Has such an analysis ever been conducted? My question is basically: there is a an economic underclass in America-comprised of people who are on life-long welfare programs. These people work rarely, and many of this class are career criminals. Criminals do not (in my pinion) contribute to GNP-they do not produce anything, and their actions actually help destroy wealth (armed robberies tend to drive businesses out of an area).Moreover, incarceration costs the tapaters about $100,000/year in direct costs.
Suppose we could magicall transform the underclass into working class people-how much would our GNP increase?
The undecals (people without stickers) generally reduce the GNP through lack of sticker-buying action.
Is this a hypothetical question, Ralph? Or do you have evidence for the actual existence of your lifelong welfare recipients and the career criminality of a large proportion of them?
I can discuss the activity of my neighbors in the eight places we’ve lived since 1980, many of whom were eligible for Food Stamps, and how they did or did not fit your ‘uncerclass’ stereotype. (Most did not, save a few who could be objectively defined as unemployably disabled and one woman who in fact did ‘play the system’.) My hunch, based on my own extensive anecdotal evidence, is that you are confusing anecdotes with data.
First define what you mean by “the underclass” or this question does not have much traction.
Under the **Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 ** one cannot be “on welfare” more than 2 years in a row, or 5 years over ones lifetime.
So, you can’t be “on life-long welfare programs”.
How much productivity is lost because of fat, clumsy fingers that create incoherent messages that take extra time to decipher?
It amazes me that you’d go to the trouble of putting quotation marks around a word and still blow it that badly.
Does that limitation apply to other forms of welfare programs, such as agricultural subsidies? In other words, are there farmers who have received government subsidies all their lives? Would one consider them members of the underclass (or the “Undecalss”, as Ralph calls it)?
No, because Agriculture Subsidies aren’t welfare, any more than public schools, fire departments, police services, and roads are. Subsidies are a means of paying people not to produce something in order to achieve a governmental goal – (whether that goal is desirable or not can be debated elsewhere). Welfare is a social protection program to insure that people don’t fall through cracks because of circumstances beyond their control (opinions on whether this system works as intended is practically the defining difference between “liberals” and “conservatives”, and also can be debated elsewhere).
The two have nothing to do with each other.
I don’t see this as having a factual answer, so it’s off to GD where y’all can argue about the unfactual answer.
Y’know, I didn’t even notice it was a political thread since I assumed “Undecalss” was some kind of acronym.
Changed “Undecalss” to “Underclass” in title.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’d question this. Certainly some crimes depress commerce, but manufacture and sale of illegal drugs has got to be a multi-hundred billion dollar industry, not to mention the separate industry of gov’t agencies to arrest, try and convict people for engaging in the drug trade.
Lots of other “shadow economies” also involve large amounts of wealth creation. Prostitution, smuggling of alcohol and tobacco to avoid tarriffs, illegal arms sales, etc.
And yet, for some reason, all the salaries of police officers and corrections officers and public prosecutors and criminal-court judges are counted as pluses in calculation of GNP.
this is not exactly my specialty, but I am sure that there are factual, rigorous ways to figure out how much the government is spending per year on incarcerating people who will be back in prison within a year of release, on treating their gunshots wounds and drug overdoses in hospitals, on “ejucating” their children and on providing community support services to their girlfriends. On a tangentially related topic, you could also calculate how much money the government spends on its well-paid, bloated, horrendously inefficient bureaucracy, each member of which deems him or herself a highly useful, productive, middle class citizen. Needless to say, this government money that pours down these two ratholes comes from the same source - the taxes on citizens and productive enterprises which make our economy less competitive compared with foreign nations that don’t suffer such waste.
In short, yes, underclass is a problem. But it is really just one of the many other similar problems that can be all summed up as “wasting money on colossal scale”.
Are you aware that GNP and its more common related measure GDP are not calculated as matters of opinion?
Not sure about that. Whose opinion is it that war profiteering by the criminal overclass should be added to rather than subtracted from the GNP?
But he said “pinion”. So he could mean in his gear with a small number of teeth designed to mesh with a larger wheel or rack, or in the outer rear edge of the wing of his bird, containing the primary feathers.
I admit, the GDP link is tenuous there, though.
I regret getting here after the title was changed from undecals.
Anyway, in Seattle it was found that the worst of the worst alcoholic homeless people cost about $4,832 a month in police protection, sobering facilities and emergency room visits. So they built an apartment complex for them, spent about $1100 a month housing them and saw prices on police/healthcare drop to $1492/month.
I can’t find the stat onhand, but I remember once reading that it cost X dollars per year (maybe $5000-8000, I don’t remember) to have an illiterate citizen because of higher unemployment, social programs, crime and imprisonment.
Health illiteracy costs up to $238 billion a year. However these people are not an underclass (with different physical characteristics, naturally) who can be marginalized as dangerous unamerican leeches. Many americans of all incomes and races are health illiterate.
http://www.allbusiness.com/science-technology/experimentation-research/13185856-1.html
Adult illiteracy is about $17 billion a year.
http://www.johncorcoranfoundation.com/article6.htm
Anyway, how much do these people cost? I really don’t know the total cost. Something like 0.2% of the population commits around 50% of the crimes. Add them in with the chronically homelessness (who are usually mentally ill or substance addicted), etc and its probably a few hundred billion a year in police, imprisonment, lost economic growth, more health spending, etc for about 0.5% of the population who are career criminals or severely homeless and unable to care for themselves. I really don’t know the exact stats, but I’d guess $200 billion or so in effects from police/crime, lost business, lost productivity and health spending. No idea though.
Of course that is just the worst criminals and homeless people. I wouldn’t consider someone who steals a $30 bicycle or a homeless person who squats or lives in their car and is fairly capable of surviving alone the same as the tiny minority of criminals who commit most of the crimes or the severely addicted homeless who cost $5000/month in services.
Here is a cool article. 5-10% of homeless people are chronically homeless (substance abusers or mentally ill) and the rest are short term homeless. The chronically homeless make up about 150,000 people and cost around $10.95 billion a year in public services (making up the majority of spending on the homeless), so about $73,000 a year in services. Housing them is cheaper.
“The 150,000 chronically homeless people in the United States cost $10.95 billion per year in public funds. If these individuals were all permanently housed, the expense would be expected to fall to $7.88 billion.”
But what is an underclass? Are the 5-10% of homeless who are chronically homeless the underclass and the tiny minority of criminals who commit most of the serious crimes the underclass?
Secondly, what about all the damage done by the middle and upper classes? The SNL scandal and economic collapse of 2008 were brought about by the upper class. Health illiteracy by the middle class costs hundreds of billions a year.
Now I want me some French-fried tapaters with my share of that $100 grand.