That is a valid way to look at it, provided your tax plan is retroactive as well, which I don’t think it was.
With Bush’s plan he got $300 in hand from a previous year, where yours only only starts at the present.
Assuming a reasonable discount rate, the present value of that cash in hand is offset by the higher annual savings of your plan somewhere in the late third or early fourth year.
Which means on a four year basis your plan can be accused of fucking over the poor just as much as Bush’s.
The point here Minty is that lowering the lowest Federal tax brackets are not particularly meaningful forms of relief for those in a low income situation.
Can we agree on that statement? Call it “Axiom 1.”
Can we also agree that on the low income working class the most onerous burdens are the payroll and sales taxes? Call it the “Jshore Axiom.”
Can we put those two together and form the “Minty Scylla Synthesis” which will go something like:
“Meaningful tax relief to the working poor must recognize and alleviate the penalizing effects of payroll and sales taxes to be effective.”
(1) As was noted minty green, the tax brackets are now automatically adjusted for inflation. I think this change was made sometime in the 80s.
(2) While it is true that there have been some changes that have made taxation more progressive at the very low end (namely, expansion of the earned income tax credit, I think), the rest of the federal income tax has not become more progressive. Thus, while one can attribute some of the drop in the fraction of tax paid by the bottom partly to these changes, one cannot attribute the rise in the fraction paid by those very near the top to this. To put numbers on this, the top 1% have seen their percentage share of the tax burden just about double between 1980 and 2000, a fact that the WSJ editorial page laments regularly. But, the reason has nothing to do with increasing progressivity of the taxes and everything to do with the fact that their share of the income has grown. In fact, their share of the income (AGI to be exact) has more than doubled…growing by a factor of nearly 2.5. So, people who say we must cut taxes on the wealthy lest they end up paying too large a share of the taxes are really saying “We must cut taxes on the wealthy because inequality has ballooned and thus their share of the income has gone through the roof and as a result they now pay a higher percentage of the taxes.” Sort of a bizarre argument if you ask me!
Well, there is a CBO study on this that I can dig up somewhere. I am not saying it drops dramatically down from the 80% level…It can’t drop that far considering that the top 20% earn about 60% of the income! But, it does drop a lot closer to being in line with this percentage of income.
And, as you point out, I do like to consider things holistically because considering cuts only to the most progressive taxes is a great way to make the tax system more regressive while saying “But, look, I’m cutting taxes across the board” Or “There is no way I can possibly cut taxes much on the poor because they are hardly paying any.” Both statements are simply not true regarding taxes as a whole; they are only true about federal income taxes and discussing it in this manner is a great way to perpetuate the myth that our tax system is strongly progressive and thus, by some definition, strongly redistributive.
I saw figures somewhere showing the difference in sales taxes paid as a percentage of income between the rich and the poor and the difference was astounding! As I recall, we are talking about the rich having an effective tax rate on income due to sales taxes that is maybe like 1/4 that of the poor. (In addition to the rich spending a smaller fraction of their income than the poor do, the rich also tend to spend more on things generally not subject to sales taxes, like services, than the poor do.)
By the way, I do agree with the “Minty Scylla Synthesis” with the proviso that expanding the earned-income tax credit (which is sort of like lowering the payroll tax effectively) is one possible way to do this.
I think there are two separate deficiencies here that I would identify concerning the Bush tax cuts:
(1) They do not do much to help the very poor. And, here, I’ll admit that I think this is a truly hard problem to address and thus, while I am not happy about this, I am not ready to burn Bush at the stake for not doing more here.
(2) It transfers a huge amount of money to the wealthy. This is really the bigger problem. You may think it is sort of silly for me to see this as such a big problem but the reason I do is that, despite your complaints about government spending, I don’t see many ways of significantly reducing it that (1) will ever actually occur and (2) that won’t hurt the poor and middle class the most. Thus, I think we will be left in a fiscal state that will cause either a loss in services to these folks or increased taxes on these folks (some of these taxes likely occurring at the state level as the federal government continues to effectively offload costs to the states). It is this squandering of our resources that I find most unforgiveable about the Bush tax plan.
