of trouble with the result being that they tend to stay out of trouble with more success than the general population of violent felons.

198

A hearty round of applause to BobLibDem for this excellent summary of conservatism. Watch out, though, Bob, we have some posters that are humor-impaired or at least sarcasm-impaired. For instance Bone is likely to come by and challenge you to cite where conservatives have said exactly those things using those exact same words! :smiley:

199

A basic universal income used to be a conservative idea that would get rid of many if not most of these problems (except the whole “an empty belly improves attitudes towards work” issue) but when we discussed this in another thread, it was mostly the conservative posters who blew up at the idea. For too many conservatives, they don’t want “better” programs, they want NO programs. To be fair, some liberals don’t like the idea of universal basic income because it is paid to everyone (which is a feature not a flaw) and it is designed to eliminate virtually all other safety net programs (some liberals want to keep all the safety net programs AND implement a basic income :eek:).

200

That is a pretty good summary of what many conservatives believe, although those of us who get deeper into the issues are more nuanced about those things. Liberals tend to have some weird beliefs too though:

The law of supply and demand can be repealed(minimum wage, anti-gouging laws)

If a program isn’t working(at least if it’s one liberals like) it’s always because it needs more funding.

People are poor through no fault of their own, yet apparently are too stupid to vote for their interests in many cases.

Raising the cost of doing business doesn’t cost jobs.

Voting is an absolute right, but the 1st amendment is subject to regulation.

Abortion is a unique medical procedure in that it should be completely between a woman and her doctor without government intereference. All other medical procedures though, the government may intervene between doctor and patient.

Rule of law is subordinate to achieving the “correct” outcome, regardless of the means because the Constitution is so like, 100 years old.

The government is good, except for the most visible agents of it, the police. Must be lack of funding.

If a Democratic President does anything foreign policy related, it is smart policy. A Democratic President can bomb seven countries and that’s fine, and it’s not even really a war. A Republican President so much as insults another country and he’s obviously a warmonger.