(1) As was noted minty green, the tax brackets are now automatically adjusted for inflation. I think this change was made sometime in the 80s.
(2) While it is true that there have been some changes that have made taxation more progressive at the very low end (namely, expansion of the earned income tax credit, I think), the rest of the federal income tax has not become more progressive. Thus, while one can attribute some of the drop in the fraction of tax paid by the bottom partly to these changes, one cannot attribute the rise in the fraction paid by those very near the top to this. To put numbers on this, the top 1% have seen their percentage share of the tax burden just about double between 1980 and 2000, a fact that the WSJ editorial page laments regularly. But, the reason has nothing to do with increasing progressivity of the taxes and everything to do with the fact that their share of the income has grown. In fact, their share of the income (AGI to be exact) has more than doubled…growing by a factor of nearly 2.5. So, people who say we must cut taxes on the wealthy lest they end up paying too large a share of the taxes are really saying “We must cut taxes on the wealthy because inequality has ballooned and thus their share of the income has gone through the roof and as a result they now pay a higher percentage of the taxes.” Sort of a bizarre argument if you ask me!
Well, there is a CBO study on this that I can dig up somewhere. I am not saying it drops dramatically down from the 80% level…It can’t drop that far considering that the top 20% earn about 60% of the income! But, it does drop a lot closer to being in line with this percentage of income.
And, as you point out, I do like to consider things holistically because considering cuts only to the most progressive taxes is a great way to make the tax system more regressive while saying “But, look, I’m cutting taxes across the board” Or “There is no way I can possibly cut taxes much on the poor because they are hardly paying any.” Both statements are simply not true regarding taxes as a whole; they are only true about federal income taxes and discussing it in this manner is a great way to perpetuate the myth that our tax system is strongly progressive and thus, by some definition, strongly redistributive.
I saw figures somewhere showing the difference in sales taxes paid as a percentage of income between the rich and the poor and the difference was astounding! As I recall, we are talking about the rich having an effective tax rate on income due to sales taxes that is maybe like 1/4 that of the poor. (In addition to the rich spending a smaller fraction of their income than the poor do, the rich also tend to spend more on things generally not subject to sales taxes, like services, than the poor do.)
By the way, I do agree with the “Minty Scylla Synthesis” with the proviso that expanding the earned-income tax credit (which is sort of like lowering the payroll tax effectively) is one possible way to do this.
I think there are two separate deficiencies here that I would identify concerning the Bush tax cuts:
(1) They do not do much to help the very poor. And, here, I’ll admit that I think this is a truly hard problem to address and thus, while I am not happy about this, I am not ready to burn Bush at the stake for not doing more here.
(2) It transfers a huge amount of money to the wealthy. This is really the bigger problem. You may think it is sort of silly for me to see this as such a big problem but the reason I do is that, despite your complaints about government spending, I don’t see many ways of significantly reducing it that (1) will ever actually occur and (2) that won’t hurt the poor and middle class the most. Thus, I think we will be left in a fiscal state that will cause either a loss in services to these folks or increased taxes on these folks (some of these taxes likely occurring at the state level as the federal government continues to effectively offload costs to the states). It is this squandering of our resources that I find most unforgiveable about the Bush tax plan.
(1) As was noted minty green, the tax brackets are now automatically adjusted for inflation. I think this change was made sometime in the 80s.
(2) While it is true that there have been some changes that have made taxation more progressive at the very low end (namely, expansion of the earned income tax credit, I think), the rest of the federal income tax has not become more progressive. Thus, while one can attribute some of the drop in the fraction of tax paid by the bottom partly to these changes, one cannot attribute the rise in the fraction paid by those very near the top to this. To put numbers on this, the top 1% have seen their percentage share of the tax burden just about double between 1980 and 2000, a fact that the WSJ editorial page laments regularly. But, the reason has nothing to do with increasing progressivity of the taxes and everything to do with the fact that their share of the income has grown. In fact, their share of the income (AGI to be exact) has more than doubled…growing by a factor of nearly 2.5. So, people who say we must cut taxes on the wealthy lest they end up paying too large a share of the taxes are really saying “We must cut taxes on the wealthy because inequality has ballooned and thus their share of the income has gone through the roof and as a result they now pay a higher percentage of the taxes.” Sort of a bizarre argument if you ask me!
Well, there is a CBO study on this that I can dig up somewhere. I am not saying it drops dramatically down from the 80% level…It can’t drop that far considering that the top 20% earn about 60% of the income! But, it does drop a lot closer to being in line with this percentage of income.
And, as you point out, I do like to consider things holistically because considering cuts only to the most progressive taxes is a great way to make the tax system more regressive while saying “But, look, I’m cutting taxes across the board” Or “There is no way I can possibly cut taxes much on the poor because they are hardly paying any.” Both statements are simply not true regarding taxes as a whole; they are only true about federal income taxes and discussing it in this manner is a great way to perpetuate the myth that our tax system is strongly progressive and thus, by some definition, strongly redistributive.
I saw figures somewhere showing the difference in sales taxes paid as a percentage of income between the rich and the poor and the difference was astounding! As I recall, we are talking about the rich having an effective tax rate on income due to sales taxes that is maybe like 1/4 that of the poor. (In addition to the rich spending a smaller fraction of their income than the poor do, the rich also tend to spend more on things generally not subject to sales taxes, like services, than the poor do.)
By the way, I do agree with the “Minty Scylla Synthesis” with the proviso that expanding the earned-income tax credit (which is sort of like lowering the payroll tax effectively) is one possible way to do this.
I think there are two separate deficiencies here that I would identify concerning the Bush tax cuts:
(1) They do not do much to help the very poor. And, here, I’ll admit that I think this is a truly hard problem to address and thus, while I am not happy about this, I am not ready to burn Bush at the stake for not doing more here.
(2) It transfers a huge amount of money to the wealthy. This is really the bigger problem. You may think it is sort of silly for me to see this as such a big problem but the reason I do is that, despite your complaints about government spending, I don’t see many ways of significantly reducing it that (1) will ever actually occur and (2) that won’t hurt the poor and middle class the most. Thus, I think we will be left in a fiscal state that will cause either a loss in services to these folks or increased taxes on these folks (some of these taxes likely occurring at the state level as the federal government continues to effectively offload costs to the states). It is this squandering of our resources that I find most unforgiveable about the Bush tax plan.
Dang, did I forget to mention the part where I retroactively made everyone insanely wealthy? My bad.
Nonsense. As I demonstrated above, my plan saves an unmarried taxpayer making $25,000 a year almost $1300 per year, as opposed to Bush’s paltry $300. $1300 is meaningful, and $25K a year is low income in my book.
Pretty much, though I’d suggest that sales tax burdens n low income working class are rapidly approaching federal income tax burdens. And of course, state sales taxes are a significant burden on people whose incomes are nowhere near enough to require federal income tax payments.
I’m with you on sales taxes, which I despise (and which the Republican legislature in this state is just about to raise yet again in a school funding trade-off for cutting property taxes). And I certainly agree that payroll taxes are a far greater burden on low income households than income taxes. For that reason, I would be quite happy to throw the programs funded by payroll taxes–i.e., Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid–into general funds. The elimination of payroll taxes would, of course, necessitate substantial increases in income tax rates, but hey, I can deal with that as long as the resulting income tax rates are progressive enough to make Republican campaign donors squeal.
Single Dude making 25k a year is not low-income in my book. Back when that guy was me, I was doing pretty fucking awesome.
Of course you know that the agenda of the Republicans is to do away with these entitlements just as soon as we’ve consolidated enough power to pull it off, and released the economy from the stranglehold of entitlements.
You see, these programs don’t work. They perpetuate what they were set out to appease. Once we make the economy strong enough that these programs can be severely scaled back, we can wean the people from the artificial dependancy on them that the Democrats have imposed. (you Dems have done this to the poor much like the machines have imposed an artificial reality on humanity in the Matrix (the movie is actually a morality play on the enslaving nature of entitlement programs through big government.)
Low taxes and full employment, Babes. Free you mind, Coppertop.
Yeah, I was pretty jazzed when I had two jobs and could usually afford the extra $3.50 a week to move up from the Beast to Shiner Bock. But I was still low income, and it says oodles about your worldview that you would consider a singleton making $25K today to be anything other than low income. Go on, start a thread in IMHO to see how middle class they feel.
Dude, I’m flattered, but I’m still not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
Do you have any sort of historical or cross-national evidence to support these claims? E.g., are the poor much better off in countries that do not have strong social services or those that do?
We know that such laissez-faire policies are great for the rich but is there any evidence that they are great for the poor and middle class?
In an earlier thread in which you participated the disincentive action of social programs was cited and backed up with several studies.
Your request for proof that they don’t work isn’t reasonable. A negative can’t be proven. If you wish to spend trillions of dollars on such programs the onus is on you to prove that they have efficacy.
Wow, I just wish you thought the onus of proof for supply-side and trickle-down economics policies were on those who want them.
The fact is that if we look at other countries, we don’t see any support for the claims that these programs don’t help the poor. In fact, you see countries with larger safety nets having a more equitable distribution of wealth and income, better health and such for the poor and so on. And, in fact, if you look historically, there is strong evidence that S.S. helped dramatically cut poverty of the elderly and that the “War on Poverty” made consider progress when it was being ramped up in the 60s and early 70s.
As for disincentive effects, sure, I am willing to believe there are some disincentives with some policies. However, I think the claims of this have tended to be exagerated (as I recall, the sources for most of that in the thread you refer to were conservative and libertarian sources offering either their own studies or their own simplistic interpretations of very complex studies by less biased folks) and that they also are less if the programs are better designed. E.g., a program to provide subsidies for day care for working mothers could give them a greater, not lesser, incentive to work.
That’s unnecessarily exclusive. The problem exists with most any policies founded on economic theory. It’s almost impossible to attribute cause and effect.
That’s not the claim in need of support. As I just said. You can’t prove a negative. Prove that they alleviate poverty.
Wealth distribution is not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for poverty alleviation.
Anyway, what you said were true you’d be misatrributing cause and effect. Countries with larger safety nets tend to be more modern and well to do, and that is probably providing the effect you are seeing with your wishful thinking.
Less well to do countries with large safety nets aren’t necessarily doing so well, take Communist Russia for example.
Well, we’re spending more than ever and the “War on poverty” has been a losing battle for 40 years. With all these trillions of dollars that have been spent, you’d think it wouldn’t be worse now, yet it is.
So where is this evidence that it works?
That’s a wishful memory. If you wish to assert that they work and the disincentive is being exagerrated show me cites that live up to your standard of credibility, that is, that do not come from Democratic/Liberal sources, and that support your claim.
Maybe. “Could” is not the same as “does.” You’d have to prove it.
I have to wonder if much of what kept you going was your youth and your strong prospects of being able to move up to a higher income bracket in the not-too distant future. Make 25k a year for fifteen years and you might have a different viewpoint. I knew single guys who lived on 22k and they were doing ok, but they weren’t able to save for retirement and just fergeddabout starting a family or buying a house. They were pretty much locked into renting and used cars. A 19 year old making 25k is probably thrilled. A 44 year old making 25k is another story entirely. I realize the philosophy is that everyone has the potential to move up and no one need be locked into 25k a year for their entire lives(which pretty much locks them out of retirement on anything other than SS(which you want to cut) and leaves them forced to rely on those “entitlement” programs if they do something dumb like having a family), but let’s face it. We can’t all be rich.**
I don’t believe a welfare state is a desireable outcome, but I’m not quite sure I understand the mechanics behind your claim that the economy is being held back by entitlements. Some elucidation please? I’d rather not have handwaving about how it is easier to stay on the teat than work, that is self-evident. How is the economy being harmed by the absence of lazy, unskilled workers who choose to suckle the teat? The best arguement I’ve ever heard is that the rest of the economy is being pulled down by the excessive taxes needed to keep the milk flowing. I agree this is possible, when looking at the budget it is clear a significant portion is social services. My question. What would these people do otherwise? Certainly there are some for whom entitlement becomes a way of life, but claiming a lifestyle based upon entitlement is strangling the economy seems pretty farfetched to me. What percentage of the potential workforce is living off the state? What jobs would they have if they weren’t on welfare? Is the economy so desperate for unskilled workers(the resume of the typical welfare recipient isn’t exactly stunning) that these people could maintain a subsistence level above poverty if welfare were done away with? Is the education system so robust that these people could be cost-effectively trained to fill needs in skilled labor forces? Are there enough openings in skilled labor?**
Funny. I come from a mid-lower middle class background. I was the first in my family to graduate from college. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without
A) support from my family(in some cases sacrifices they could ill-afford)
B) Some of the social programs you claim don’t work
My family has been “off the teat” for a while now and we don’t anticipate going back on it. In my case the programs worked EXACTLY as intended. We were on them for about three years while we were in college and had children which needed to eat and needed health care. Two of our children were born with the assistance of Medicaid programs. Post graduation we stand on our own. I’m certain I’m not alone in this situation. I can tell you, putting myself and my wife through college without help from parents or student loans/grants would simply have been impossible. And I was one of the lucky ones who planned ahead and had literally saved HALF of every penny I ever earned in my entire life(age 4, I got a savings account. Half of every allowance, half of every yard I mowed, every cup of lemonade or snowcone I sold during the summer, half of cash gifts on occasions such as a birthday, half of EVERYTHING) up to that point. I had double-digit thousands of savings and I grew up in hand-me downs/thrift store clothing BECAUSE I, and my family, PLANNED AHEAD. This is the kind of responsible citizenry the Republican plan counts on right?
Well, a wake up call is in order. It simply wasn’t enough. ALL of the money was gone in less than two years even though I was working a full-time job(making almost double minimum wage), had a fairly inexpensive(and small) apartment, and was gifted a car(thanks Sis!). The medical costs from the birth of our first daughter took a huge chunk out of my savings and putting two people through college while working full-time in an unskilled job and paying daycare quickly ate the rest. My wife and I desperately tried to balance our budget, but when you ran the final numbers there simply wasn’t enough income. We ate hamburger helper and had second-hand furniture. For birthdays and anniversaries we received cookware and household goods or clothing. It just wasn’t enough.
I, and my wife, were extremely reluctant to seek welfare. We had managed without it our entire lives, even though we qualified for food stamps/school lunches and other such programs for a significant portion thereof. We believed it should always be possible to support yourself and not need welfare. I don’t believe that anymore.
It really irks me when people seem to think “a job” is all people need. As if full employment somehow means no poverty. In countries with living wage laws this MAY be true. In the US you can work two jobs and still be so soul-grindingly poor that you NEED food stamps.**
This kind of demonization of your opponents won’t get you any points with thoughtful people of any stripe. At least you could acknowledge that these programs did not spring up in a vacuum. They were all instituted to address an actual need. To alleviate actual poverty. Actual poverty CREATED by exactly the type of laissez-faire fiscal policy that you are espousing.
jshore didn’t ask you to prove these programs don’t work. He asked you to show evidence that economies can be built, in the real world, which can provide for all with no need for strong social services.
jshore, if you could find that chart on percentage of income taxed as a result of the necessary spending on subsistence via sales tax and other post-payroll taxes I’d be very interested. I’ve looked through census data until my eyes are bleeding in the past few days.
OTOH, Scylla, thanks for the reminder. Hey minty! “The Matrix” this weekend at the Inwood. Grace said she’s free and Moxmaiden and I are looking into babysitter possibilities. Think you can tear yourself away from admiring your hoard of cash and your porsche long enough? I’ll do my best not to get sick less than an hour before the get-together is scheduled.
I should be able to make the movie Saturday night, as long as the Rangers game doesn’t go into extra innings. Amazingly enough, I managed to score seats in the fifth row behind home plate. I’ll probably just meet ya’ll at the Lounge before the show.
I won’t disagree with that although some trends are clear enough that one can make some reasonably firm conclusions.
Well, I don’t have time to look up all of this supporting data at the moment. But, I think the evidence that S.S. helped alleviate poverty among the elderly is unambiguous. I also think there is strong evidence that the war on poverty in the 1960s and early 70s made great progress.
Well, I would argue that there is a good reason why well-to-do countries have evolved toward larger safety nets! They did so because their found this a necessary and useful thing to do.
Now, you want the U.S., already out-on-a-limb as being the first-world country with about the most inadequate safety net, to move further out on the limb…on some unsupported belief that this safety net is doing more harm than good…and in contradiction to what seems to be true when one does international comparisons.
Yes, well, some people learn from this lesson that one wants to go as far to the opposite extreme as possible. Others learn from it (along with evidence from the more laissez-faire societies today and in the past) that it is best to avoid extremes on both sides and choose a middle course.
Well, we could as well say, “We’ve been pursuing a course of supply-side / increasingly laissex-faire market economics for many years now under the claim that this would raise all boats and reduce poverty and all it seems to have done is resulted in an explosion of wealth at the top.” In fact, I think the correlations are better in regards to the claim that progress in alleviating poverty was being made at the times when there was a really ramping up of effort to fight it and that progress in alleviating poverty was not made when trickle-down ideas were followed. (And, again, we don’t live in a vacuum and the experiences of other modern Western countries on dealing with poverty are also useful.)
So where is this evidence that trickle-down economics works?
I see, you are allowed to quote with impunity the claims of the likes of Michael Tanner and company at CATO (even though we’ve demonstrated in past threads a few cases of the distortions that Tanner puts out). But, then I can’t quote any liberal/Democratic sources.
Scylla, I don’t mean to be too belligerent here and I agree that it is important to try to do hard studies to try to determine what works and what doesn’t. However, I don’t find unsubstantiated claims that any sort of government attempts to alleviate poverty are a failure and that supply-side / trickle-down policies are successful to be based on anything but wishful thinking themselves.
I’d have to see this unambiguous evidence to accept this.
I seem to recall that poverty has in fact worsened over the last 50 years, but again, I’d have to see this evidence
It would be nice to think so. I, on the other hand think they tended to do it because it was a popular thing to do. I’m sure they had good intentions, but intentions and results are two different things.
Take for example the popular liberal sociological belief (I forget the guy that was the big proponent of this,) that decided on ideological grounds that the way to fight poverty was to create community, a “we’re all in this together” philosophy, and the best way to do this was to create great big monolithic housing projects. When all these people were living together, the theory went, the sense of community would lift people up and they would not tolerate poor behavior.
Perhaps no single action has done more to further demean and perpetuate the worst aspects of poverty and keep down the poor than those housing projects. Billions of dollars with the best of intentions.
In the “War on poverty” that was the Bay of Pigs, Maginot Line, Waterloo, and Vietnam all wrapped up in one. That’s the legacy of the 60s and 70s. I don’t call that “great progress.” I don’t call that “necessary and useful.” Do you?
Most inadequate? Really?
Why don’t you compare per capita spending on poverty in the US to Japan?
Show me some kind of correlation between spending on poverty and poverty levels. Show me that spending more helps.
Let’s see the comparisons. Facts and figures. And once again, my beleif is not unsupported. If you want to spend billions of dollars on another housing project type well-intentioned disaster it is only prudent that you prove it works?
Compromise doesn’t always work. You can’t be sort of pregnant, or dead. You either are or you aren’t. Some things are just wrong. This is one of them.
Why don’t you ask somebody who is asserting that it works? Why are you asking me?
I’m just telling you you can’t have it both ways. You pooh-poohed my cites because you personally felt they were partisan. Having made such an objection it now behooves you to produce unpartisan cites. If my partisan cites are bad, why are your partisan cites good?
You’re not asking me to let you have it both ways, are you?
I’ve sensed no belligerance fom you. I hope I don’t appear to be offering any.
I have made no claims about trickle down economics here, nor supply side economics, and yet again, I don’t have to prove that they don’t work, people advocating them need to show that they do.
Where are the economies where full employment means no(or vanishingly small) poverty? Where are the economies where all boats are raised(and more importantly, is it possible to build this type of economy in the US?)? Where are the economies where no strong social services are necessary?
We have reached a point quite far off the topic of the OP and with me not having the time to do justice by properly researching the answers to the questions that you raised concerning the evidence for the success of various social programs. As I said, I think you raise some good questions concerning the importance of figuring what works and what doesn’t work.
On the other hand, I am quite convinced that the answer to your question is not “What works is a bare minimum of government intervention and just letting the market do its magic.” I think there is a very good reason why we have evolved away from that. And, in the recent attempt to drift back toward it (like under Reagan), I think the result was that all boats are not lifted very well under such policies.
I am also generally skeptical of policy approaches that seem to claim that what is best for the wealthy happens to be, by coincidence, also what is best for the poor. I know that things are not a zero-sum game but there are almost always bound to be trade-offs, especially on the margin. This is simply a general truth about optimization problems of any sort.
By the way, I am curious about your description of these monolithic housing projects and the proponent of them. I always sort of guessed that the reason for these projects in comparison to the alternative of having the low-income housing more spread out had more to do with NIMBY-ism than anything else. In fact, in the fairly wealthy but unusually progressive county I grew up in, Montgomery County, Maryland, I believe they had laws that tried to implement this idea of spreading out the low-income housing so you don’t end up with majority-poverty neighborhoods and majority-poverty schools.
Regarding subsidized housing, I spend a great deal of my time doing consulting work and appraisal of Low Income Housing Tax Credit facilities, both proposed and older (usually I’m appraising older tax credit facilities for tax protest purposes). I’m also involved in proposals for new “project-based” housing, most notably I’ve done work with the Tulsa Public Housing Authority’s new Hope VI project, the redevelopment of the old Osage Hills facility (this is currently under construction).
Mostly, I can really only tell you about my own experiences and observations, as I’m typically not looking at these things from a public policy standpoint. I don’t have any peer-reviewed studies handy regarding the efficacy of these programs, but I can poke around as time permits on the EconLit database to see what’s handy. Time is something I’m relatively short of at the moment though… 'course it’s only going to get worse as the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency’s deadline for summer '03 applications draws nearer.
If anyone’s really interested, I can tell you all about my own experiences in subsidized housing, LIHTC and otherwise, either in this thread or by starting a new one. I’m tending to think the issue is too large to adequately discuss in this one without completely hijacking it.
My great beleif is not in the market. It’s in people.
I don’t think it’s a trade-off. I think what is best is best regardless of wealth.
That’s the new thought now, and I think it’s a better one. I live in a mixed area myself, and I think it’s a much better community and place to raise kids, and, I think we make each other better by mutual presence.
